Greenhouse

I recently watched the movie an inconvenient truth and I found it very informative and entertaining and think even those who don t much like Al Gore personally might still enjoy the movie. There wasn t a whole lot in the film that you probably haven t seen or heard before but it is the scale of which it is portrayed. That throughout 600,000 years of history the carbon dioxide level has never been above 300 ppm and its dramatic rise from 1950 to the present and that if left unchanged is now a straight vertical line pointing off the chart. This leaves us in virgin territory to say the least.

Global warming nay sayers are rapidly becoming like the tobacco

industry, recently the head of Alcoa Aluminum and other American manufactures went to the White House to ask George Bush to do something to curb green house gas emissions. But greenhouse gasses are the symptom not the disease they are the fever not the virus. As the movie thoughtfully points out that from the beginning of human history until the beginning of twentieth century human population grew slowly and gradually then they movie goes back to greenhouse gasses and pollution.

It ignores the more inconvenient truth it took humanity 500,000 years to reach one billion people on this planet. In around 1950 where the movie begins there were 2.5 billion and that doubled by 1990 to five billion and now seventeen

years later we are at 6.68 billion and adding three humans a second. This is were I think the movie derailed, Ok lets say we cut our green house gas emissions by 40% in ten years, which we won t but just say we did. The population growth will wipe out any savings by addition of two billion more people more people.

Years ago taking a Real Estate class the instructor explained that slums come from too many people living in too small a space. The poor unable to afford an apartment of the appropriate size rent a two-bedroom apartment for seven or eight people and the over use of the fixtures causes the property to decline. We as humans find

ourselves in this situation similar to the Marx Brothers movie where they keep adding more and more people to our tiny stateroom called Earth.

We have done a remarkable job in feeding this growing multitudes but modern agricultural yields are based on petroleum based fertilizers and it would appear we are heading towards a critical mass with a shortage of petroleum a rising population and the effects of global warming. Very soon something must give, petroleum prices will continue to rise environmental degradation will cause crop failures making farmers unable to purchase the fertilizers. While in Western countries populations are devouring farmlands for residential development as if the amount of arable land is unlimited.

But as rapidly as we have been able

to supply food stuffs for the masses what about wealth? Can we double our national wealth every forty years? Not likely just as the growth of population speeds up the cost of maintaining them speeds up as well in 1950 less than 10% of the world population lived in cities by 2020 it will be 40%. That means 1.4 billion more people crowded into cities. In 1950 those eight percent in urban areas accounted for 260 million leaving 2.5 billion living in the rural areas most as subsistence farmers can we handle an increase in subsistence farming of say 4.5 billion souls?

If we do not solve the problem and I have my doubts as to our ability to do so,

the problem will solve us. The Black Death that swept across Europe during the middle ages was nature s way of saying if you won t solve your sanitation problems we will. Through out the history of the planet there are localized cases of humans out stripping their environment. On Easter Island the population grew to point where they could no longer feed themselves and over farmed the available land until the yield collapsed ditto for the Mayans in Mexico. They had developed an intricate system of crop irrigation, but without rain it becomes academic just how cleaver you are.

The movie points out that if the Greenland ice sheet melts it will raise ocean levels by 20 feet and the

ice in the Antarctic would raise it another twenty. So if just half the ice melts from both you have the problem of major world cities that no longer exist, New York, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila and the list goes on and on. Those millions will have to relocate to somewhere making Katrina the norm rather than the exception.

Ocean currents regulate weather patterns and temperature patterns and to a large degree are regulated by the amount of salt in the water. As the ice melts the oceans become less salty and the currents pick up speed. Less salty water evaporates faster and causes heavier rainfalls and snow falls but because the climate is warmer the snowfalls melt and cause

flooding and the rainfalls are deluges causing erosion. But even the nay sayers will tell you the earth s climate is cyclical and they are correct if left alone the problem will solve its self.

In eight to ten thousand years as the earth emerges from the ice age it will once again be a paradise of lush forests with rich top soil the oceans will again teem with fish and as the glaciers recede to a balance point the half a billion humans left on the planet can start again. They can relearn how to make metal and develop written languages and maybe next time they will do a better job with it than the current administrators. Or perhaps humans

will just die out another failed wrung on the evolutionary ladder Homo Sapien, nimis intellego action proprius valetudo (too smart for his own good).