Which is more destructive - Global warming or overpopulation?

Question

Which should we really be tackling?

Answer 1

global warming.we have huge amount of land around the world,

Answer 2

Definitely global warming!  It is increasing the gravity of the sun and drawing the earth ever closer to climate catastrophe!

In fact, global warming is what agitates bullies and makes them pick on weaker kids in school.  Gosh, it's everywhere!

Answer 3

I totally remains to be seen. So far overpopulation. Potentially global warming.

Answer 4

Neither are threats to our existence.

Worrying about silly hoaxes and myths is more damaging to your health than these end-of-the-world scenarios could ever be.

There are a lot more important things to worry about.

Answer 5

Well, global warming is in part a byproduct of overpopulation. The overpopulation factor means we have most waste products, which in turn causes global warming.

But technically overpopulation should deal with itself more easily than global warming since just a one degree change can be massive to the world while in overpopulation, people die and the problem dwindles slowly.

Global warming is a growing problem while overpopulation is more controlled. But since dealing with overpopulation in turn helps the cause of preventing global warming, then it should be more immediately approached.

Except you can also look at it the other way: if we find a clean energy source that doesn't increase the temperature of the earth through global warming then we can use that to amplify the production lines, increase food stocks, and thus "solve" overpopulation.

So it's either way eh since finding a solution to either one solves the other one, in part.

Answer 6

Mass stupidity and political correctness are more dangerous than either. Followed by public school science teachers doing political indoctrination instead of teaching science.

Answer 7

with a name like yours, you should know better

Answer 8

who cares.........allllll stars are gonna explode one day including our sun

Answer 9

Overpopulation is a byproduct of the infamous G.W. Now I care about the environment and I work hard to protect it. But here's the deal. As people have more and more children and start a familly, that ONE baby causes about 5% of the Earth's landfill's pollutions. With the disposable diapers. The fumes from the diapers. Plus the amout of waste a baby can make up. Now as the baby grows up, they want to get a car, they always ask you to drive them places, the car, in turn, causing more G.H.G emissions. Then they grow up, get a job, and spend their everyday work days, driving their polluting car. Now imagine the extra lets say 74% of the world that aren't babys. Alot of cars on the highways. Alot of garbage being carelessly thrown out of the cars. You see? Over population is simply the factor of "Global Warming" or "G.W." Which should we be tackling? Both! Dont make your kid not be a kid though. Teach him/her to respect the environment. Recycle. And watch that your not carelessly having babies.

Thanks.

Courtney D. SaVe ThE tReEs!!

Answer 10

Global Warming IS A SCAM - TO MAKE MONEY.

There is a new scheme managed by the UN (hmm) Carbon Cap and Trade.  Some companies are banking on this Carbon Trading Vehicle.  They are trying to make a market out of thin are requiring payment to market participants to do business.  Obviously the business that buy these Carbon Credits will ultimately Charge YOU.

THIS IS A HUGE TAX to PAY CORPORATIONS, and GOVERNMENTS.

Global Warming is just the vehicle  - it is not real, but an exaggerated illusion.

Over population - is more of a threat than Global Warming.  Only to the extent that competition for resources will be greater.  What does it matter to me how many people live in China?  

However - there have always been plauges- they have a tendency to reduce population.  Humans are not that smart - just yet.

Answer 11

I believe that if there is global warming, it is tied directly to overpopulation.

Answer 12

Niether are destructive and niether should be tackled. You cannot stop the globe from warming or cooling. It will cool down when it is ready, which seems to have been 10 years ago since there has been no warming since 1998.

There is no point in trying to control population, what are you going to do, kill people or prevent people from having off-spring. Look what the one child policy has done to China, not really a good idea, Mao. That is more destructive than over populating, it has cause China much more harm than good.

By the way, how many people constitutes over population? Just wondering. Take your Malthusian fears back a few centuries when they were talking about the same thing. I wonder how that turned out. Oh yeah, people are still trying to make the same illogical arguments.

You start playing God and bad things happen. You start trying to control and manipulate the way nature does things, bad things happen. You try to eliminate future babies from being born in an attempt to control population, you will prevent the future Einsteins that will bring tremendous advancements in our world.

There are things in this world that can be controlled, the overwhelming majority of them are products of man anyway, both of these are not and both of them should not even be considered to be controlled.

Answer 13

well, since it was proven that global warming is a myth, it would have to be over population!

Answer 14

global warming, with the ozone layer breaking, less oxygen, and more heat, theres No way the earth can get over populated!!!!!! so Global warming is more desructive by a mile stone!!!!!!

Answer 15

Both!!!

Answer 16

Overpopulation... Global Warming's not real.

Answer 17

Over population. Because of that we are cutting down forests where many animals live. Since in some place those areas are proctected we don't have anywhere else to go.

Since we have so many people polluting we have created global warming. Global warming is killing the polar bears and penguins. All this stuff about people not carring and polluting which causes global warming makes me sick.

Answer 18

i think overpopulation is the cause of global warming so maybe we should start with the population and go from there

Answer 19

There is no such thing as over-population.

