From time to time, I spend some time lurking on a public forum of the Kansas Citizens for Science. It is a rather good forum as it draws a more intellectual crowd than some forums. The link is http://www.kcfs.org/forums/.

Today someone posted this link to a study on global warming: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1786829.ece.

Here is how I responded:

Back in the early '60s when I was at KU, I wrote a series of articles for the UDK (I was a Journalism major) about what I thought was an impending disaster from overpopulation and how it would result in mass starvation. I thought the disaster would have already happened by now.

Well, science has enabled agriculture to more than keep pace with the population and most of the hunger problems today are related to distribution and political problems. Nevertheless, I still think that there will come a day when our population will outstrip our ability to produce enough food.

What hardly anyone says in these studies is that having half as many people on this planet would really help out; and, if we continue to increase our population it is only compounding the problems.

Granted we in the U.S. produce a disproportionate percentage of the pollutants that are causing global warming, but we must also recognize that world population growth is not helping out at all.

Also, what is normally not mentioned is that superstitions, religious and otherwise, are at the heart of much of the population growth. Whether it is a village peasant that believes that many boy babies are desirable or George Bush advancing only a "just say no" policy toward sex, the overall effect is devastating.

Of course, if the equatorial part of the planet becomes uninhabitable, then one would assume that the more northern uninhabitable regions would become habitable. But how do you move a population from one region to another when territorialism, regionalism and tribalism runs rampant and those needing to be moved are generally the poorest.