Rising population is biggest threat to global society
THE EXCHANGE of fire between climate change antagonists in your pages has been entertaining and is certainly the sort of controversy that helps to sell newspapers. Us mere spectators don’t know who might be right among the knowledgeable scientists and pseudo-knowledgeable nonscientist commentators because it’s easy to be selective about data in order to support this or that viewpoint.
However, the best indicators of what’s going on are found among the birds and the bees. Animals (and plants) of all stripes are already responding to climate change by shifting habitat, revising migratory routes, altering their breeding calendars, and in some instances failing to find adequate traditional food sources.
Instead of us getting hot under the collar arguing about why the climate is changing, we’d do much better to emulate nature’s other creatures and accept the change and act or plan to act in order to survive. Drastic measures will be needed.
As Keith Bryer (and others) predict, not much concrete action will come out of the forthcoming Paris Conference. Nevertheless, it could be a wonderful opportunity to put population control at the top of a revised agenda. The ever-growing swarms of unabsorbable people are a vastly greater threat to the health and stability of global society than any kind or degree of climate change. The swarms are growing fastest in countries and areas where education barely exists and employment opportunities are almost non-existent.
Breeding controls must be agreed to and relentlessly imposed by governments, perhaps in exchange for food handouts or tax relief. If countries fail in this, the consequences will be violent social upheaval, collapse of governing structures, epidemic disease and widespread conflict.
Nature always corrects population imbalances, often by ruthlessly drastic means. We need to keep ahead of nature. TIM ANDERSON NEWLANDS CAPE TOWN
Climate change fears not soley for ‘lefties’
Regarding the human-caused climate change debate in which Marc Swanepoel appears to put everybody who disagrees with his take on the evidence in a box labelled “left wing bunny huggers”, I would first point out that I am probably more right wing than he is on my outlook on life.
In his diatribe published last Wednesday, he chooses not to mention the most glaringly obvious statistic and fact, which is that the current population of humans on the planet is in the region of 7 billion people. This is a 14-fold increase on what it was just 200 years ago. For the past 5 000 years the population was pretty stable at about 600 million. It is unimaginable to reason that this has nothing to do with the current high level of carbon dioxide (CO )
2 in the atmosphere which has recently passed the 400 part per million mark as measured in Hawaii.
He quotes Patrick Moore as saying there have been periods in the Earth’s history where CO levels have been 10 times
2 this. This is very misleading, the only time that CO made up a substantial part of the
2 atmosphere of the planet was during the first billion years of the planets existence when there was very little oxygen so there was no life or very primitive anaerobic bacteria. Over at least the last 30 000 years, CO
2 has been in the region of 280 parts per million, so there has been a 40 percent increase since the start of the industrial revolution, exactly coinciding with the exponential growth of human population.
Should Swanepoel seek evidence for what I have just said he should refer to the ice core sample research done by the British Antarctic survey. Some of these ice cores are taken from ice 3km deep and contain small bubbles of gas trapped countless millennia ago and which can be analysed today for gas composition.
More worryingly for our future comfort is the correlation in the rise in CO with
2 the rise in methane in the atmosphere, an even more potent greenhouse gas. This gas at present comes from decomposing manmade landfill sites, rice paddies and ruminant animals.
I would suggest the gentleman should stop behaving like the proverbial ostrich and simply contemplate the climate changes observable in one generation starting perhaps with the fast disappearing land glaciers. In summary, people who support human cause of climate change are not all loony lefties. PETER HILL ST. LUCIA KWAZULU-NATAL
Who will pay bill for PetroSA legal dispute
I wonder if we will ever find out who pays the costs of the legal challenge by PetroSA financial officer Lindiwe Mthimunye-Bakoro over her suspension. I would think these costs are fairly substantial.
Given the current trends in this country I am prepared to venture that Petrosa (and ultimately the taxpayer) had to pick up the bill. The quicker employees are made to pay for the consequences of their actions the less inclined they will be to go running to the courts.
We are always told how great our labour laws are but not much focus is put on the huge delays and administrative burdens they create for businesses and employers. TONY BALL DURBAN
We’d do much bettter to emulate nature’s other creatures and accept the change and act, or plan to act, to survive. Drastic measures will be needed.