How many is too many people in the world?
Is the idea of man induced global warming a symptom of a bigger problem…too many people?
After all, more people mean more of everything and that will affect our world. Even “pollution free” fuel cells for cars emit water vapor, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas. If all cars were hydrogen powered, then water vapor becomes a man induced problem. And even our present day 1.2 billion cattle (forget pigs, sheep, and domestic birds) fart methane out in ever increasing and threatening volumes. Add in manmade septic systems generation of methane (including the high tech ones), and numbers start to add up…in the wrong direction.
Can you imagine the world being exposed to the equivalent of two suns worth of energy coming into our world, every day? It’s coming.
Even renewable sources of energy have limits. Imagine a solar field covering the size of Montana to make enough electricity for some of us. A good idea maybe, unless you are from Montana. And all of us that use electricity are subject to the natural restrictions of power line losses, which is why power sources have to be somewhat close to the user. In other words, the Montana solar field is not a viable energy source for the east coast, and vise versa if some kind of ocean based renewable source comes online.
Geothermal and fusion energy appeals to me. Imagine two times, then three times, then so on more energy plants to satisfy an ever increasing number of people who need energy (and transmission lines) to live on this earth.
Maybe we can export our people to other worlds, if we can even keep up with population growth. Maybe we will become like the aliens in the movie Independence Day who use up a planet’s resources and then move on.
Estimating population growth is a nebulous science at best. Assumptions about natural and unnatural factors vary all over the place. But most agree that the world’s number of people will grow, not decline. And catastrophic end of the world scenarios like a comet strike, massive nuclear war, or plague are ignored for good and bad reasons.
Establishing public policies to control population growth, like all other social science policies, is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Just look at China’s one couple one child policy and the increased number of aborted females, and its consequences.
And so, we in the world just do nothing for now. This is too tough a nut to crack for now. But the problem is not going away, as much as we hope it will. In the meantime, I suggest that we focus on the public policy problem, and not symptoms like the idea of man induced global warming.
Using the analogy of a leaking dike, using more and more fingers to plug an increasing number of holes in the leaking dike does not address the problem that the dike is leaking.
2 comments:
You really are good, and your posts are great, but you missed it on this one! The main demographic problem in the world is not a population boom (Erlich was so wrong!) Rather, the looming problem is a population bust! Most countries in the world now have populations growing at a lower-than-replacement rate. Russia is losing population. Italy and Spain are next. De-population is the concern now, not over-population.
Try googling writer Mark Steyn on this. You can't afford not to get this one right! It is too big.
I hope I did not get this one wrong! And I agree about Erlich. I even agree about the western countries depopulation numbers. In this there is hope that some kind of "natural" instinct will kick in for the whole human world.
It is the rest of the human world that also lives and reproduces on this planet that will lead the problem, I think.
In writing this article, I worried that it might come across as some kind of Malthusian chicken little the sky is falling thing. I also knew the assumptions about what is happening would be most controversial. Getting agreement on assumptions is most difficult. This is kind of like some version of Moore's Law for computer chips...call it Gerry's Law: Until assumptions are agreed on, then all results are suspect.
This one is too big if I am on to something, which I think I am...kinda like scary in its impacts for our children and their children, who will be the ones to suffer more than we will today. I have been studying and thinking about this since my time at Georgia Tech in the 60's, and have tempered it with my third world time in the Marines.
Last, once an engineer, always an engineer. So I use what I know, and how to approach analyzing problems. In this I think the global warming politicians are leading us the wrong way. The problem is way bigger than what they talk about. I hope I am wrong, and something as simple as CO2 reduction will make all wonderful.
By the way, thank you for a civil discussion.
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