I’d invite readers to have a look at this two-minute video, titled, “Humans have caused climate change for 180 years”:
Here’s an excerpt from an article in the ANU Reporter, dated 25 August 2016 (emphases mine):
An international research project has found human activity has been causing global warming for almost two centuries, proving human-induced climate change is not just a 20th century phenomenon.
Lead researcher Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from The Australian National University (ANU) said the study found warming began during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s, much earlier than scientists had expected.
“It was an extraordinary finding,” said Associate Professor Abram, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
“It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
If I could turn back time…
I learned about this research from a recent report in Science Daily (January 4, 2017). Reflecting on the results, an interesting “virtual history” hypothetical suggested itself. Back in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius was the first person to claim that humans burning fossil fuels might eventually give rise to global warming. As it turns out, Arrhenius actually thought that the warming would occur over thousands of years, and that it would be beneficial to humanity. But let’s imagine that instead, he warned that it could lead to a future calamity for the human race, and let’s imagine that his warning was issued decades earlier than it actually was, giving humans the opportunity to avert man-made global warming altogether. Let’s also imagine that the scientists and politicians of his day took his warning to heart, invoked the Precautionary Principle and concluded that the burden of proof lay on people burning fossil fuels, to establish that the combustion of these fuels was safe. No such proof being forthcoming, let’s suppose that politicians in all countries enacted bans on fossil fuel emissions, thereby slowing the onset of the Industrial Revolution around the world. Would we be better off today?
It’s easy to see that we wouldn’t. Most of the world would never have benefited from the Industrial Revolution. We would have missed out on mass production, too. In this pristine agrarian world, it’s fair to say that we would never have developed the technologies that enabled most people to live past the age of 40, escape from rural isolation and squalor, and improve the quality of their daily lives, especially after the year 1850. In the absence of industrialization, the scientific and medical research enterprise as we now know it simply wouldn’t exist. There would be far fewer people (owing to higher mortality rates), and they’d be far more miserable than we are today, but they wouldn’t have to worry about man-made global warming.
I have a time machine here, if anyone wants it:
(Image courtesy of J. Morton, Oto Godfrey and Wikipedia.)
Would anyone care to go back to 1830 and call off the Industrial Revolution, before it spreads from Britain and north-west Europe to the rest of the Continent?
Let’s try another experiment. Let’s turn the clock back to 1980, by which time many scientists were aware of global warming. Cumulative man-made CO2 emissions over the course of history were at less than half their current level. China, however, had not yet industrialized, and its decision to do so during the 1980s, and to open up its economy to market forces, helped lift 680 million people out of poverty. Would anyone like to go back to the year 1980, tell China’s leaders to call off their experiment with free-market capitalism, and tell their people to meekly endure another few decades of absolute poverty and high infant mortality before some 21st-century genius invents a way for a large country to industrialize without burning any fossil fuels? No? I didn’t think so.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t worry about global warming. What I am saying is that even if it is going to be catastrophic (as some scientists think), its occurrence was inevitable (following our discovery of the astonishing power-generating capacity of fossil fuels), and what’s more, it would have been unethical to stop global warming at its inception. Too many people have benefited from living in a world where our politicians didn’t genuflect on bended knee to the Precautionary Principle, but chose instead to industrialize first and ask questions afterwards. Historically, humanity has always progressed by getting rid of one problem by creating another problem, and kicking that can down the road for future generations to deal with. That may sound short-sighted and irresponsible, but it has worked, thanks to human ingenuity. And I would argue that this approach is ethically defensible, too, provided that there are no strong grounds at the time for believing that the future problem will be a catastrophic one, or that future generations will be unable to stop it. Of course, anything might happen, but we have to make our decisions based on what appears likely, in the light of our current (and imperfect) knowledge. That’s life.
For my part, I’m a pragmatist: I believe in whatever works. But perhaps some readers have a different perspective on this question, so I’ll throw the floor open. What do you think?
I am still waiting to see the math that demonstrates raising the amount of CO2 by parts per million can cause global warming by more than millionths of a degree.The planet has been hotter and the planet has been colder. The cold eras were very bad for plants and animals. And seeing that in the 1830s we were still in a little ice age and not prospering, I will gladly take what little increase there has been.
My position is that the industrial revolution and the attendant blessing of science have improved the human condition, but it comes at a cost to future generations, unless Jesus returns.
I’ve wondered why the issue is “CLIMATE CHANGE” not “OVERPOPULATION”. The decimation of natural resources is a symptom of overpopulation. Why focus on the possible (I emphasize possible) symptom of climate change when the cause is overpopulation, which is clearly damaging to the environment, not just in terms of possible climate change.
This is like a doctor screaming at a patient “you’re sick, you’re sick” but then not treating the cause.
