OPAWTY? SOS-Save Our Seas

As I watch the TV news or read the paper or read science or news magazines, I constantly encounter stories that scream OVERPOPULATION. Often these are about damage to the environment, but there are many others about hunger, desperate poverty, deaths from preventable diseases, war, strife and other calamities.

The July issue of Discover Magazine contained two articles about the ocean that support my concerns.

In “Better Planet - Garbage Patch” (click here for the web version) author Thomas M. Kostigen describes a trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is an area in the Pacific Ocean where circular ocean currents trap some of the floating refuse of humans.

“Around and around: bottles, plastic bags, fishnets, clothing, lighters, and myriad other man-made items, held until they disintegrate, make their way to distant seas, or merely bob among the waves before washing up on someone’s beach.”

Unfortunately, much of the material floating here does not disintegrate quickly. Many of these items took several years just to get to the garbage patch which is like a soup made of garbage floating on or near the surface. While the dimensions of this garbage patch are still being mapped, it is believed to be about one and a half times the size of the United States and may reach a depth of 100 feet or more. How much damage is being done by all this garbage is still being studied, but from what we already know, from the damage done to wildlife that often eat plastic thinking it is food to chemicals in the water from disintegrating plastic, the threat is believed to be very serious.

The second article is Ocean Reflux by Kathleen McAuliffe (click here for the web version). It has long been known that the oceans can sequester carbon dioxide as they naturally absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact, the oceans were seen as such a good place to store carbon dioxide, there have been suggestions that we pump liquid CO2 into the deepest parts of the ocean rather than let it disburse in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

Now new research has found that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in ocean water increases its acidity which may have profound effects such as destroying coral and many of the marine creatures at the bottom of the food chain. Among other problems this might cause, the loss of reefs and small ocean creatures could eventually threaten the planet’s fisheries.

I can’t begin to relay all the scientific details from these two articles, but you can read them yourself if you want more details.

Some scientist or researcher or politician will eventually tell you what we might do to mitigate or reverse these threats, but what you won’t hear them offer is a plan to reduce the number of people on the planet as a way to reduce the damage we are inflicting. Why is that?

Over Populated – Are We There Yet?

OPAWTY? - Virtual Water

The June issue of Discover Magazine had an article about virtual water (Better Planet: Virtual Water..., by Thomas M. Kostigen). Virtual water is the amount of water it took to provide a service or item for you - from start to finish. For example, it is estimated that it takes about 1,900 gallons of water to put that one pound steak on your grill and about 53 gallons to put a single egg in your refrigerator.

I'm not sure why these are virtual gallons of water. I am pretty sure I've never consumed a glass of virtual water, but then again who really knows what is in all those bottles we consume. Maybe it is virtual water and that is why we have to pay so much for it.

From the article I learned that like your carbon footprint, you have a virtual water footprint. The average person on earth has a virtual water footprint of about 328,000 gallons of water a year. That is the number of physical gallons of water a person uses directly in a year plus the number of virtual gallons used in a year to produce the food and goods a person consumes and uses. In the United States the virtual water footprint of the average person is about 656,000 gallons a year while in China the average is only about 185,000 gallons - which is good since there are so many more Chinese. If their footprint were as large as ours, they would be very thirsty.

Why are we talking about virtual water? Because we, who live on a water based, water rich world are running out of fresh water. The virtual water concept is supposed to allow us to make better choices. The author, Thomas Kostigen, makes the point that if each of us avoided wasting just one cup of coffee a day we could save enough virtual water to give two gallons of water a day for a year to each of the 1.1 billion people who currently don't have access to clean water. Remember, it is not just the physical water in the cup, it is also the virtual water used to grow the coffee bean, roast it, ship it, etc. Luckily I don't drink coffee so I don't have to carry the guilt of ignoring a billion thirsty people. It took me years to get over the trauma I caused the starving Chinese people when I didn't eat my vegetables as a child.

If the concept of virtual water catches on you can bet it will be added to the content list of packaged food. 180 calories, 0 grams of trans fat and 319 gallons of virtual water.

Let's get real. Are dwindling supplies of fresh water a problem? Yes! But not because we are wasting water on unconsumed coffee. And not because we eat too much meat and not enough grain. The problem is there are too many of us. As the Chinese become more prosperous their virtual water usage will go up. If their virtual water usage even rises to the current world average they are going to be in serious trouble. Likewise, we could cut our virtual water footprint in half, but if our population doubles in 100 years, as might happen, we have put off our problem, but not solved it.

When we are talking about a global water shortage on a water rich planet, people should take note. The problem is not too little water, it is too many people.

Over Populated - Are We There Yet?


You can check your virtual water footprint at WaterFootPrint.org.

OPAWTY?-What is a Pest?

If overpopulation by any other species caused as much environmental damage as human overpopulation does, we would have long ago created an industrial strength pesticide to control their numbers.

Over Populated -
Are We There Yet?

OPAWTY? - 4

Over Populated - Are We There Yet?

The quotes below come from Urban and Slum Trends in the 21st Century by Eduardo Lopez Moreno and Rasna Warah (UN Chronicle Online Edition, The State of the World's Cities Report 2006/7). Emphasis added.

