What Does It Mean Change the to Address and Try Again
What 11 Billion People Mean for Climate Change
Editor's notation: By the stop of this century, Earth may be domicile to 11 billion people, the United Nations has estimated, earlier than previously expected. As part of a week-long series, LiveScience is exploring what reaching this population milestone might mean for our planet, from our ability to feed that many people to our impact on the other species that telephone call Globe abode to our efforts to land on other planets. Check back here each mean solar day for the next installment.
On the western coast of Alaska, nestled against the Bering Bounding main, residents of the remote village of Newtok may soon become the land's first climate refugees.
Similar many Alaskan villages, Newtok sits atop permanently frozen soil called permafrost. In contempo years, however, warming oceans and milder surface temperatures have melted the icy subsoil, causing the ground beneath Newtok to erode and sink. In 2007, the village already sat below sea level, and studies warned that the subarctic outpost could exist completely done away within a decade.
Now, despite political and fiscal hurdles, the community is looking to relocate its roughly 350 residents. With climatic change speedily altering human being ecosystems effectually the world, Newtok may not be alone in its fight confronting warming temperatures, melting ice and rise seas.
For the roughly 7.two billion people who live on Earth today, the impacts of a changing climate may be taking different forms, simply the consequences are already being felt across the globe — from astringent monsoons in Southeast Asia, to the increasing pace of melting ice at the poles, to hotter-than-average temperatures throughout the contiguous United States.
Over the grade of the adjacent century, if the levels of greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, and nations accept failed to address the myriad challenges of climatic change, scientists say Earth's delicate ecosystem could be in serious jeopardy. But, what if in those same 100 years, nearly 4 billion people are added to the world'due south population? Could this type of rapid growth overwhelm the conveying capacity of our "Pale Blue Dot" and our power to mitigate and cope with climate change?
A recent United Nations assay of world population trends indicates global population growth shows no signs of slowing, with current projections estimating a staggering 11 billion people could inhabit the planet past the twelvemonth 2100, faster growth than previously predictable. The majority of this surge in population is probable to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, with the population of Nigeria expected to surpass that of theUnited States earlier 2050, co-ordinate to the statistical analysis.
The new report as well suggests Republic of india will eventually become the globe's largest country, matching Mainland china's estimated population of i.45 billion people in 2028, and continuing to swell beyond that point, even every bit People's republic of china's population begins to decrease.
Some scientists say rapid population growth could be catastrophic for the planet, considering information technology will likely lead to overcrowding in cities, add stress to Earth'south already dwindling resource, and worsen the effects of climatic change. Simply within the scientific community, a debate is brewing, and there is petty consensus well-nigh how — or fifty-fifty if — population growth is linked to global warming.
Assessing the bear upon of population growth on climate change has been tricky. Most scientists hold that humans are to arraign for nearly of the planet'south warmingsince 1950, merely precisely which events were aggravated by man activities (and how much) are unknown. [What 11 Billion People Mean for the Planet]
"It's a question that'southward really hard to respond, because climate science is non to the point of being able to place specific impacts, or changes that have occurred and then far, as being directly caused by climate change," said Amy Snover, co-managing director of the Climate Impacts Group and a researcher at the Centre for Scientific discipline in the Globe System at the Academy of Washington in Seattle. "What we can exercise is look at the many things that take happened recently that are similar, and what we wait to happen, and see that these things are problematic and will certainly raise concerns for the time to come."
Furthermore, scientists on both sides of the equation — those who report demographics and those who study climate scientific discipline — practise non necessarily agree on how, or even if, population growth and climate change are connected.
A growing debate
Increasing the number of people on the planet does not, in itself, intensify climatic change, said David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow studying climate change adaptation and human being settlements at the International Establish for Environment and Evolution, in the Great britain. Rather, changes in consumption are the key drivers of global warming, he explained.
"Higher consumption is what drives anthropogenic climate change," Satterthwaite told LiveScience. "The loftier-consumption lifestyles of the richest half-billion people scare me much more the growth in population in depression-income nations."
