Limiting population can help climate fight

Most newspaper articles concerning global warming, restrict themselves to discussing the need to reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions to 80 percent of their 1990 levels, but they fail to mention the huge role that the exponential growth of our populations play in the production of green house gases.

Making an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions will slow down the pace of global warming. But the world will have to not only reduce it’s CO 2 emissions 1 or 2 percent of 1970 levels; it also will have to stop the exponential growth of its populations, in order to completely stop it.

Since 1975, our nations have been adding a billion people to our planet every 12 to 14 years, and it is this unsustainable population growth that has been fueling the explosive growth of our societies, industries, transportation systems and green house gas emissions.

Even though few people are willing to discuss this subject, if we do not stop overpopulating our planet soon, we will not only fail to stop global warming completely, but it will become one among many other serious environmental threats to our future.

This story was originally published December 28, 2015 at 9:14 AM with the headline "Limiting population can help climate fight."