I’ve come to think, the attack on climate change rather than the attack on overpopulation is politically motivated in part to destroy US oil companies and help foreign oil companies.
http://acsh.org/news/2017/01/09/fracking-protesters-are-putin-puppets-10707
So what if we stop fracking in the USA? The USA is dwarfed by China and India in terms of population. When the Chinese and Indians and the rest of the world become as industrialized as the USA, will all the climate change advocacy in the USA mean much? Hardly. The call of “stop climate change” rather than “stop overpopulation” not only has a more feel-good-but-do-nothing-of-substance appeal in the West, but it’s a tool to help non-western countries sell oil but who could care less about the world and the human condition.
There are such things as tipping points.
Glen Davidson
Sal makes a sort of valid point, but then lapses into bizarre conspiracy theories. Any environmental damage, including global warming, is a product of population and per capita impact. Both have to be addressed, and you can’t argue to ignore one by pointing out the other.
Sal’s the guy who jumps off the 20th story, and while passing the 10th story, thinks, “what were they talking about? this hasn’t been bad at all!”
15.3 million Americans live within a mile of a well that has been drilled since 2000. They might care.
stcordova,
I have yet to see a convincing argument that man is causing warming. I do not doubt it is possible but the data seems unclear to me. In this video she seems convinced but her argument is not clear to me. Am I missing something?
I’m with you, however, I’m quite convinced man is damaging something in the environment, if not the climate.
I’m pointing out the absurdity of singling out climate change when the root cause of all man-made damage to the environment is overpopulation. It looks suspicious.
stcordova,
This is a very good point which I had not thought of. 🙂
What about HIV / Aids?
So we should kill off all the other animals?
Kill those off too.
Where have you looked?
stcordova,
I’m inclined to agree. The Catholic Church could make a real difference here.
correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the guy who finds Young Earth Creationism convincing?
Not surprising since all you read are anti-science websites that tell you what you want to hear. Your debacle in trying to discredit evolutionary theory shows you’re unwilling and/or unable to comprehend anything from the primary scientific literature.
newton,
Internet search and a friend involved in climate modeling. What is your opinion?
Sal has a point. Population is part of the problem. But only part of it. The other part is a refusal by some countries to even acknowledge that humans have an impact on the environment.
Some environmental problems are relatively easy to solve. Remove lead from paint and gasoline. Others are more difficult. Create an electric car infrastructure where one does not exist.
The idea that we can’t have an impact on the world is just stupid. We can detect Roman lead smelting in arctic (or is it Antarctic?) ice cores. PCBs have been measured everywhere on earth. Lake Erie has gone through many changes in the last century, all due human impacts. Same with the Nile, the Sahara, the Black Sea, etc.
Vincent Torley,
You’ve evidently spent too much time playing the genius to an audience of dupes and dopes. Listing the rhetorical tricks you’ve deployed in the post is not worth my time. You know what they are. I know that you know, because you’re good at detecting them in the writing of others. It’s quite easy to distinguish your honest investigations from your propaganda pieces.
So here I am, telling a philosopher that he needs to think hard about what he wants his life to be.
Unusually, I’m with Sal here. Global warming is, as John said, the product of population times impact per capita, so presumably we could have a population of 8 billion people (breeding unchecked like bacteria) and no climate impact. But I rather doubt it. To keep our population alive and growing, we aren’t just borrowing from the future, we are stealing the future blind.
Yes, one side effect is global warming. Along with polluting the oceans, the air, and the land, wrecking food chains, causing another great extinction, sucking the oil out of the ground, draining the aquifers, clear-cutting the forests, expanding the deserts, and so on and on (and on and on). All in the interests of supporting a decent lifestyle for a small minority and bare subsistence (or not quite) for the rest.
When it comes to controlling our population, humans have proved no more responsible than locusts or lemmings. Those populations tend to crash periodically, but they CAN rebound because the resources necessary to do so are still there, or soon replenish. Not so with the human population, which has enough intelligence to ensure that before the crash, nothing useful will remain for the survivors. Humans will surely regard burning lignite (and not being able to see across the street even in Patagonia) as preferable to birth control.
So I think Sal is correct here. Global warming is among the less virulent of the damage people are doing. The main threat global warming presents is that it will lead to economic inconvenience for some people. Once we have trawled the last fish from the oceans (wrecking the environment necessary for recovery in the process), then we’ll have a better perspective on population problems. Won’t be long now.
One of the big problems is that capitalism and economics are not based on reality. Any first year ecology student knows that any population cannot have constant growth. Yet economies and governments plan for and depend on constant growth in GDP. The only way this is possible for any country is through increased birth rates or increased immigration. But neither of these is sustainable in the long run.
