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OT: Moorabal/Lal Lal wind farm 17-Jun-2009 At 4:39:09 PM jono_1

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On 17/06/2009 R James wrote:
>You suggest that AGW does not happen, but,
>>as others have asked, What if you’re wrong!
>
>And I responded on 12/6/09. Have a look back.
>
>I'm suggesting that realistically there's little we can do about climate,
>whether AGW is real or not, while we have an exponentially growing population.
>Most of Australia's growth comes from immigration. We choose not to overpopulate,
>so the government offsets this by encouraging immigration from other countries.
>Sensible when capital cities struggle to supply enough drinking water.
>
>I'm not suggesting a one child policy - we need 2 - 3 children on average
>for stability. However, if Australia is serious about reducing emissions,
>for a start reduce immigration.
>
>We need to globally acknowledge, at government level, that population
>increase is not in our best interests. It will require education and culture
>changes - this is a huge topic and outside the scope of this thread, so
>I won't dwell on it.
>
>Let's just consider that world population is expected to increase by 35%
>by 2050 to 9.2 billion people. Does anyone really believe we'll reduce
>total emissions and use of resources at the same time? Politicians are
>pulling vote winning unachievable figures out of a hat (eg reduce emissions
>by 25% by 2050).
>
>Reducing population won't win an election. However, people feel so good
>about reducing emissions, that not only will it win an election, the silly
>sheeple will pay more taxes to support it. Meanwhile, Blind Freddie can
>see that the emission goals are unachievable while the bigger problem of
>population growth is ignored.

It is not just global population increase that makes CO2 reductions more difficult it is the rise of the middle class in China and India. Just think if a rural kid living in India/China gets an education, gets a good job, moves to the city, gets married, has kids, buys a car, TV, microwave, fridge, use airplanes for holidays etc, etc there impact is probably 10-20 times that of if he/she didn't rise up into middle class/consumer ranks. They of course have every right to do so. So say 100,000,000 people over the next 10-20 years increase their CO2 emmisions by times 5, 10, 20 then you have an effective population increase in terms of CO2 of 500, 1000, or 2000 million people. Thats scary. I don't have the exact numbers/forecasts but you get the idea.

With that said, population projections, changes in CO2 per person emmisions are factored into emmisions reductions scenarios. In fact, Dept. Climate Change loves to produce figures based on CO2 reductions per capita (ie. something like 25-35% decrease in C02 emmisions per capita compared to overall decrease of 5-10-25%). It makes us sound like we are doing more than everyone else.