Your quite right Al that the human population has tripled in only 70 years.The reasons are the advances in medical science, medications that can prevent death and illness, increased food production/better nutrition and electricity production (this is where the two issues correlate as increased humans causes increased demand to electricity and increasing supply of electricity causes increased population ) and increased advocacy by economists to increase to population for the purpose of economic growth.
This was the Keating and Howard debates about Big Australia back in the 90s where population growth was seen as essential to grow GDP and the economy in general.
There has been debate about whether increased CO2 leads to increasing temperatures or increasing temperature causes increased COs levels. The proof that CO2 retains heat has been acknowledge for around 200 years but the dynamics had muddied the issue for some decades. I cannot explain this debate without digging up a few websites but anyone can do this. (dyor).
Since global warming was identified, reversing the trend toward an ice age in the 60/70s, it was noted that for the first time in analysis of ice cores and atmospheric analysis that CO2 levels actually predated the increased average global temperature. I've posted enough links earlier and Principia Scientific is an excellent site to discuss this. SkepticalScience.com is also excellent. NASA/BOM always draw criticism due to alleged changing of historical temperatures (this was due to a lack of standardised placement of weather instruments and accurate readings back in the 50s) but have excellent data sets and charts.
Surely you've done your own readings Al.... you should know about greenhouse gases GHGs and temperature .... after all this has been an issue headlining discussions for over 30 years.