Answer 20

Overpopulation, for sure.  It is a driver of global warming, and lots of other problems.  Anybody that doesn't believe there are too many people is either very young, or lives in a rural area. Open space is disappearing around the world.  The field I used to play in when I was a kid is now a 10 lane freeway.  Pastures have become malls.  Traffic is getting worse and worse.  The air in Asia and areas downwind from it is almost opaque and unbreathable. If the population of the planet keeps rising at the current rate we are going to be in big trouble, especially as the world's poor begin to expect to live in the same lifestyle as the rich.  The growth of energy demand is huge, and even without greenhouse gas emissions we will end up with global warming due to waste heat.  

I have no idea why governments encourage people to procreate, it is just stupid.

Answer 21

THE WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS TODAY

A Contemporary Essay

By Rick Doble

Dr. Michio Kaku has written that we live in an especially dangerous time. By time he does not mean the last couple of years or even the next fifty, but rather the hundreds of years it may take for us to progress from a planet of special interests to a  planetary culture.

Right now we are in the infancy of technological development with crude energy sources and chemical processes that have the potential to destroy the environment either as by products of our civilization or with their deliberate destructive use in another world war.

Energy systems could be created that would cause virtually no pollution. Furthermore world wide economic development can proceed without harming the environment. Decentralized systems such as  solar panels can bring electricity and non-polluting development to many corners of the world.

Yet the destructive technology that we continue to use will have consequences for many years to come. In fact, we will feel the effects long after we have stopped using this technology and switched to a more environmentally friendly one.

Global warming will affect just about everyone, even though it is primarily a small number of nations that are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The same holds true for radiation pollution, as we saw in the Chernobyl disaster. Radiation crossed national borders and ended up all across the world.

Even over-population will affect us all, because a severe strain on the ecosystem in one part of the globe will create stress on other parts.

This crisis is very real. If the global temperature increases and the sea level rises, there will be massive changes in the weather which will cause migrations across the world as well as wide spread flooding. In this kind of environment, new and rapidly spreading diseases could wipe out large numbers of people and the food supply could be threatened. These kinds of disruptions could also lead to wars.

The problem is that any solution is a long term solution. As Hans Blicks, the United Nations weapons inspector before the second American-Iraq war, has pointed out, these environmental questions are much more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction. Yet since politicians do not often think beyond their four or eight year terms, they feel no urgency to risk their political future to forge a fifty or hundred year policy that may be required.

Overpopulation

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Views: 556 Comments: 114 09:08 p.m. Wednesday June 4, 2008 109539



The root of (nearly) all problems.

Shortage of food, shortage of energy, global warming, destruction of habitats, pollution...... we can try to come up with solutions to all these and more, but the underlying cause is overpopulation.

We can't kill people because we are humane, but we need to get the population down from approaching 7 billion, to a sustainable maybe, one billion... quickly.

There are places we just shouldn't live.

In 1985, we had liveaid to raise money for the starving in Ethiopia. Had we stopped those people from having children, there would be 4 million children not suffering now.

OK... the peoblem is how do you impliment the birth control, and who decides who is prevented or limited... I have a few ideas.

Before everyone says " you can't do that", consider that if you don't, billions will die, and we may go extinct.

Lets end suffering.

Introduction

The world is currently tortured by a wide range of problems. Most have been profiled in the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. This deliberately avoids positioning any single problem as the ultimate cause of the other major problems. Traditionally religions have however focused on a limited set of problematic behaviours, values and attitudes -- possibly termed sins -- as generative of the plethora of social problems.

There is however a case for exploring the extent to which a significant proportion of the problems facing the world is the result of a certain attitude promoted by religions themselves. What follows is not intended as a criticism of religion or spirituality -- although a number of new studies of this matter have recently been published (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006; Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: how religion poisons everything, 2007). The focus is rather on the attitude promoted by religion to the unconstrained increase in the human population -- and its fairly direct exacerbation of many major problems. Deliberate efforts by organized religion to associate spiritual aspiration with this agenda is part of the problem.

Irresponsible avoidance of the overpopulation challenge

Of particular interest in this respect is the manner in which the very question of overpopulation has been very effectively designed off the international debating table in relation to feasible action. Even though the Earth's population doubled from three billion to six billion people between 1960 and 1999, the last United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), at which such matters could be directly addressed, was in Cairo in 1994. This was however followed by a modest "Cairo+5" review conference in 1999 (The Hague Forum) -- also known as ICPD+5 [more]. The "ICPD+10" anniversary confirms the trend towards periodic production of review documents -- avoiding any conference.

A significant document of the time is the Declaration on the Decrease of Fertility in the World (27 February 1998) by the Pontifical Council for the Family had as its preamble:

The truth about current demographic trends cannot be denied any longer. It is increasingly evident and ever more widely acknowledged that the world is engaged in a marked demographic decline, which started around the year 1968. In 51 countries, fertility is already below replacement level. The number of deaths per year is even higher than the number of births in 15 of these countries. It is urgent to increase the general knowledge of these trends. A true solidarity must be forged without delay, boldly facing the future and mindful of the Declaration of Human Rights whose 50th anniversary is commemorated this year.

