3 Sources & Connection to Climate Change

Population Research

Johns Book (Chapter 15: Human Population)

This book chapter was very informative. I learned that it look more than three million years to reach the first billion and the each time the gap before the next billion becomes shorter and shorter. It is estimated that by 2020 they world population will reach eight billion.
This chapter also brought up the point that argues people now life their life fuller and healthier than before but the do not mention that their will be an equal or even higher number of people that will life in poverty and misery.

http://www.populationconnection.org/sites/News2?new_iv_ctrl=-1&page=NewsArticle&id=6645

What I got from this reading was that there is about one million people starving out of the current population of 6,692,030,277.

McGinley, Mark; David Casagrande. 2007. "Carrying capacity." In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). February 08 2010.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carrying_capacity

Reading this I learned that everything has a carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the number of people a certain area can sustain. It does not let the population grow exponentially because then there would be a lack or resources. A way not to let the population grow so much would be too keep the number births around the same as the number of deaths.

Daily, Gretchen; Paul Ehrlich. "Population, Sustainability, and Earth's Carrying Capacity: A framework for estimating population sizes and lifestyles that could be sustained without undermining future generations". February 9th, 2010

Shah, Anup. "Global Warming and Population". February 9th, 2010
http://www.globalissues.org/article/708/global-warming-and-population

This article was about how countries blame huge developing countries like China and India but some disagree arguing that the greenhouse gases that are affecting the climate today are the one that were used decades ago so the countries that the primarily responsible are the countries that were rich back then.

Connection to Climate Change

Climate change will affect the population in many ways. The hotter climate will started to melt all the ice and that will cause the sea level to get rise which means that the places with low elevation will begin to sink so the habitable areas will be less.
It is predicted that because of that there will be around 200 million refugees which would be made up of the poorest people on earth.
The population will also be affected because there will be a lot of less fertile areas, desertification, which means there will be less food for the rapidly growing population.
The population will affect the climate by overpopulation. It is estimated that by 2050 the population will increase by 2.3 billion which will cause the climate to change because the world will be ecologically unstable.
The population is in responsible for the earth's sudden change in temperature, because we love using technology that involves the consumption of fossil fuels and do not realize that we are emitting so many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that remain there for years so even if we take initiative and want to see a change it will take a longer time.