Population Scare

According to Thomas L. Friedman in Hot, Flat and Crowded, we have some terrifying increases in population ahead of us. He provides us numbers for the increase in people for the next few years, personally i find this extremely disturbing. In 2007 United Nations Population Division reported that in "the world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion over the next 43 years, passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion." Friedman goes on to explain that most of this population increase is not, in industrialized and developed countries, but in the developing countries whose population will raise from 5.4 billion in 2007, to 7.9 billion in 2050. But in developed countries the population will remain basically the same. In fact, if not for migration from developing countries the population would have decreased! While seeing these numbers on a page might not be enough to scare you, living though these next few years will not be a pleasant experience for humanity. The huge population in this world causes many problems, the biggest of which are exhaustion of fossil fuels and global warming. It is said that if everyone in China started driving our gas supply would last only 6 months. As horrible as this sounds, not everyone in China will drive all at once, second, it could be an opportunity. An opportunity to get our asses in gear and lead the world towards completely renewable fuels. Global warming is not such an easy problem to figure. It has many causes, and just as many effects, all of which I'm sure, humanity would rather avoid. While its true that termites produce the most methane that goes into the atmosphere (yes, more than cows), our pollution spews CO2 that binds to oxygen and breaks down ozone while creating a blanket of insulation. So the ozone cannot deflect the suns rays and this new blanket keeps them from bouncing back into space. Not only does this create higher temperatures, it creates violent changes in weather patterns, for instance Hurricane Katrina. It kills fish and polar bears, and is flooding sea level villages.