Should I be Concerned About Global Warming?

Should I be worried about global warming?

According to this video the cost of doing nothing will surely outweigh the cost of doing something about global warming. Well my question is when was the earth ever sustainable?  Was there ever a period when people where  living in harmony with the earth? What would the total population look like? Well, the answer to these questions might be scarier than the video presented. 

In the mind of SamCWrites
Well before I get into answering some of these questions let me tell you how I stumbled into thinking about this. Well I have an interest in business and a few weeks ago I noticed that the price of oil has been extremely low. What used to cost my wife $40 to fill her gas tank had started costing $24. Talk about a heck of a savings. So I then started watching the news to understand what was going on. I heard speculators talking about how there was an over production and how OPEC countries were not going to lower production amounts. My favorite economic doomsday scenario builder right now is Peter Schiff.

So next I run into another blog talking about Peak Oil by Gail Tverberg called Our Finite World In an article called Ten Reasons Why a Severe Drop in Oil Prices is a Problem. 

There are really two different problems that a person can be concerned about:

1. Peak oil: the possibility that oil prices will rise, and because of this production will fall in a rounded curve. Substitutes that are possible because of high prices will perhaps take over.
2. Debt related collapse: oil limits will play out in a very different way than most have imagined, through lower oil prices as limits to growth in debt are reached, and thus a collapse in oil “demand” (really affordability). The collapse in production, when it comes, will be sharper and will affect the entire economy, not just oil.

In the commentary section people began asking the question of how can we use these resources more suitably the basic answers given by Gail were

Densifying cities would require more energy–moving people farther away from where the food is grown, and making people more dependent on electricity and other forms of energy. If the issue is keeping the current system from collapsing, I agree that using more energy is (very temporarily) the answer.

The problem is that the current system seems likely to collapse, in the very near term. If it does, it will not support dense populations in large cities very well. Adding more density just makes the problem worse after collapse.

 (Back to the issue at Hand)

When I asked my classmates and friends when they thought the world was consuming things in a sustainable era  they pointed at the Native Americans and specifically around the year 1700s.
The prevailing guess was that at that point in time there were only about 1.2 Billion people on earth.
Right now the population is at about 7 Billion + people. That means in order for the humans to become aligned with earth 5.8 Billion People have to go. I'm no mathematician so I'm guessing that means that 1 out of 8 people gets to live and everyone else has to die. So with older growth estimates that would only delay the impending doom for another 200 years before the earth would find itself in the same predicament.

Type in World Sustainable Populations Estimates into Google and you will see something similar.

So if we are talking about changing things in the United States to cut carbon emissions by 25% then compared to cutting 7/8 of the population I would assume we would yield an extra month of earth time.

I hope if you view the situation as bad as I'm outlining in this blog then when you see these efforts to curb emissions you would see that this no more than plugging a dam with your fingers in hopes of saving the village.  So now I would argue that perhaps instead of looking to stop the environment from crashing be thankful for another day cause the alternative is gonna cost you.