Population Growth and Climate Change

Almost all rational and informed people who have passed beyond believing that the earth is flat accept the scientific data that heat-trapping gasses, especially carbon dioxide, are causing climate change. This change includes melting glaciers and polar icecaps, acidifying the oceans, increasing extreme temperatures and desertification in many areas, and reducing habitats and numbers of numerous species of wildlife. The fifteen hottest years on record since modern global temperatures have been kept have all occurred since 1991 and we have lost a third of our Arctic sea ice in the past thirty years.

Countless scientific studies have shown overwhelming evidence that most of this damaging climate change has been caused by human activity. Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are already at their highest levels in at least the last 400,000 years, thirty percent above those of the pre-industrial era. Audubon, Sierra, and almost all environmental organizations are lobbying for drastic measures to stop this disastrous process. These measures would include either mandatory limits on warming gas emissions or economic-based mandatory cap-and-trade treaties and legislation The successful system that mostly stopped sulfur emissions from acidifying northern lakes in the U.S. shows the effectiveness and modest cost of such legislation.

But neither Audubon, Sierra, nor most environmental groups have been clear in making the obvious linkage of damaging emissions and negative climate change to rapidly increasing human population. The inevitable striving of the roughly eighty million additional inhabitants of earth each year for a better standard of living that includes electricity, water, food, transportation, and such causes of global warming, in addition to depletion of natural resources, will negate much or maybe all measures against climate change. Some of those concerned by climate change may have been lulled by population stabilization in some countries, including parts of Europe and Japan. However, while the percentage rate of increase of the world's population has dropped because of the larger base on which it is calculated, the absolute number of additional people each year has remained essentially at its unsustainable high level.

One of the few environmental organizations that has made the obvious linkage of damaging climate change to human overpopulation is the rapidly-growing Center for Biological Diversity (http://www.biodiversity.org/) In addition to its frequent litigation to protect endangered species, it is actively campaigning for environmentalists and the public to push for governments and international bodies to give greater support for international family planning, smaller families, and more education of women who gives them options to excessive child-bearing. Perhaps we can encourage Audubon, Sierra and other major environmental organizations that once linked their former strong population programs to protecting wildlife and their habitat to renew and increase them with a focus also on the linkage to Climate Change.

-Wade Matthews, Conservation Chair