Opening discussion

Friends and fellow readers,

For many years now I’ve had two major interlocking concerns: that we’re getting too many people on the planet for sustainability, and the potential crisis of global warming / climate change. I know that there are many out there with similar concerns, but because we as a society are not taking these issues seriously enough for real, substantive change, I feel like an Old Testament prophet, crying out in the wilderness where no one hears me. This blog is a tiny attempt to be heard.

It is my hope that this blog will cover a whole range of related topics, from the basics of global warming, to why our internal alarm buttons aren’t pushed, to thoughts on why we either deny the existence of global warming or don’t take sufficient action. Along the way I want to talk a little about the nature of light and electromagnetic radiation, human social evolution and adaptability, how increasing ocean acidity (from CO2) may affect the very air we breathe, ways we could dramatically reduce the impact of global warming today, and finding the will to act. And of course, I don’t want to forget to explore ways to begin to bring our runaway population growth under control.

I know that by bringing up these two topics I will be labeled as a gloom and doomer – someone who sees nothing but the dark side of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am blessed with a wonderful family, live in a beautiful part of the world, have pretty descent health for a 72 year old, and find miracles at every turn.

On the other hand, my positive outlook has never kept me blind to real problems. I have made it a point to try to look at my world accurately and with clear eyes, to be skeptical of muddled thought, wild ideas, or the latest conspiracy theory. I have tried to use evidence rather than hold to a particular world view, even when I don’t like what the evidence shows me.

For those of you who are climate skeptics, I hope you will bear with me and attempt to follow my arguments.

Initially my concerns about global warming and climate change came from my understanding of basic history. It’s so easy to forget, in our technologically rich modern world, how much simpler things were just three or four hundred years ago when the only way to get anywhere was by walking or horseback, by wagon or carriage, or by wooden sailing ship (no inboard motors; no radar, no GPS or radio; just a simple compass, a sextant, and log entries or hand-drawn maps). Trains, cars and planes did not yet exist. Electricity hadn’t been discovered. Cooking was done over the fireplace and water was hauled from the nearby well or stream. None of the conveniences we now take for granted existed.

Medical knowledge was primitive, so huge numbers of people, especially children, died each year from small pox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and other diseases. This kept the overall population from growing at more than a snail’s pace.

Here’s just one example from my own experience: years ago I saw a framed needlepoint from the mid 1800s that listed all the names in a family with ten children. From the dates included with each name I could see that all but three of the children had died before the age of five.

Then there was a big shift. It began in roughly the mid 1700s when mankind invented the industrial revolution. Soon we learned to do more with iron than make swords, shoe a horse, or shape an iron plow. We discovered steam power, electricity and the light bulb, radio and the telegraph. Soon rails for the “iron horse” stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and all across England and Europe. In the mid 1800s the first oil wells were drilled.  Almost like magic the internal combustion engine appeared making possible the modern automobile and the early airplane. The development of contemporary science and engineering brought forth a rapidly accelerating list of inventions, while the Twentieth Century gave birth to modern medicine with its antibiotics, vaccines, modern surgical tools, and a vast (though not complete) knowledge of the human body and disease. If our ancestors from the 1600s could see us in our modern culture today they would think we had the power of the Gods.

Now let’s look at a parallel history – that of the number of humans on the planet. For this it helps to start earlier: about 10,000 years ago (8000 BC) when mankind began to shift from hunting to agriculture, and the estimated world population was about 5,000,000 (see 1) (A good estimate is that our species appeared 50,000 years ago, so it took about 40,000 years for our population to grew from zero to 5,000,000.)

The farmer had a considerable advantage over the hunter gatherer, so over the next 8000 years our population grew by 60 times 5,000,000 souls until there were 300,000,000 of us by the year 1AD. But in the last three centuries, with the advent of the industrial revolution, modern medicine, and the discovery and harnessing of gas and oil, population growth really took off. 

 

In the chart below, notice that by 1650 it had taken 1650 years to go from 300 million to 500 million people, but by 1999 it took only 12 years to add another whole billion (1000 million) to the total. When I was born in 1938 the estimated population was 2,300,000,000. In only 72 years it’s become almost three times that, expanding to an estimated 6,700,000,000 today.

World Population estimate milestones – in Billions of people

(modified from Wikipedia)

Population in billions	0.30	0.50	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Year	1AD	1650	1804	1927	1960	1974	1987	1999	2012	2025-30	1045-50

Elapsed years between dates

1650

154

123

33

14

13

12

13

15-20

20-25

Compared to our 17^th century ancestors, our modern culture requires vast quantities of energy. Not only are we supporting 6,000,000,000 more people, but more and more of those billions are using modern forms of energy. 17^th century energy sources were pretty basic. Energy came from human effort, horses, and wind or water power. Heat was a little wood or coal in the fireplace, and light came from whale oil lamps or candles. But today we live in a culture that requires unimaginable quantities of coal, oil, and natural gas. And, except for keeping our gas tank full and paying the electric bill, we hardly notice.

TO BE CONTINUED