02.01.07

The More Inconvenient Truth

Posted in General at 4:07 pm by DaveParts

I recently watched the movie An Inconvenient Truth and I found it very informative and entertaining and think even those who don’t much like Al Gore personally might still enjoy the movie. There wasn’t a whole lot in the film that you probably haven’t seen or heard before but it is the scale of which it is portrayed that makes it different. Throughout 600,000 years of history, the carbon dioxide level has never been above 300 ppm. Its endured a dramatic rise from 1950 to the present. If left unchanged, the level is now a straight vertical line pointing off the chart. This leaves us in virgin territory to say the least.
 

Global warming nay-sayers are rapidly becoming like the tobacco industry spokesman. Recently, the head of Alcoa Aluminum and other American manufactures went to the White House to ask George Bush to do something to curb green house gas emissions. But greenhouse gasses are the symptom not the disease. They are the fever not the virus. As the movie thoughtfully points out, from the beginning of human history until the beginning of twentieth century, human population grew slowly and gradually. Then they movie quickly went back to greenhouse gasses and pollution.
                                      

It ignores the more inconvenient truth it took humanity 500,000 years to reach one billion people on this planet. In around 1950, where the movie begins, there were 2.5 billion and that doubled by 1990 to five billion and now seventeen years later we are at 6.68 billion and adding three humans a second. This is were I think the movie derailed. Suppose we cut our green house gas emissions by 40% in ten years, which we will not do, but for the sake of argument, just say we can. The population growth will wipe out any savings by addition of two billion more people.
 

Years ago, I took a Real Estate class in which the instructor explained that slums come from too many people living in too small a space. The poor, unable to afford an apartment of the appropriate size, rent a two-bedroom apartment for seven or eight people and the over use of the fixtures causes the property to decline. We as humans find ourselves in this situation similar to the Marx Brothers movie where they keep adding more and more people to our tiny stateroom called Earth.
 

We have done a remarkable job in feeding the growing multitudes but modern agricultural yields are based on petroleum based fertilizers and it would appear we are heading towards a critical mass with a shortage of petroleum, a rising population, and the effects of global warming. Very soon, something must give. Petroleum prices will continue to rise, and environmental degradation will cause crop failures making farmers unable to purchase the fertilizers. In Western countries, populations are devouring farmlands for residential development as if the amount of arable land is unlimited.
 

But as rapidly as we have been able to supply food stuffs for the masses what about wealth? Can we double our national wealth every forty years? Not likely just as the growth of population speeds up, the cost of maintaining the population speeds up as well. In 1950, less than 10% of the world population lived in cities. By 2020, it will be 40%. That means 1.4 billion more people crowded into cities. In 1950, those eight percent in urban areas accounted for 260 million, leaving 2.5 billion living in the rural areas – most as subsistence farmers. Can we handle an increase in subsistence farming of say 4.5 billon souls?
 

If we do not solve the problem, and I have my doubts as to our ability to do so, the problem will solve us. The Black Death that swept across Europe during the middle ages was nature’s way of saying, if you won’t solve your sanitation problems, we will. Throughout the history of the planet there are localized cases of humans outstripping their environment. On Easter Island, the population grew to a point where they could no longer feed themselves and over-farmed the available land until the yield collapsed. The same happened to the Mayans in Mexico. They had developed an intricate system of crop irrigation, but without rain it becomes academic just how clever you are.
 

The movie points out that if the Greenland ice sheet melts, it will raise ocean levels by 20 feet and the ice in the Antarctic would raise it another twenty. So if just half the ice melts from both, you have the problem of major world cities that no longer exist such as: New York; London; Shanghai; Hong Kong; Manila; and the list goes on and on. Those millions will have to relocate somewhere making Katrina the norm rather than the exception.
 

Ocean currents regulate weather patterns and temperature patterns and to a large degree are regulated by the amount of salt in the water. As the ice melts the oceans become less salty and the currents pick up speed. Less salty water evaporates faster and causes heavier rainfalls and snow falls but because the climate is warmer the snowfalls melt and cause flooding and the rainfalls are deluges causing erosion. But even the nay-sayers will tell you the earth’s climate is cyclical and they are correct  - if left alone the problem will solve its self.
 

In eight to ten thousand years as the earth emerges from the ice age, it will once again be a paradise of lush forests with rich top soil the oceans will again teem with fish and as the glaciers recede to a balance point the half a billion humans left on the planet can start again. They can relearn how to make metal and develop written languages and maybe next time they will do a better job with it than the current administrators. Or perhaps humans will just die out another failed wrung on the evolutionary ladder Homo Sapien,  nimis intellego action proprius valetudo (too smart for his own good)
 

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