It's flying in the face of scientific opinion and the available evidence to believe that overpopulation, pollution and excessive fossil fuel consumption haven't played a part in climate change. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has firmly established that global warming is with us. Sure, there are a few scientific dissenters who contend otherwise, almost all of whom are funded by the oil lobby and most of whom have swopped scientific credibility for oil dollars.
Read Lovelock's new book, "The Revenge of Gaia" to see how bad we've made things and how much worse they're likely to get. Grim reading indeed. Lovelock, the father of the Gaia movement, was the scientist who originally formulated the Gaia theory which includes the premise that the planet has self regulating mechanisms to control climate. One of these mechanisms is the use of forests to lock up CO2 gases in the form of coal, natural gas and oil, CO2 gases being accepted global warming accelerators.
By cutting down so much of the world's forests and by releasing into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels quantities of CO2 that it took the planet millenia to lay down, man is removing the very instruments that the planet uses to regulate climate.
Over the next 35 years the world's population is likely to double from around 6 to 12 billion. The additional amount of forests cut down to make farmland to feed twice the population we now have will further incapacitate the earth's ability to stage a recovery. In addition, many of those in developing countries who currently don't use much fossil fuel or add to pollution will have lifestyle expectations matching our own. China, for example, has recently become the second biggest oil consumers on the planet behind the USA. With almost 4X the population of the USA, if they consume at the rate that the USA does, there simply won't be enough oil to go around.
As a point of information, the USA uses 25% of the world's oil for 3% of it's population, a situation that is simply not sustainable. Conservation measures are going to have to be taken by everyone whether we like it or not and alternative fuel sources need to be found.
The sooner we face up to our responsibilities and try to undo some of the damage, or at least make sure we don't continue to make matters worse, the better chance we have that we can still leave some sort of planetary legacy that can reasonably support our descendants.