It appears to be designed by an unknown designer somehow
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Vincent Torley’s post is evidence in support of the theory that intelligent life usually extinguishes itself quickly.
Let’s say that Planet Earth had started taxing carbon emissions in 1850, with the price per kilogram proportional to the increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, relative to the level in 1840. The tax at time
would have been
That obviously would have brought scientific and technological progress to a screeching halt. The Tragedy of the Commons is simply the Way of All Things. We have to let it happen, and then respond. Cuz freedom.
The projection is killing me. All evos employ are rhetorical tricks for dupes and dopes…
Does anyone else realize that “global warming” is based on an arbitrary norm?
The projected rise of temperature and its effects on sea level and food production may be an effective solution to overpopulation.
Not sure how relevant this is to climate change, but I see from today’s headlines that the moon is from even longer before the universe was first created than had been thought.
Go figure!
I wrote here on the “great filter” previously. I’m convinced we’re the wrong side of it. Industrialization, proliferation of WMD, overpopulation and end times religious narrative at odds with reality.
???
Well said.
A scuba diver under water has a finite supply of breathable oxygen. The question of global warming for him is not as immediately relevant as being able to breathe!
Unless C02 is removed from the air at a rate equal or faster than we put it in, we’ll also run out of breathable oxygen. Not anytime soon, but eventually.
Plants through photo synthesis can remove C02 from the air and put back oxygen. But that requires plants, and plants require area to absorb sunlight. People reduce the usable area for plants to exist. We’re probably getting to the point we are taking out more breathable air than the Earth is putting it back in.
Now consider this:
But let’s suppose the 1.1% growth rate continues for 500 years.
Population in 500 years = (Present Population) * (1 + 1.1%)^500 =
7.5 Billion * 1.011^500 ~= 7.5 Billion * 237 ~= 1.78 trillion
If you think we have problems now, just imagine the world 500 years from now if we keep going the way we’re going. Yikes!
Not that correlation necessarily implies causation, but this might be a better way to market limiting population instead of screaming “CLIMATE CHANGE!”:
stcordova,
I rather doubt that as a serious threat. The excess CO2 that is being put back into the atmosphere is from plant (and some carbonate) sources, originating from atmospheric CO2 in the 1st place. It’s not consuming oxygen.
I expect the seas to evaporate due to warming, so I am buying land that is currently underwater. Seeking like-minded investors.
Sure it is. Why do we have oxygen in the first place? One reason is that some of it came from water being split by UV rays high in the atmosphere and the hydrogen lost to space while the O2 remained, but that’s not enough. The rest comes from carbon and hydrogen being buried in the rocks while the O2 resulting from the same photosynthesis remained in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, much else has been oxidized by the rise in O2 levels, like minerals in the mantle, even a bit of oxidation of the core.
Either way, long-buried carbon and hydrogen recombining with oxygen consumes the oxygen in order to burn. Carbon and hydrogen come from the ground, oxygen comes from the air, burning to produce CO2 and H2O. The oxygen has to come from somewhere.
Glen Davidson
The problem is that carbon is being burned at at least ten times the rate at which it is being sequestered. Sal should learn arithmetic.
GlenDavidson,
OK. When a plant photosynthesises it takes CO2 and water, generating complex carbohydrate and releasing O2. When that complex carbohydrate (now as hydrocarbon) is burnt, we use that O2 molecule to generate CO2 and water. So there is no net loss of oxygen due to burning fossil fuels, I should have said.
That would be a steady state model. Burning happens over a shorter time frame than burial of course. So we are releasing rapidly a store that was laid down over many millions of years. But that would only be a problem if the entirety of biologically fixed carbon were in that form. If we had enough burnable carbon to regenerate the primordial 7000ppm atmosphere, that would consume a lot of the oxygen. But in fact most is in carbonate rocks.
petrushka,
To be fair, that was me.
Depends on what is meant by “burnable.” There’s not enough oil, gas, and coal to use up the oxygen in the atmosphere, but there is enough reduced carbon/hydrogen in kerogen (from which oil and some nat. gas is cooked) to use up several times the oxygen in the atmosphere. We can’t burn the kerogen economically, although there have been some attempts to artificially cook oil out of especially rich sources of kerogen, such as the “oil shales” in the Green River Formation of the US.
So that’s another impossibility for YECs and their “flood geology,” they have no ability to explain how so much kerogen came about in 6000 years, +/-. Even more carbon is in the carbonate rocks, as you properly note, but the carbonates don’t directly point to millions of years of photosynthesizing. The kerogen in the rocks does point to millions of years of photosynthesizing.
Glen Davidson
Then again, most carbonate rocks point indirectly, but rather compellingly, to millions of years of photosynthesis, since most limestone (the overwhelming carbonate rock) comes quite obviously from the shells/skeletons of marine organisms, such as corals.