The quarrelsome dynamics of the Cairo conference, strongly influenced by religious agendas, ensured that reproductive liberty was affirmed as a human right (William McGurn, The Population Problem: the Pope undermines the case against population control by accepting leftist economic assumptions, National Review, Sept 1994). The debate successfully shifted development efforts from population programmes to women’s reproductive health. As a consequence, the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) agreed on many proposals to achieve sustainable economic growth but without a single mention of the challenge of sustainable population levels.

In a major review of future security threats (Michael E. Brown (Ed), Grave New World: Security Challenges in the Twenty-First Century, Georgetown University Press, 2003) issues of population are presented under the technical title of "Demographic Developments and Security", where it is only concluded that "migration, not fertility or mortality, is the factor most likely to exacerbate security concerns". Currently, however, the key to the challenging issue of carbon emissions (and their consequence for climate change) -- presumably of no security significance -- is being reframed as primarily the responsibility of the countries with the lasgest, fastest growing populations, namely India and China. However it is those countries with far smaller populations which have so successfully lobbied to preclude reasoned discussion of population issues.

The population issue has been successfully confused with the abortion issue to ensure the total opposition of the "pro-life" movement -- whose abhorence of this form of "murder" is curiously dissociated from willingness to support the killing of others, especially if they can be framed as a threat to a way of life. The issue has been further successfully confused with opposition to family planning as an unnatural constraint on the natural propagation of the species -- and a God-given right. Ironically it might be argued that this consensus amongst mutually antagonistic religions is one of the very few instances of successful inter-faith dialogue with practical consequences -- however aberrant the result may be considered (cf Emergence of a Global Misleadership Council: misleading as vital to governance of the future? 2007).

How is it that, lacking any trace of humility, each religion positions itself on the moral high ground -- above any reasonable moral reproach -- and yet perceives other religions to be misguided, problematic or "sinful" in the extreme? Like any commercial enterprise, each promotes itself as having a monopoly of spirituality and questions the merits of competing products.

Most curiously is that any arguments for "population reduction" have been successfully confused with various "New World Order" conspiracy theories -- such as The Club of Rome and Population Reduction (2007), Ruppert Endorses 4 Billion World Population Reduction?, Top Scientist Advocates Mass Culling 90% Of Human Population (2006), Depopulation of a Planet: thinning out the useless eaters (1995), The Depopulation Bomb (2007), Population Control is Evil!.

Even more curiously is the avoidance of the overpopulation issue by environmentalists, as noted by Madeleine Bunting (Greens need to grasp the nettle: aren't there just too many people? Guardian, 10 September 2007):

It's the one issue no environmentalist organisation wants to tal

Answer 22

I am a strong believer in saving or protecting our environment. The overpopulation is the biggest issue, but I am not jumping out of the window or open a vein to save the earth. I just save energy where ever I can, walking or bicycling  instead of driving a car (a small car). I am also a vegetarian. Just imagine how much greenhouse gas is produced for only one burger? But don't take my word for it. Just use your own brain. The grain, what is used for one cow, could easily feed a family of 10 to 12 people per year, without the byproduct of the gassy remains of the cow.

If not so many people would persist to drive gas guzzler, we wouldn't need the bio diesel. The corn is food, which is burned to change into gasoline. Is that just the normal madness, or what? Does nobody come up with the idea, that less is more?

One thing is for sure, the earth has much more time to regenerate, then we have to destroy the environment which we need to live.

Answer 23

Overpopulation

Answer 24

You may as well be asking whether or not if Wylie-E-Coyote ever caught the Roadrunner as that is about as fiction as the idea of Global Warming and Over Population. The scientific fact is that it will take over 50 years from this date in order to determine if in fact there is any example of any Global warming. As of today, there is not one true example of Global warming anywhere on the planet. In fact the whole concept of global warming violates the "second law of Thermodynamics" as everything eventually leads to maximum entropy....meaning that the World is getting colder, not hotter. One great example of the myth of global warming that has been overturned just this past month was the idea that man is causing the Polar Ice Caps to melt as a result of global warming when the truth was discovered recently that any Polar Ice Caps which are melting are a result of underground magma from underwater volcano activity in the area including Greenland. However, you will notice that Al Gore has ignored this because he still wants his little film and his books to sell. On the subject of over population, many research projects in the past 10 years dedicated to this point to the fact that under the current population growth and under the current productivity of natural resources as well as agricultural output, the planet can handle over 10 times the current population even with the current agricultural productivity meaning that the population isn't the problem. Distribution of the products is more of a problem.

Answer 25

OverPopulation,because overpopulation cause global warming.

Answer 26

Which fictitious problem is a bigger problem?  Neither!  I live in the US.  We've got land and resources for centuries, don't you worry.  Let other countries deal with their own issues.

Answer 27

over population, much more demand for the worlds dwindling natural food resources particularly in India and china.