Overpopulation and the Impact on the Environment

 
 
 

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33 
Figure 7. Deforestation. 
Source: World Wildlife Fund. Deforestation. Retreievd from: 
https://www.woroldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation
 
 
Scientists predict that human activity of deforestation will have a long-lasting impact on the 
environment. The end of nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century showed that global 
deforestation significantly increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in atmosphere due to 
burning of fossil fuels, which count for an increase of “more than three times the CO
2 
emissions” 
(Dodds 38). Since oil, coal, and natural gas are burned at a higher rate than before, there is a strong 
correlation between the use of global energy and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Burning of 
fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide “at a rate of 6 million trillion tons of carbon per year” (Dodds 
39), and these particles will remain in the atmosphere for at least 100 years (Dodds 39). “Decades 
or centuries are required for global processes to reach equilibrium (that is, to return to a stable 
state)” (Dodds 39).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is less than one percent, but it nevertheless 
has an impact on global temperature. In 1890s, a Swedish Nobel Prize winner, Scante Arrhenius 
was the first one to observe the effect of carbon dioxide on temperature. His observations 
introduced the “greenhouse effect”, or an increase in temperature of the Earth that warms up as 
greenhouse that traps solar heat (Dodds 40). The process of greenhouse effect starts when carbon 
dioxide traps the heat energy in Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth is then heated by sun, and it emits 

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34 
energy back into space, but some of the energy gets trapped before it reaches the space, and the 
temperature of the atmosphere increases (Dodds 40). The amount of energy trapped is proportional 
to an increase of carbon dioxide concentrations, which shapes the atmospheric temperature. 
Even though China is the biggest polluter, United States takes the second place as its 
economy is built on fossil fuels. “Although United States has 4.5 percent of the world’s population, 
it produced 18 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2010, according to the U.S. 
Energy Information Administration” (Parham 25). Scientists and experts on climate change 
estimated that the highest acceptable threshold of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere equals 350 parts 
per million, and if the amount reaches beyond the suggested estimation, the Earth will experience 
serious consequences of global warming. “Today, the planet has 392 parts per million CO
2
” 
(Parham 25).