Sometimes it takes just one human being to tip the scales and change the course of history. In 2007, that human being will either move to or be born in a city, and demographers watching urban trends will mark it as the moment when the world entered a new urban millennium in which the majority of its people will live in cities. It will also see the number of slum dwellers cross the one-billion mark, when one in every three city residents will live in inadequate housing, with no or few basic services.

There are now about 6 billion people on earth and 1 billion of those people live in urban slums. Also from the report,

This report unfolds a new urban reality, showing how poor living conditions impact slum dwellers: they die younger, experience more hunger, have less or no education, have fewer chances for employment in the formal sector and suffer more from ill-health.

And finally,

The growth of slums in the last 15 years has been unprecedented. In 1990, there were nearly 715 million slum dwellers in the world. By 2000, the slum population had increased to 912 million and to approximately 998 million today. UN-HABITAT estimates that if current trends continue, it will reach 1.4 billion by 2020.

Over Populated - Are We There Yet?

OPAWTY? - 3

Over Populated - Are We There Yet?

I watched NOVA on PBS last night, "Dimming The Sun". They described some of the scientific research that proves that airborne particles (and the cloud formations that they facilitate) significantly reduce the amount of sunlight that strikes the surface of the earth. This reduction in sunlight has a measurable cooling effect on the earth.

While this reduction in sun light and the cooling effect might seem to be a beneficial counter to global warming, it also causes problems. Scientists believe it may have contributed to some of the devastating droughts in Africa and, of course, air pollution is a serious health concern.

The most sobering observations were that global dimming has masked the effects of global warming and that as we continue to make progress decreasing air pollution, we will greatly increase the rate of global warming. The current models that attempt to project the rate of global warming do not take into account the full effects of global dimming. We may have much less time to bring global warming under control. Many decades less time. There is a point at which the effects of global warming begin to cascade and there will be nothing we can do to reverse it. Let me say it again, there is a point where reversing global warming will be completely out of our control. That time may be closer than we think.

It has taken decades to convince people that global warming is real. How long would it take to convince people we should stop trying to prevent air pollution until global warming is under control?

I'm sure there are people who will argue that global dimming is just as unreal as global warming, but they've been arguing against global warming for years and so far no good, hard evidence has appeared to suggest they are correct. Global warming is a big problem that will take massive and, probably, painful solutions.

One of the solutions to global warming should be population reduction. Reducing the world's population by itself will not reverse global warming fast enough, but it should be a another tool.

Doesn't common sense tell us that more people on the planet will only make our environmental problems worse? At some point there will be more people on earth than the planet can support. When that time comes we can reduce population several ways: nature can make drastic reductions (disease, famine, loss of habitat), governments can force family planning or we can make voluntary reductions. Since the first two have already occurred in some places, shouldn't we be proactive and start voluntary reductions?

By the way, if we don't bring global warming under control soon, population reduction will occur.

OPAWTY? - 2

Over Populated - Are We There Yet?

In the July, 2007, issue of Popular Science is an article entitled Skyscraper Farm about a plan to build skyscrapers to house highly automated hydroponic farms. A farm might be 30 stories tall and feed 50,000 people. Microbiologist Dickson Despommier of Columbia University suggests skyscraper farms as a solution to several problems.

Al Gore has suggested that we grow more trees in response to global warming. Since 40.5 percent of the earth is being used for agriculture, we could move agriculture to skyscrapers and use the land formerly planted in crops for trees.

With the world's population projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion, we will need to find additional land to grow food, land we need planted in trees to counter global warming. Skyscraper farms allow a lot of food to be grown on a small foot print of land.

In addition, these hydroponic farms could use and recycle waste water and sewage (after pretreatment) to not only grow the plants, but also to produce clean water by capturing the moisture that evaporates from the leaves. Clean water is another resource that is becoming more scarce. Presumably, skyscraper factories would use less water because water loss due to evaporation would be minimized.

This all sounds fine, except this solution (and problems it tries to solve) are in response to another problem. Over-population. Shouldn't we be talking about ways to minimize population growth and, maybe, over the long term, decreasing the worlds population to a level that is enviornmentlly and economically sustainable without such drastic solutions?

Over-Populated. Are We There Yet?

On the U.S. Census Bureau web site there is a paper written in 2000 that attempts to project the population of the United States through the year 2100. As you can imagine, this is a difficult task, but they do it in a well described, scientific manner. They have to make a large number of estimates about birth rates, mortality rates and migration rates. They ended up with three series of projections based on these estimates using a low, medium (middle) and high rate of population growth (see paper here).

The lowest projection has the population of the U.S. rising to about 313 million by 2050 and then falling to about 282 million by 2100. The middle series projects the population of the United States to continue to grow and reach about 571 million by 2100. The highest series (which I believe is based on a high immigration rate) has the population reaching about 1.18 BILLION by 2100.

Who knows what the actual population of the United States will be in 2100, but what these projections do show is that given the right (or wrong) circumstances, the population of the United States could increase dramatically over the coming decades.

What do you think would be the affects of a population roughly four times the current population of about 302 million people? Would a U.S. population of 1.18 billion be better than a population of 282 million people?

While few of us will see the year 2100, our actions will help determine the future population of the United States. Shouldn't we review the facts and determine what we believe would be the ideal population of the United States and then work to achieve that goal?