Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| Global Warming: Human Population, Too Many Fleas on a Dog |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2016-03-13
This essay begins with a fairy tale, a parable. Not realistic. Hope that’s OK. The Fleas On The Dog: A Parable Imagine the fleas on a particular dog, perhaps a big dog, maybe a German Shepard, called “Fido”. These fleas cannot live anywhere but on Fido. And Fido cannot do anything about his fleas. Tough, but that’s the way it is. Bear that in mind. What are these fleas doing? Mostly, they are sucking Fido’s blood and reproducing. Reproducing “like fleas”. As to the later, it is as if they’re thinking, “Gee, more fleas is better! We believe in the sanctity of life! The more life the better, the more of the good and the glorious”—meaning the more fleas on Fido (the only dog they know!)—the better. And if we think of fleas as “thinking”, we may imagine that the fleas formed this idea of “the more fleas the better” back in the days when there were only 10 fleas on Fido. Today there are 100. We may further imagine that some of these fleas have a book, an authoritative book, which they call their “Bible”, which tells them to “be fruitful and multiply” in other words, tells them to make more fleas on Fido. And those fleas don’t just “want” to make more fleas, they believe that they are “commanded” to do so. What these fleas are not thinking about—and, indeed. contrary to much of the foregoing imaginings, fleas have no capacity whatsoever to think—is that there is a “carrying capacity” for fleas on Fido. Too many fleas on Fido and Fido will die, and then the fleas will die. They are definitely not thinking about that. Imagine Fido with 10,000 (or 100,000) fleas sucking his blood! Ouch! Itchy! And it might kill him. Truly. Moral: A few flea bites are harmless. too many flea bites can kill the host and the fleas themselves. Population matters. End of parable. Time to talk about human population and global warming. Human Activity And The Two Hockey-Stick Graphs We humans have been transforming the earth—or intervening in the affairs of the earth in a manner unlike the interventions of non-human animals—since we first developed flint tools and mastered fire, perhaps 700,000 years ago, when we began to develop hunting techniques sufficient to threaten or complete the extinction of various large-animal populations such as woolly mammoths which gradually became extinct about 12,000 years ago. Climate may have had more to do with this extinction than humans, because the ice-age was concluding about then. The agricultural revolution (neolithic period) began 12,000 years ago and resulted in transformations of the surface of the earth as farms first began to replace forests and grasslands. The industrial revolution, marked by the burning of fossil fuels for power, began in 1760, about 250 years ago, and flared into extreme and exaggerated existence about 1950, about 65 years ago. It was the industrial revolution which produced a truly vast transformation of the earth. By the way, all that happened after 1950 happened during my own lifetime. What that means is that the most severe trashing of the environment occurred during a single human lifetime, after a far less destructive 12,000 (or 700,000) years. The industrial revolution ushered in two particularly important and interrelated transformations: climatic interference and population explosion. By climatic interference I mean the beginning of the spewing of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, resulting in the sudden beginning of a steady increase in earth’s surface temperature (see first hockey-stick graph and description). By population explosion I mean the beginning of the fast-exponential growth of the human population (see second hockey-stick graph and description). Each of these transformations experienced a particular speedup with the post-WWII advance of modernity—the explosive growth of science and technology and industrialism after 1950. The industrial revolution occurred more or less at the same time as the fastest advances in science and technology, and together these made two things possible. They made possible the growth in agricultural productivity and medicine and public-health which allowed (or produced) the explosion of the human population. They also made possible (or produced) the explosive growth in GHG emissions. These two instances of explosive growth are shown in the two “hockey-stick” graphs. The simultaneous blow-up of the human population and huge increase in use of fossil fuels created the Global Warming/Climate Change (GWCC) problem we see today; the growth in population also brought about enormous changes in the earth’s surface—people, people, everywhere, farms where once had been forests, concrete and asphalt covering much of the rest, the natural more-or-less untouched world shrinking: in other words, 100,000 human “fleas” on the “dog” which is the earth. An Aside On Population And Birth-Control and Abortion The “Bible” (Old Testament) of the Jews and Christians, somewhat taken up in Islam, has been interpreted to command people to be fruitful and multiplythat is, to have lots of babies. This admonition was written at a time when human populations did not threaten the earth, maybe 2600 or 3000 years ago, when it was, indeed, unthinkable that human populations would ever threaten the earth. And so it is not surprising that the commandment failed to add a clearly limiting clause; failed, that is, to say be fruitful and multiply and do so until, but only until, the earth is full. Lately, Pope Francis—an interpreter of the Bible for Catholics and a very wise man—sought to add something a bit like this qualification into Catholic teaching when he advised Catholics not to “breed like rabbits” (three children would be enough) (see: Pope Francis). The good Pope has the right idea, even though three children per family is still too many, perhaps twice too many on average, considering that the earth is already considerably overpopulated. But his advice will not limit the human population. Sadly, like the fleas on Fido, people make babies without concern for the earth’s carrying capacity, without concern for the harm that (more) people do to the climate and otherwise to the earth’s “natural order”, and indeed