This is because developing nations, where the U.N. estimates most of the next century'south surge in population will occur, have much smaller carbon footprints than developed countries, such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
"If you recall of population as the driving forcefulness, it makes sense to look at the fast-growing nations and say: 'We have to boring that population growth,'" Satterthwaite said. "But near of the nations with the fastest growing populations have far lower per capita greenhouse gas emissions."
During the Industrial Revolution, which began in the mid-1700s in England and later spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the United states, emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases soared as manufacturing and transportation boomed. The technologies used during the Industrial Revolution were also inefficient and largely based on coal and fossil fuels, which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases that linger in the atmosphere.
This flurry of activity has taken a price on the planet. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, human being activities accept increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by a third, according to NASA.
Now, equally developing countries seek their own industrial revolution, in that location are concerns that as well much damage has already been done.
"There are opinions that nosotros're already past a sustainable population now, in terms of beingness able to provide a loftier quality of life for every citizen on the planet," said David Griggs, a climatologist and manager of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), an international body jointly established by the Un Environment Programme and the Globe Meteorological Organization to assess the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of climate change.
Others say improvements in applied science will yield improve crop production and distribution, enabling cities and towns to suit more people, he added. Simply more is not necessarily improve.
"I'm not a fan of thinking about this as a tipping point — there isn't a point where we only go over the border," said Griggs, who was previously the deputy principal scientist of the United Kingdom's national weather service. "It's a slow deterioration, and the more people in that location are, the more challenging it is for those people to have their basic needs met."
Population versus consumption
To understand the potential ecology impacts, it is important to consider both population growth and trends in consumption, said Robert Engelman, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environment and sustainability call back tank based in Washington, D.C.
"Some people volition say one matters more than the other, but they multiply each other," Engelman said. "Information technology would be unsafe to ignore population as a major gene."
In 2008, China, the United states, the Eu (excluding Estonia, Republic of latvia and Republic of lithuania), India, the Russian federation, Japan and Canada were amid the meridian emitters of carbon dioxide. Combined, these nations contributed more than 70 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes. In contrast, the balance of the globe represented only 28 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
"In some of the poorest countries in the earth, emissions are very low, but the idea is we want these countries to develop," Engelman said. "As nosotros've seen happen in India and China as they've industrialized, countries that are populous and poor tin experience a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Nosotros tin't just consider how much the average person is emitting in these populous countries now. Nosotros have to call up near what will be happening to the people in these countries over the next 70 years."
Beginning in the 1960s, Prc embarked on a rapid path toward industrialization. Past the cease of the century, the country had secured its identify as a manufacturing powerhouse and a veritable economic superpower. But, China's speedy industrialization has come at an environmental price.
Within 20 years, China more than tripled its emissions of carbon dioxide — from ii.46 million tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to eight.29 million tons in 2010, according to United Nations estimates.
Since 2000, China'southward energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have increased at an boilerplate rate of more than than 10 percent each year, co-ordinate to the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, which is designed to identify "scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic postal service-2012 international policy architecture for global climate change."
Adding politics to the mix
Simply, developing climate policies has been a challenging, and an often fruitless, process.
Jerry Karnas, the Center for Biological Diversity's population campaign managing director in Miami, is all too familiar with these political pitfalls, specially in addressing the impact of population growth on climate change.
In 2008, Karnas was appointed to a statewide committee to help design a programme for Florida to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to eighty percent of 1990 levels by the year 2050. The last study was more than 1,000 pages and comprehensively tackled every sector of Florida's economy, except population.
"Population was the just thing not on the table," Karnas said. "We had to accept growth as a given, and not claiming the notion that for Florida to succeed, it had to grow."
I of the reasons the state government accepts rapid population growth has to do with the way Florida's economy is prepare, Karnas said.
"Florida is a sales taxation country. Nosotros have no income tax, only much of the country is also funded by the documentary postage tax," he said. "Documentary stamps are real estate transactions, so every time a real estate transaction occurs, it gets taxed, and that goes into the land coffer. So, the two major funding sources for Florida are dependent on increasing the population numbers in the state."
