Another surreal moment or two when the alarm went off this morning – if anything worse than yesterday! I got up too late to cycle into work and rather guiltily took the cheaper, post-9:30 train in. Work was fairly lightweight stuff again; my heart wasn’t really in it. After only two days back at work, though, it’s such a relief to remember that tomorrow is Saturday.
Cooked a lovely pork dhansak for dinner and then we sat and watched De-Lovely, a very entertaining and touching musical about the life of Cole Porter. (An unexpected appearance by the lovely Kevin McKidd made it even more pleasant!) Then caught up on Celebrity Big Brother, to see whether the Chorus got another mention. (As Rula was entering the house last night, Davina had commented that she had just finished touring with the London Gay Men’s Chorus. Whoa! Free publicity in front of an audience of millions! Excellent.)
On a slightly more serious note, I spotted this article on the BBC News site today and it struck me as very incisive; if mankind’s abuse of the environment is the cause of Global Warming then as mankind grows, the abuse is going to get worse even if we do manage to cut the average individual’s footprint. As well as recycling and cutting emissions, we need to deal with the exponential growth in our population – but that’s a topic that everyone shies away from.
3 comments:
There is a belief held in Daoism and Taist religions in the east, and has echoes in Judaism and Buddhism too.
But simple physics puts it more simply: Newtons Law: For every positive action there is an equal and opposite re-action.
As the earth warms and we render parts of the earth 'uninhabitable' so too will we loose population through natural disasters, famine, disease and war over remaining resources (no one mention Oil in Iraq) all a 're-action' to our action in global warming.
So ultimately, nature knows best and we are all probably screwed in the long term.
Not so exponential these days - the chirstmas special for the economist had an article on the history of wheat, that also discussed population growth:
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1
"Soon after Norman Borlaug went to India in 1963, a remarkable thing began to happen. The world population growth rate, in percentage terms, had been climbing steadily since the second world war (bar a two-year drop in 1959-60 caused by Mao Xedong). But in the mid 1960s it stopped rising. And by 1974 it was falling significantly. The number of people added each year kept on rising for a while, but even that peaked in 1989, and then began falling steadily. Population was still growing, but it was adding a smaller and smaller number each year.
Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm, now forecast that the population will peak below ten billion—ten gigapeople—not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50 years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths equal births) by 2035."
Hmm. Interesting article. Maybe Slightly is right then; nature will correct for our excessive growth by finding ways to reduce birth rates.
Post a Comment