How many children we have and at what age is even more important.
Soot from coal burning, forest fires, prairie burning, and anything else you burn is more important than you imagine. It is twice as `effective' at warming the glove as CO2 is. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/101/2/423.full.pdf
So don't burn your high school notebooks, or anything. What you can't compost, reuse, reutilize or gift - you can recycle.
Soot decreases ALBEDO. That's earth's reflectivity - or how much sunlight is reflected away from earth.
What happens is that earth is actually very good at healing itself. So if it was only CO2 increase, earth's `solution' is to increase cloud coverage with more `el-nino' storms etc. That way, cloud coverage is increasing due to those storms. Then less radiation from the sun arrives at the surface and the globe cools back. In the last few decades this albedo did grow (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 16GL068025), but not enough. (I worked on finding this out a tad, but so did NASA and people watching the moon (!) in California and Spain. The method is called `earthshine' although we looked at the moon... Moonshine is something else entirely...
) You may think: the reason ALBEDO didn't grow enough is that less ice and snow that reflects sunlight due to global warming - but that in itself is not really significant. Antarctica, in the Southern Hemisphere, didn't experience a huge reduction in albedo (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... 064001/pdf . It may get worse, though, since in the last decade a lot of ice was lost). It is in the Northern Hemisphere, where there's more soot that ALBEDO changed most.
So soot that comes from burning all kinds of things is bad for use because it decreases the reflection. Even `bad actors' like china are improving (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9917300814 ). In America use of dirty coal has shrunk dramatically.
So if governments are doing their thing what's wrong? Albedo is still not growing, and we are not sure if it is soot or other emissions - but we are having an effect.
I don't know if population explosion is as much of a problem as people make it to be, but I know how to stop it.
You need to be responsible, reuse, rethink, as in the previous posts by RegularJackass. You can make more babies, but don't be greedy. If you plan on having two children per family at age 35 and dying at 70 and have them die at 70 you will not create population explosion. That is zero growth in humans. If you have one baby at age 33 then the two of you can live to 99. Got it?
Want to make more babies? Make arid places bloom but don't you dare have more babies than you can support. If you behave, well, will you be my neighbor?
