Carbon Dioxide
There's a letter in today's Sunday Telegraph which puts forwards an argument also made by a columnist in the Daily Telegraph, namely:Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the world's population has risen by about 5 billion (about 4 billion of which has been since 1950). Each person's exhalations are about 4 per cent CO2 (about 1 litre per minute on average) so that today people themselves contribute to the carbon in the atmosphere to the tune of around 1.84 billion tonnes per year (fossil fuels are said to contribute around 7 billion tonnes a year). In February this year world population passed 6.5 billion. Curbing population growth could serve to reduce global warming, if that is a real threat, as well as alleviate poverty.
As far as I am aware this just isn't how it works*, with the amount of carbon dixoide being expelled by human breathing the same as goes in from food, whcih comes from the atmosphere. This is technically true of fossil fuels as well, but the issue is the time-scale. Is that right? But what if no-one ate the plants? Would that mean lower atmospheric quantities of carbon dioxide over time?
* Except of course fewer humans would mean reduced emissions for other reasons.
posted by Matthew @ 4/02/2006 04:20:00 PM
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