Is Global Warming Inevitable?
The Coming Baby Bust, or The Imprecision of Predictability
Memo from the year 2121: Remember a century ago, just about the time when global warming (and its mushy cousin, “climate change”) became enough of a household word to scare many people that they would sizzle, drown, or starve in a fit of geophysical fury? According to the experts, by 2121, Earth was predicted to be a scorched, useless ball of ashes.
About the year 2021, a spate of studies and media reports had begun to tell our great-great grandparents that all this gloom and doom was wrong—that Earth’s population would soon be falling, along with a concurrent decline in consumption of pressure on use of resources, including fossil fuels.
A newspaper as prominent as the New York Times had told your ancient forebears in 2021 that many national populations already had begun to fall quickly, clinching a sustained long-term decline in Earth’s birthrate for the first time in human history.
Now there’s a news story, Stop the presses; hold the mail, Bruce Johansen (with some help from his media friends) is having a one-cent sale! Countries such as South Korea, Italy, parts of China, and others are already below replacement levels. The United States would be hugging replacement level if not for immigration. Australia and Canada are in a similar state.
What Happened to 700 million people?
China! Some villages in the Northeastern part of that country have emptied, totally. Remember 1.4 billion people? Those who say they are in the know now say that the number of people in China will be cut in half in 100 years. China’s population will be surpassed by Nigeria’s, up from about 200 million in 2020. The projections assume that a baby boom will continue in large parts of Africa, India and Mexico, long cradles of exploding baby booms, are falling to a replacement level of 2.1.
In Germany, hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes and other properties have been bulldozed and turned into parks. This is despite Germany’s admission of at least 1 million refugees at the beginning of the 21st century. In South Korea, babies have become so rare that the government has spent more than $178 billion over 15 years on baby bonuses and other incentives.
Baby Bonuses
So, what will become of climate change in such a scenario? At first, not much. Anyone who has read this book by now knows about Thermal Inertia, which tells us that warming will continue until after we quit dumping heat into the environment for about 50 years on land and 150 to 200 years in the oceans after the last belch of carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. Thus, in 2121, the daily weather will be warmer than today’s, even if no one had a single baby after today. Even a century after that, rising standards of living may keep temperatures rising even after we belch our last ounce of fossil fuels. Even without babies, our utopia will be a matter of fantasy.
The Imprecision of Predictability
The proponents of the baby bust also have not figured in (and this is important), a propensity of human beings that we might call The Imprecision of Predictability. Or, as this fancy line is said in history, a field in which I have had some experience: “Any historian who tries to predict the future risks becoming a fool.” Or in law: “Anyone who presents his (or her) own case in court has a fool for a client.”
One other mitigating factor that rarely gets a murmur in population projections is the comfort paradigm. Birthrates may be falling in places with large populations and hot summers (India comes to mind), but energy consumption continues to rise. How many demographers check air-conditioner sales? What about the number of cars per thousand people? Material prosperity is a strong driver of energy consumption per person.
Who, a century ago, would have predicted that the Earth’s population would rise from about 1.5 billion to about 8.5 billion? Who would have foreseen nuclear weapons, or hand-held computers that open a universe of information in several languages and also act as telephones? Or a time when these same wondrous machines could be used to build political and business empires based upon hate and lies by people who confuse information with verbal sewage? Social media’s mean streak has made it a bastard child of our age, a breeding ground of both useful information and absolute lies that has ruined public discourse on a number of important issues, one of which is the veracity of climate change and the reality of such threats as viral disease. Note to Lewis Carroll: Just how do almost 9 billion human beings get out of this rabbit hole?
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).
Memo from the year 2121: Remember a century ago, just about the time when global warming (and its mushy cousin, “climate change”) became enough of a household word to scare many people that they would sizzle, drown, or starve in a fit of geophysical fury? According to the experts, by 2121, Earth was predicted to be a scorched, useless ball of ashes.
About the year 2021, a spate of studies and media reports had begun to tell our great-great grandparents that all this gloom and doom was wrong—that Earth’s population would soon be falling, along with a concurrent decline in consumption of pressure on use of resources, including fossil fuels.
A newspaper as prominent as the New York Times had told your ancient forebears in 2021 that many national populations already had begun to fall quickly, clinching a sustained long-term decline in Earth’s birthrate for the first time in human history.
Now there’s a news story, Stop the presses; hold the mail, Bruce Johansen (with some help from his media friends) is having a one-cent sale! Countries such as South Korea, Italy, parts of China, and others are already below replacement levels. The United States would be hugging replacement level if not for immigration. Australia and Canada are in a similar state.
What Happened to 700 million people?
China! Some villages in the Northeastern part of that country have emptied, totally. Remember 1.4 billion people? Those who say they are in the know now say that the number of people in China will be cut in half in 100 years. China’s population will be surpassed by Nigeria’s, up from about 200 million in 2020. The projections assume that a baby boom will continue in large parts of Africa, India and Mexico, long cradles of exploding baby booms, are falling to a replacement level of 2.1.
In Germany, hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes and other properties have been bulldozed and turned into parks. This is despite Germany’s admission of at least 1 million refugees at the beginning of the 21st century. In South Korea, babies have become so rare that the government has spent more than $178 billion over 15 years on baby bonuses and other incentives.
Baby Bonuses
So, what will become of climate change in such a scenario? At first, not much. Anyone who has read this book by now knows about Thermal Inertia, which tells us that warming will continue until after we quit dumping heat into the environment for about 50 years on land and 150 to 200 years in the oceans after the last belch of carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. Thus, in 2121, the daily weather will be warmer than today’s, even if no one had a single baby after today. Even a century after that, rising standards of living may keep temperatures rising even after we belch our last ounce of fossil fuels. Even without babies, our utopia will be a matter of fantasy.
The Imprecision of Predictability
The proponents of the baby bust also have not figured in (and this is important), a propensity of human beings that we might call The Imprecision of Predictability. Or, as this fancy line is said in history, a field in which I have had some experience: “Any historian who tries to predict the future risks becoming a fool.” Or in law: “Anyone who presents his (or her) own case in court has a fool for a client.”
One other mitigating factor that rarely gets a murmur in population projections is the comfort paradigm. Birthrates may be falling in places with large populations and hot summers (India comes to mind), but energy consumption continues to rise. How many demographers check air-conditioner sales? What about the number of cars per thousand people? Material prosperity is a strong driver of energy consumption per person.
Who, a century ago, would have predicted that the Earth’s population would rise from about 1.5 billion to about 8.5 billion? Who would have foreseen nuclear weapons, or hand-held computers that open a universe of information in several languages and also act as telephones? Or a time when these same wondrous machines could be used to build political and business empires based upon hate and lies by people who confuse information with verbal sewage? Social media’s mean streak has made it a bastard child of our age, a breeding ground of both useful information and absolute lies that has ruined public discourse on a number of important issues, one of which is the veracity of climate change and the reality of such threats as viral disease. Note to Lewis Carroll: Just how do almost 9 billion human beings get out of this rabbit hole?
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).