March 1st 2009
The real climate change issue
By Marie Alena Castle
The debate over whether climate change is happening, and whether nature or people are causing it, is beside the point. Either way, the climate always has and always will change. We are in trouble today because of overpopulation. Ages ago, when rivers dried up or glaciers advanced, people moved to other areas. They simply got out of the way of nature.
That option is no longer available. If it were, we would not be cutting down rainforests to create needed cropland, building cities on flood plains and tectonic fault lines, and putting villages on the sides of volcanos. We would not be draining our aquifers and depleting fishing grounds faster than nature can replenish them — or perhaps spewing more global warming pollutants into the air than the climate can tolerate. The president of the Maldive Islands (eight feet above seal level) would not be desperate to buy tropical property where he can resettle his 300,000 people if global warming swamps the islands. Good luck to him on finding anything livable but uninhabited. We might not even be in economic distress if there were not too many people for the available jobs and/or too many people too poor to keep up mortgage payments.
Overpopulation is the most serious problem we face, and may even underlie most other problems, yet none of our leaders seem to be aware of it.
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