Thread: Climate Change ''fogging'' out other major issues

People are all arms up in the air regarding climate change but people aren't considering other issues of far greater importance such as food and water for the next 100 years.

Shortages of drinking water are found everywhere in a country as wet as Ireland.
Food is becoming much more expensive, look at the biofuel scam in America, they've converted something like 50% of their Maize fields to biofuel. All this does is raise the price of food.
I don't see why people worry about things that they could never hope to stop at this stage and don't start worrying about keeping food on the plate...!

Any comments?

Barry

the root of all problems, from environmental degradation to rising oil and food prices (+ also global warming) is overpopulation

we're way past the earth's carrying capacity for the type of large mammal we are, and more often than not this type of situation resolves itself through a population crash - i just hope i'm no longer around to experience it, because it won't be pretty

People are all arms up in the air regarding climate change but people aren't considering other issues of far greater importance such as food and water for the next 100 years.

It is all interconnected. The fundamental issue is not climate change or overpopulation; it is sustainability. We might as well accept that population is going to increase, not decrease for the next fifty years at least. No point crying over spilt milk. Instead, accept that the population is what it is and think about what we can do to make a sustainable world for such a large population.

It is not just the population numbers, it is the fact that as the population grows it is becoming more middle class, and middle class people make far greater demands on resources and produce far more waste than poor people. E. O. Wilson has estimated (I’m going on memory, might be off a bit on numbers) that the projected world population of 9 billion fifty years from now will produce 12 times the amount of waste as the current worlds population, because of this multiplicative effect.

Consume less, recycle more and develop smart (not corn-based) biofuels.

The technology that permits 6.5 billion people to live in standards that didn't exist 50 or a hundred years ago, has not started to decline. Frankly, I feel its capable of supporting the 10 billion, expected to be around in 2100, but improvements will continue.

Water, shortages in places that have good annual replenishment rates (rain) are likely from the use of long known retention methods. In the US southeast, this year, you have heard of shortages especially in and around Atlanta. They have two or three lakes designed and used for years for fresh water uses, which left alone are adequate. The problem in this one case were environmentalist concerned, which some species down stream of the OVERFLOW, which was not taken into account when built. So much over flow is required...

In general accessible fresh water makes up far less than 1% of whats available. Most fresh water (non salt or sea water) is tied up in Ice. Glaciers the main reason and natural moisture held by land masses in the soil or as snow on higher elevations most of the year. Then you have salt water (ocean water) which is currently being made fresh by a couple processes. General Electric alone make billions of gallons into fresh bottled water and sold in places where fresh water in near non existent.
In time rivers may flow from the ocean, in pipe lines to places where food could easily be grown.

Next time your in a grocery store, check out a few prices on bulk food items. Fifty pound bags of rice, flour, sugar and so on. Even the large packages of any item will tell you this; Packaging in the commercial markets make up the highest per cent of cost, that you pay, followed by transportation and labor involved. I have to grant, the push for Bio-fuels, in the US from corn has pushed up quite a few prices and world wide. It will even out and some (not all) of the added food cost come back in fuel savings.

Well, just food isn't the half of it. Like everybody else knows, its also gas, the atmosphere, and a lot of other stuff. This is just the gathering before the storm. Because the human population is getting so large, and people are fighting over resources, we're eventually gonna kill ourselves. We will be nothing but index fossils. Life on earth will be much better without human interference, in my opinion