How to Save the Earth: Put Fewer People on It

Finally, someone comes out and says it. Over on the Anderson Cooper 360 blog at CNN, correspondent Randi Kaye reports on a conversation she had with a California climatologist named Bill Patzert. He works at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

When a climatologist tells you the only thing that's going to reverse the effects of global warming is a "good old-fashioned pandemic that wipes out millions" your ears perk up. Mine sure did when climatologist
Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told me that.

We came to California to see what is making this state so darn hot and to take a look at what the summer may bring. It's not good.

Patzert got a rare glimpse into the future by studying the past. He found that in the last 100 years the average daily temperature in this state jumped 5 degrees; average nightly temperature jumped 7 degrees; and the annual number of extreme heat days, those over 90 degrees farenheit, multiplied by 12. Even heat waves are up, he said. They are three-to-five times more likely with each passing summer.

Now, it's a big mistake to turn local weather stories into global climate change stories. "Gosh, it sure is hot this year" most definitely should not lead to "must be global warming." That's a sucker's game—for climate change to stick as science, the trends have to be larger-scale.

But I'm glad to see a little noise about the real cause of most of our ecological problems: population. There are, simply, too damn many of us, and Earth is going to try to kill us off as a way of getting back to homeostasis.

What I mean is, as population grows, cities grow. Energy use goes up. Food consumption goes up. And while developed nations tend to level off in population, developing nations rocket upward. At constant fertility levels, the United Nations predicts a world population of 11.8 billion by 2050 (got that number here).

But if more people leads to more global warming, and more global warming leads to more pandemics (just like greater population density leads to more pandemics), that may well be nature's way of telling us to slow down.

It's the worst possible solution to our ecological problems. It's a lot easier to talk about geoengineering, greater crop yields, and post-antibiotic drug therapies than it is to think about a world where people die like it's 1917. It might even be easier to talk about sex education and birth control (gasp! *faint*). But that pandemic might be coming, anyway.