Thread: Eaarth
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Old 01-01-2011, 03:24 PM   #347 (permalink)
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Deforestation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The estimates seem to vary considerably, but the average seems to be around 12%. The question remains as to how far back they go, since deforestation was one of the first human impacts on the carbon cycle dating back thousands of years.

Global population in the year of my birth, 1950, was around 2.57 billion. Today it is something like 6.5 billion.

I would consider the sum of those two factors alone would be a significant amount of any carbon increase from human induced effects.

I am neither advocate or adversary in this fight, but when you consider just these two very significant factors, you could rationally conclude that they would be the prime reasons for increased carbon in the atmosphere. In fact you could possible argue that the per capita carbon emissions have actually been reduced as human kind has used up the forests for heat and switched to better sources. Even coal is an improvement over wood.

I remember when I was young and London England outlawed the use of bituminous coal for heating, switching to anthracite coal. It seems like that single act had much to do with the reduction in the fogs London was notorious for 50 years ago.

I believe that the issue of climate change will be resolved by many different efforts, and one of the most significant (in my biased and agenda driven opinion) would be adoption of my design into vehicles, which has been demonstrated to reduce fuel consumption dramatically.

Whether that adoption would be driven by the economics of elimination of oil imports into the US (as well as the rest of the planet), or whether it would significantly reduce pollution as a result of the same adaption, is irrelevant. What is relevant, is the driving force behind the design was to make energy conservation cost effective, which makes adoption virtually automatic, when you eliminate the, normally multi decade payback period of many other options that seem to be preferred by some.

regards
Mech