Twenty years ago, I just wanted to get through to graduation with a certificate to teach high school sciences and math as I plodded my way through one science class and lab after another. I never thought too deeply about global warming then. But I should have.
I should have begun thinking about global warming the semester I took anatomy and physiology. In every other class, the professors wanted me to attain a greater understanding of the world around me. In anatomy and physiology, we focused on the world within me.
We studied all the wonderful systems of the body, the circulation of the blood, the digestive tract and the respiratory system. Sometimes we physically studied a bodily function using critters like frogs and turtles. Sometimes we studied ourselves as we did the week we focused on the respiratory system. Our class arrived for lab with notebooks in hand and stared at the tub-like thing we would be using that day.
The lab exercise aimed to improve our understanding of how much air we breathed. Dr. Leo Carson Davis explained that the device on the table would measure the amount of air each member of the class exhaled. We had to take a huge breath and then expel our air into a tube. We exhaled any unused oxygen, the oxygen that had converted to carbon dioxide and the untouched nitrogen.
Easy enough, but how embarrassing. I puffed out even more than the guys. Okay, so I was as tall as, if not taller than, most everyone in the class. It was discombobulating, but it demonstrated a basic fact of nature: larger people need more oxygen. And thus larger people breathe out more carbon dioxide.
All of the talk, discussion, studies about global warming and I’ve never heard anyone address the fact that people also contribute to the carbon levels in the atmosphere.
We all breathe in oxygen and we all breathe out carbon dioxide. The lab emphasized the impact of size on oxygen intake.
Insightful, yes, but embarrassing enough to be forgetful. And I did forget it until recently when I scanned some notes that said, “The larger a person is, the more oxygen they must breathe in order to furnish each cell in their body with oxygen.”
And therein I discovered a contributing factor to global warming – the increasing mass of humans. Certainly we have had a massive population growth around the world. More people means more lungs exhaling carbon dioxide.
We have also had a massive growth in girth. Not only do Americans use most of the energy produced in the world, we also consume a lot of food and wear significantly larger clothing. The increasingly expanding population in the United States – where there is a lot of concern about global warming and obesity – is using up a lot of air.
We are fat. Because we are fat, we are breathing in more oxygen and expelling more carbon dioxide.
Not only are we food hogs, we are oxygen hogs, sucking in the oxygen and converting it to carbon waste product.
And isn’t it carbon waste that causes global warming?
So help stop global warming – go on a diet! Quit eating all those sugary sweets (that require even more global warming agents to grow, produce and then cook), walk or ride your bike to work instead of driving that gas hog and cut back on carbon emissions.
Help stop global warming. Don’t run your car to the fast food place and idle it while waiting for a delivery at the drive-through window. Go home. Plant a garden, grow some lettuce and eat that for supper.
Help stop global warming: Eat less food, get more exercise and save the icebergs for another generation.
Help stop global warming: Vote for skinny people and become one yourself.
There, how’s that for a reason to resolve to lose weight this year?
I might consider doing it if only so I could go back and show Dr. Davis that I really do not need that much air.
(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times and author of “Twenty Gallons of Milk.” Email her at joanh@everybody.org)