Still, it’s just one more nail in the coffin of YECism. There are so many impossibilities for YECs that it just gets boring to list them. We have great evidence of an earth with very low oxygen levels, too, including pyrites that would have been exposed to oxygen for extended periods (such as in the Witwatersrand gold fields, pyrites in alluvial fans) had they been formed today, and, less directly, all of the bacteria/archaea that are anaerobic. That fits into YECism not at all, unless you’re Sal and the law of superposition is a mystery to you.
Glen Davidson
There are even more impossibilities for materialism and yet that doesn’t seem to bother you and yours.
Hi Sal,
Thank you for your comments. I believe your anxieties about population are overblown. World population is variously expected to peak at 8.7 billion (Deutsche Bank) or 10.9 billion (UN), and gradually decline thereafter, so your fears of population reaching 1 trillion are unfounded:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722
In any case, it’s affluence that represents the greatest threat to the planet’s ecosystems. You might want to read an article entitled The Population Myth by journalist George Monbiot in The Guardian (29 September 2009). In his article, Monbiot alludes to a report entitled, The implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change by David Satterthwaite, on behalf of the International Institute for Environment and Development, in Environment and Urbanization 2009; 21; 545 (DOI: 10.1177/0956247809344361). Monbiot summarizes the key findings as follows:
Food for thought.
You might ask: but what about future generations of poor people? Won’t they consume more than the descendants of rich people? Author and environmental consultant Fred Pearce had addressed this point in an online article entitled, Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat (Yale Environment 360, 13 April 2009).
I hope that’s given you something to think about. Cheers.
Tom English,
The carbon tax you propose sounds like an interesting proposal, but it’s clearly at variance with the Precautionary Principle, which says that any increase in CO2 is to be deemed dangerous until proven otherwise. That was my point.
My other reason for writing the article was to show that long-term global warming now rests on a very firm scientific footing. Pity you missed that.
vjtorley,
I should hope you are right and I am wrong. God bless you. 🙂
It’s a pity that you’re too busy affecting great wisdom to learn the meanings of the terms you use. I strongly advise reading sources before linking to them. Take a good, hard look at the Wikipedia article on the Precautionary Principle, and get back to me.
I said that I would not waste time listing Vincent Torley’s rhetorical shenanigans, but, having blundered into an exchange, I will mention one of them: fallacy of the false dichotomy. My response was to describe a graded (not dichotomous) precautionary measure — a carbon tax proportional to the elevation in atmospheric levels of CO2.
So, if you thought I was unloading freely on Vincent, paying no attention to the content of his post, think again. Hopefully he will have the grace to stop sassing, now that I’ve made one of his tricks clear.
Beware the Tar-Baby!
Oh brother. if that doesn’t just finish the credibility of globalwarmingolicism.
Now its from Napoleoons day!!
Those tiny puffs of smoke from birmingham started the globe in a warm trend.!!
This is incompetent investigation. its a surprise these people get jobs instead of better people. (not really a surprise).
Possibly there is a rumour that they better extend the years of global warming SO AS to have a lesser threshold/effect from it but still say its going on.
Global warming has been copy for two or three decades now.
its just plain not warmed up where it should be if true. The docks have not been flooded.
I think so, but in combination with all the other trends I listed. If global warming isn’t the proximate cause of human population implosion, then pollution, or aquifer draining, or slash-and-burn agriculture, or overfishing, ad nauseum will be. Most likely, we will see this entire herd of horsemen conspire to bring about the apocalypse. And all of these are being done to support a current population far above the planetary carrying capacity. One thing for sure – if any humans survive the collapse, they’ll have precious little to rebuild with.
Having munched on this thought-food for a bit, I remain dubious. In nature, populations do not bump up against some resource limitation, and become asymptotic to a sustaining fertility rate. Instead, they overbreed and then crash.
Even if we grant that fertility rates decline as affluence increases, we find that IN ORDER to get this decline, we must accept a per capita consumption (and destruction) level on the part of these slow-reproducing affluent people far in excess of what the world can support.
As a thought experiment, we might try to calculate the global carrying capacity of a population of humans living the average American lifestyle. Imagine we eliminate poverty in the process. Do you suppose the world could support, what, half a billion? A couple hundred million?
The mechanics of actually getting from 8 billion mostly poor people to half a billion comfortably well off people aren’t clear to me. Even if we could find some “soft landing” way to eliminate 15 of every 16 people, what would be left of our land, our forests, our oceans, our atmosphere, our climate after this reduction period, which a lower fertility rate would require many centuries to achieve?
We might, in desperation, attempt a truly energetic worldwide campaign of birth control and abortion. Although you personally might prefer the mechanics of plague and starvation, as being more godly. I don’t know.