Overweight people cause global warming

[Aabidano]

It's in The Sun, so it must be true:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... 387203.ece

Michael Moore is bad for the environment, I knew it

[Spang]

Drudge Report seems to think it's true.

[Aslanna]

'blobal warming' was funnier.

[MooZilla]

Why all of the hostility towards scientists, or these apparent 'crack pots', that are studying global climate change? There's this misconception that it's a new field in science, or that the evidence behind changes is ambiguous or irrelevant to our planet's natural cycles. I understand people are afraid of the hard truth, but the ignorance I see in a bunch of responses on this site is just mind boggling. Almost anybody in the scientific community can conclude that there is a direct correlation between historically unparalleled levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides, and atmospheric warming. True, there are cycles and disturbances on our earth and in space that change temperatures in the short term - El Nino, sun spots, volcanic eruptions -, but the exponential warming trend we are experiencing right now falls very far from any of the 10,000 year glacial cycles which exhibited extremely fast warming, followed by a prolonged super cold period. The consensus is that this warming is thoroughly anthropogenic.

Here's a simple way to look at it: Our earth receives both long wave (infrared) radiation and short wave (UV) radiation from the sun. Most of this energy is absorbed at the surface (with variable amounts reflected by clouds or particulates - a much more complicated matter) Since our planet is a body above 0 degrees kelvin, it radiates energy back up into the atmosphere in the form of IR radation. A thicker atmosphere, due to the increase in GHG's, will absorb much more of this heat. Scientists refer to this as the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is the point where the type of green house gas is just as important as the amount. A molecule of nitrous oxide can hold more heat than methane which can hold more heat than carbon dioxide which holds way much heat than even oxygen. Anyway - we may also consider the atmosphere itself a black body, radiating heat both up to space and down back towards the surface. Let's add in the fact that with rising temperatures comes higher amounts of water vapor in the same volume of air (per the clausius-clapeyron relation). Water vapor is an insanely powerful green house gas due to it's ability to trap heat. All factors combined, how can the human-induced nature of global warming be denied?

To address the article; it is an interesting take on population as consisting of individual polluters who indirectly influence GHG production due to demand.