without concern for the availability of food or water or housing or medical care or education or jobs for all these children. Although birth control and abortion technology has long been available, it goes unused through much of the world due in part to poverty, lack of education, lack of communication, etc. Unforgivably, birth control and abortion technology also go unused due to the deliberate interference of politicians (I think especially of so-called “Christian” politicians in the USA) who think birth control and abortion to be sinful not only for themselves but for everybody else, sinful because against God’s commandment. When we consider the fearful consequences of this dangerous and unthinking submission to religious teaching, it is easy to conclude that these people think that the Bible commands them not to think! I truly believe that the earth and continuing human habitability thereon may have to be far more demonstrably threatened than it is today by climate change before these dangerously misguided people—unlike Fido’s fleas of my parable, who are unable to think at all—begin to think and change their ideas. (Perhaps psychologists will confirm what I suspect: that people who live in hierarchical, strong-leader, patriarchal, authoritarian, and strongly ideological and religiously fundamentalist social orders are unable to credit the more-or-less simultaneous announcements of dangerous world over-population and dangerous climate-change—because they think that both modern industrial society and modern population sizes are “in line” with Biblical teaching and therefore cannot be a mortal threat to themselves or an offense to God. At all events, many such people deny both the reality of overpopulation and the reality and human cause of climate change. I assume that they do so as a psychological defense against loss of faith, either faith in God or faith in the safety of “status quo”.) Why Action Toward Zero Emissions Is Opposed Some opposition (“ZE-denial”) to taking action toward zero emissions of GHGs (“ZE-action”) is surely motivated by disbelief in GWCC and/or by the sort of psychological “denial” just described. Be that as it may, a very significant source of ZE-denial is the refusal of industrialists to support ZE-action either to protect normal short-term business profits (“I won’t stop until the world makes me stop”) or to prepare to profit from the disasters predicted as outcomes of GWCC (“I don’t belive the world will actually stop, and I can profit from its severe distress”)[1][2] Another source of ZE-denial is the desire for political preeminence by Republicans in the USA who will fight with Democrats about anything, “though the heavens fall”. Can Today’s Huge Human Population Survive And Also Eliminate GHG Emissions? The big problem for today is for humanity to find a way very quickly, even abruptly, to end GHG emissions. This poses a problem, or seems to, namely, can we end emissions and still continue with life “as we know it”? But if we are troubled by this question, we should be far more troubled by another question, namely, can we fail to end emissions fairly abruptly and still continue with life “as we know it”? Since our action (or failure to act) with respect to GHG emissions will happen “abruptly”, there is no time for us to reduce the human population by gradual—or by voluntary or by pleasant—means. And, at this point, world overpopulation is not the cause of GWCC—the burning of fossil fuels, any at all, is the cause. If the population could magically be cut in half overnight, ZE-action would still be necessary. Had the population remained at 1950 levels after 1950 (2.5 billion people) instead of rising to today’s level (7 billion), GWCC would still have appeared but would have done so more slowly. So today’s overpopulation does not itself directly cause GWCC, but it exacerbates various problems, some of them consequences of GWCC, such as shortage of water, food shortages, coastal flooding, wars, refugee movements, and disaster response. Might the human population nevertheless fall? Disease, war, drought, starvation (think of Syria’s drought and war) and the fall-out caused by refugees fleeing to Europe—these are ways that human population may be reduced or re-distributed. Had we thought about, planned for, called for, and insisted on reduction of human population (as the Chinese tried to do) we might have reduced the population (and thereby more-or-less proportionally reduced GHG emission). But the emergency was not seen—it is still not seen by most people—and nothing was done. (And the USA continued and still continues to refuse to provide birth control or abortion world-wide and to some extent within the USA itself. Blindness!) And we do not appear to be at all “on track” with ZE-action even to the comparatively simple matter of replacing of all fossil-fueled electric power generation by 2025; indeed in the USA there has not even, apparently, been a start in this direction. Again, blindness. Conclusion A single flea on a dog imagines that it cannot do much harm, either to the dog or to itself. People, individually, think of themselves as “single fleas”—harmless! We’d do well to think of human populations, particularly in the industrial societies which burn a lot of fossil fuels, cumulatively—not as a collection of individual harmless fleas but as an army of fleas attacking the earth and endangering ourselves. We will know that that has happened when people of childbearing age begin to consciously decide to forgo having children and when their parents stop clamoring for grandchildren. And, it should go without saying, we’ll know we’ve got the idea when the USA and all nations begin energetic ZE-action covering all sources of emissions: not only electric power generation, but transportation (ground, air, sea), factories, and building heating as well. These things are not going to take care of themselves, and won’t be easy. We must see that they are done. ----------- [1] Read: “Disaster Capitalism” by Antony Loewenstein. ----------- [2] The disasters predicted include: droughts, fires, heat waves, more frequent and more violent wind, rain, and snow storms, coastal flooding, river flooding, geographically expanding diseases, starvation, refugee population movements, etc. |
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