Terry, you are writing your posts with the assumption that global warming is not humanity's fault.

Take a look at this graph:

[Linked Image]

This graph shows the exponential growth of the human population. But not only is the human population growing in a way that would have alarmed us if we saw it in another species, but it is also true that, on average, each individual human consumes more and more, ever more than our ancestors did as individuals. So there are ever more of us and each one of us consumes ever more.

One day last September was the 'global overshoot day'. That is the day when humanity has 'used up' the resources that the Earth can naturally produce during a year. For the rest of the year, we live on borrowed resources.

The recent economic crisis happened, to a large extent, because people borrowed more than they could pay back.

When are we going to pay back to the Earth what we are borrowing from it? How will we pay back our debt? And what happens if we don't pay up?

Terry, you are assuming that humanity has no adverse impact on the Earth, so you advocate doing nothing to lessen our human footprint on the Earth.

I have certainly never claimed that humanity is the only factor that affects the climate of the Earth. Making such a claim would be utter folly, since it can so extremely easily be disproved.

But just because there are other factors affecting the Earth and our climate, it doesn't follow that we can play any irresponsible games we want to, as if our own actions don't matter. Would you tell your kids that it is all right to play with fire if other kids are playing with fire anyway?

Yesterday, when it was snowy here in Malmö and I was going to take the bus instead of cycling, a young woman stood next to me waiting for the bus and blew smoke in my face. I asked her to please blow her smoke in another direction. She replied that it didn't matter what she did with her smoke, because there was heavy traffic all around us and the air was polluted anyway.

Why don't we all start smoking? And then let's tell our doctors about it. Let's tell our doctors that we have decided to smoke because it doesn't matter what kind of junk we breathe, since the air is polluted anyway. Do you think our doctors will agree with our assessment?

Terry, can you really say that the human population can grow almost exponentially, and the average consumption of resources per individual human being can grow, too, and still the Earth, its atmosphere and biosphere will remained unaffected by our presence, our consumption of resources and our deposit of waste products?

Ann