How about putting some numbers to the whole global warming thing? I am going to try to do that in this blog.
How do we put numbers to global warming? That is the big question that needs to be answered. As long as it is just talk, everyone who has a mouth can shoot it off and that is exactly what has been happening. My numbers might not be exactly correct, but is anyone's? So here goes.
First off I want to start with population. I think that we can all agree that when there were "zero" humans on Earth that you could not blame humans for causing global warming plus, I think that most can agree that global warming did not exist as defined today. One conclusion is that global warming has gotten worse over time and most blame it on humans. If it is worse today when we have the most humans on Earth that we have ever had, you might even consider that the more people, the worst for global warming. There was probably a time when the number of humans was not a factor. My estimate is when the population of the world was about 6 billion. Now it is a little more than 8 billion. That is a 33% increase over the 6 billion. The impact of humans on global warming is not linear, but for short periods we can assume linearity. I think that most of you understand that. I look at the slope as .33, then when we get to 9 billion the global warming will be over twice as bad as it is now.
Here is another factor that needs to be taken into account and that is "quality of life". Remember that Native Americans could feed themselves better than people were being feed in Europe back in the 1600's. We know that because the Native Americans were much larger and were not suffering from starvation as were Europeans at the time. My point is that the Native Americans could sustain their quality of life as hunter gatherers back then. No one can do that today and why?
Look at the industrial revolution back in the 1700's. It had a big impact on raising the quality of life for the humans in those days and in the process they changed the earth in ways that started to contribute to global warming as it is defined today. The point is that the impact of a human on global warming today is very significantly more than it was a few hundred years ago.
What you should be seeing is that if anyone wants to turn back global warming that they have to do two things and those are to lower the number of people on Earth and lower the quality of life for them. If you do not want to significantly lower the quality of life, then you will have to significantly lower the number of people. Simple isn't.
If you try to combat global warming by switching to a more expensive form or source of fuel, it does not exist. As the fuel cost goes up, the quality of life goes down. As the number of mouths increase the need for more food goes up. I am sorry, but there is no free lunch here.
