Dear Mrs Brice's 8th Grade Class

First of all, I’m no global warming expert! I’m merely relaying information from one source to another, so I’m really happy to see you’re reading and learning about the problem—and quite a bit too, judging from your questions. By now you seem to know more about global warming than I do, so I left it to Chief Scientist Jim Swift and Professor of Oceanography Chris Measures to compose answers for you. I have posted their letters in their entirety as responses to your comment below, found here. I made some very small edits, and I also took the liberty of highlighting some of the more salient points. They are absolutely worth the read, so please check them out.

Jim’s response in particular makes a few striking statements which get at the heart of the climate change issue while also saying something you’ll never hear from a politician: the real problem is overpopulation. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here:

If you lived in a poor village in some far-away land, would you like to live as we do? If each of the planet's citizens used same amount of energy daily that underlies the lives of each of us in the USA (not just the energy we use directly at home, but our part of the sum of all the energy that goes into making what we use), and even if that energy were made via an extremely efficient process that did not involve CO2, all of it eventually gets turned into heat, so the sum over the whole planet of everyone living as we do would warm the planet, CO2 or not CO2. Either (1) there are too many human beings, (2) we need to hugely change our lifestyle (in ways that may be very harsh indeed), or (3) we have to maintain a social structure of energy-users and energy-poor.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s probably close to the truth... there are too many humans to support as good a lifestyle as we’d like to bring to everyone. We’re headed toward a crisis which puts hundreds of millions of the world’s poor in great danger—an upcoming report from the IPCC will state some predicted troubles which include severe water shortages and rising sea levels. It seems that the measures necessary to mitigate the long term effects of the disaster (but not avoid, as Mrs. Brice’s 8th grade class noted is probably not possible) will require practically draconian measures... either a drastic reduction in population, a drastic reduction of everybody's energy use, or some combination of the two that would result in an unhappy social structure. It may be too much change to voluntarily accept. I think it boils down to this: Humans are an infinitely competitive species living in a finite world.

This is not to say that there’s nothing that can be done, because there’s still a lot that one person can do. If every single person were to take some steps toward reducing their energy use (that would include eating less meat, using fewer things that require lots of energy to build, etc), that would make a big difference. It wouldn't make "all the difference," but certainly it would be productive. It just would be nice if a feeling of social and environmental responsibility were a valuable evolutionary trait... for example, apparently there’s a cleric in Australia (I won't name which religion since I'm interested in the environmental not political ramifications) who is urging those of his religion to have as many babies as possible so they can “out breed” other religious groups. Such an attitude exhibits dangerous environmental irresponsibility.