• Question: Would a pandemic, killing around half the population of earth, stop global warming? This would cut car CO2 emmisions and Cut the CO2 produce by humans through respiration?

    Asked by christiancox to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Possibly but what if it was all poor people that died and they didn’t have cars. I think that there are many better ways to cut co2 emissions, reducing intensive farming, reducing air travel, turning lights off when we leave the room, using green energy like wind or water generated power, using computers less. 🙂 planting trees is also useful!

    • Photo: Jane Henry

      Jane Henry answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      There is no doubt that the fact that there are so many people on the planet does not help global warming. Less people would need less energy live and would emit less CO2, methane etc. The effect would be greater if the people that died were those who are the greatest polluters, for example Amercians and certain very polluting power stations in china and eastern europe for example. What we have done so far in terms of pollution will continue to affect the planet for 100 years or so anyway, so even if we stopped polluting now we could have a global warming problem. But I’m with David Attenborough we need to think about limiting the human population as well as attempting to deal with global warming.

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Wow interesting question. I suppose the answer would be yes in theory because CO2 emissions would be cut quite drastically. But what about cows? They also contribute to CO2 emission so maybe there would need to be a cow pandemic as well!

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Maybe… who knows? We don’t know 100% if the damage is already done or if we can make big changes now to stop it. Hopefully scientists will find a way to sort out the problem some way without it coming to half the population dying.

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      There probably wouldn’t be much change initially as CO2 levels are relatively resistant to short-term activity (also there would be lots of bugs releasing CO2 as they degrade the dead bodies), but in the longer term, yes I think CO2 levels would drop, and eventually the rate of global warming would decrease.

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