While the population of the The states is not expected to spring significantly in the adjacent century, diminishing natural resources are already adding stress to the country'southward food and h2o supplies, and the availability of future energy resources.
In regions of the world where vast population growth is projected, such every bit sub-Saharan Africa, the issue of dwindling natural resources volition probable be magnified. [5 Places Already Feeling the Effects of Climate Change]
Feeding a hungry planet
If the global population increases by 3 billion people, food production will likewise demand to ascent to encounter these growing demands. Finding acceptable agricultural state, however, volition be a claiming, every bit soil erosion and more frequent droughts related to climate change render larger tracts of state unusable, Griggs, the Monash University climatologist, said.
"If nosotros wait at the next 50 years, nosotros'd need to grow more food than we have in the whole of man history to date to feed those 9 billion people," Griggs said. "But since nosotros take no more agricultural state, we'll have to produce all this nutrient on the same land we're producing food on at the moment."
In item, southern Asia, western Asia and northern Africa take nigh no spare land available to expand agricultural practices, according to the 2013 Statistical Yearbook of the Food and Agricultural Organization for the United Nations, published in June.
More people on Earth also means more competition for water, Griggs added. Currently, one of the main uses for water is in agriculture, and ensuring that populations take access to make clean drinking water will be another significant challenge, he said, since global warming may cause arid regions of the planet to become even more than parched.
In the United States, the Bureau of Reclamation released a report on the status of the Colorado River Basin in Dec 2012. The report concluded that over the next 50 years, water supply from the Colorado River will exist bereft to meet the demands of its adjacent states, including Arizona, New Mexico and California.
"The U.Southward. government was effectively saying, there will be no way to completely satisfy the h2o needs of the population that is currently projected in that part of the country," Engelman said.
Worldwide, the state of affairs is not much meliorate. A 2011 study on the country of the earth'southward land and water resource, released by the Food and Agronomics Organization of the United Nations, established that more than twoscore percent of the world's rural population lives in h2o-scarce regions.
Ways to mitigate the impacts
While the impact of population growth on climate alter remains a topic of contend, experts concord that finding ways to mitigate the effects of climatic change will exist critical for the sustainability of the planet.
For one, nations need to accost climate modify issues at present, in order to make communities more resilient in the future, said Declan Conway, a professor of water resource and climate change at the University of East Anglia in the U.k.. This includes investing in renewable energy alternatives, such as technologies to efficiently harness solar and wind energy, he added.
Equally office of his work at the Worldwatch Plant, Engelman also promotes the idea of carbon taxes, which would introduce fees based on the carbon content of fuels. While these types of resource taxes have been suggested as an incentivized way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they remain politically divisive.
Still, others see positive changes on the horizon.
"Twenty years ago, climate change wasn't seen every bit an issue at all, but since then, engineering has improved rapidly," Griggs said. "We don't have to hang around and wait for something bad to happen. There'due south no question that nosotros tin deal with all of these climatic change issues now, if we want to. The real upshot is: Will nosotros? Volition in that location be the political will and the leadership to accept on these things?"
As for whether he remains optimistic overall, Griggs is a little more hesitant. "I'm schizophrenic about information technology," he said. "[At] times, I await at what's happening in the globe and the lack of progress, and I say, we're blimp. On my good days, I'chiliad optimistic and I see us moving in a direction that will permit u.s. to solve these bug."
Follow Denise Grub on Twitter @denisechow . Follow LiveScience @livescience , Facebook & Google+ . Original article on Live Science.
Denise Grub was the assistant managing editor at Live Science before moving to NBC News every bit a science reporter, where she focuses on general scientific discipline and climate change. Before joining the Alive Science team in 2013, she spent two years as a staff writer for Space.com, writing most rocket launches and covering NASA's final three infinite shuttle missions. A Canadian transplant, Denise has a bachelor'southward caste from the University of Toronto, and a main's degree in journalism from New York University.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/41381-11-billion-people-climate-change.html
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