Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, the Joe Romm saga continues. He’s been discussing the paper “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth“. After I pointed out the problems with the paper’s ludicrous claims about population, Joe pulled his whole goofy section repeating the paper’s population errors. He also talked to one of the authors, and they’re going to pull that section out of their paper. Joe didn’t mention WUWT when he modified his page, either. Typical.
Of course, that means that I’ve now got to read the rest of the paper. I threw up my hands before when I hit that nonsense about population, but since they’ve pulled it out of the paper, I’ve gotta continue. Ah, well, gotta take the bitter with the sweet. Can’t say I’m looking forward to reading that paper, though. I threw up my hands before, I hope that’s all I throw up. Wish me luck …
Figure 1. Do I really have to read the paper? Photo Source
OK, been there, read that. First, what is their basic thesis?
To understand their basic thesis, we have to get past their terminology. What does “super-exponentially accelerating” mean?
Well, it means that the growth rate is increasing. Why didn’t they say that? Hey, they’re climate scientists. Their motto seems to be “don’t educate, obfuscate”.
In any case, their main claim seems to be that the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and that the growth rate of the population is “just” exponential (stable growth). Their conclusion says:
4 Conclusion
We have analyzed the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide and of what constitutes arguably its most important underlying driving variable, namely human population. Our empirical calibrations suggest that human population has decelerated from its previous super-exponential growth until 1960 to “just” an exponential growth. As for atmospheric CO2 content, we find that it is at least exponentially increasing and more probably exhibiting an accelerating growth rate, consistent with a FTS (finite-time singular) power law regime.
Well … no and yes. No, if the pre-1960 increasing population growth rates are “super-exponential”, then the decreasing population rates since then must be “sub-exponential”. It is not “just exponential”, that statement is not supported by the evidence.
And yes, the rate of atmospheric CO2 growth has been increasing. It’s gone from about 0.25% increase per year in the 1960s to about a 0.5% annual increase in the last decades, although it has been far from constant. Here’s that data:
Figure 2. Annual growth in atmospheric CO2. Data from Mauna Loa.
OK, so the population growth rate is decreasing, and the CO2 growth rate is increasing. That’s what’s so. But … so what?
Both Joe Romm and the authors of the paper seem to think that this is a Very Bad Thing™. Let’s stop a moment and consider what the numbers really mean. We know what the population numbers mean. But what does a “super-exponential acceleration” in CO2 growth mean in the real world?
Consider that at some point not long after 2050 the world population will stabilize. The population of a number of countries has already stabilized (or is dropping). Suppose (as seems quite possible) that atmospheric CO2 rates continue to rise after the population has stabilized. What would that mean, rising atmospheric CO2 growth rates at a time of stable population? What would be happening in the real world to cause that?
Simply put, it would mean that the growth rate of energy use per capita was increasing. Whoa, can’t have that, speeding up the rate at which people get more energy.
Remember, energy use per capita is another name for development. They are synonymous, as I discuss here. I show how this affects the Solomon Islands, a developing country, here.
So the slowing population growth, combined with increasing atmospheric CO2, means that we are winning the twin battles to stabilize population and to bring energy to the people of the planet.
Joe Romm and the authors of the paper think that’s a bad thing. They think the unknown distant future dangers of CO2 outweigh today’s desperate need for energy for the poor people of the planet … which means most of the people of the planet.
I hold the opposite view. I think that bringing energy to the poor now, today, is much more important than any imagined catastrophe that even the alarmists say will not occur for thirty to fifty years.
The claim is often made that the poor will be the hardest hit by warming. As someone who has never been poor, but often broke, I can assure you that’s nonsense. I’ve slept in the city streets with my pants and shirt stuffed full of newspapers, I don’t recommend it. Cold is the enemy of the poor, not warmth, that’s an ivory-tower fantasy.
In addition, the forecast changes from the IPCC talking heads are that the warming will be mostly in the extra-tropics, at night, in the winter. Although the academics may think that’s terrible, I doubt that the homeless folks in New York or London will complain about warmer winter nights …
The best way to protect the poor from the ravages of the climate is to make them middle-class, and that takes energy. The fact that we are depriving the world’s poor of energy now, in order to save them from a hypothesized and ill-supported possible calamity fifty years from now, is a monstrous aberration of basic justice that history will rightly condemn.
w.
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My possibly lame post disappeared.
[Rescued & posted. ~dbs]
Super-exponential and exponential are characterizations of time complexity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity.
I will briefly explain. Let’s say you have an algorithm for solving a problem, then you may want to know how long it would take you to solve this algorithm. For example, when you are looking up a name in the phone book or a word in the dictionary, you can first open the phone book half way and look if the name comes before or after the page you are on. Then repeat this process with the half of the phone book remianing. The amoung of steps this will take is approx log_2(n) (log *base 2* of n), where n is the number of people in the phone book.
This algorithm is called logarithmic, because as n approaches infinty the answer is approximately a logarithm of the variable(s). This is important because a computer can perform trillians of tasks in very quickly, meaning that some lengthy computations are only dependent on behavior of the function as it approaches infintiy.
Huh?
Let’s look at some examples.
Which algorithm will take longer, the one that runs at n^3 or the one that runs at 1,000n^2+10,000n+80,000?
Well for “small” numbers 1,000n^2+10,000n+80,000 will take longer, however for the numbers we care about n^3 takes much, much longer (What numbers do we care about? Well, if you’re trying to crack a nine-digit password of numbers and letters, by trying every compination, using the n^3 algorithm will take 2*10^42 actions (2 followed by 42 zeros), where as 1,000n^2+10,000n+80,000 will use only 1.6*10^31. That means n^3 will take 10 billion times as long!).
Similarly, n^4 takes much, much longer than n^3, and n^5 takes much, much longer than n^4. So what about exponential and super exponential?
Well, an exponential algorithm will be of the form a^n+O(n), where O(n) is some stuff that runs slower and so really doesn’t matter. Such an algorithm will run longer than any polynomial time one, and by a lot! Super exponential, naively, refers to anything that will run longer than an exponential algorithm. However, usually we reserve the prefixes super- and sub- to mean something that runs just a “little” longer (respectively, shorter). For example, subexponential means something that will run shorter than an exponential algorithm, but longer than any polynomial one (example, 2^(n^1/3)).
What does this mean for population growth?
Well, frankly, nothing. At least not at the scales we’re looking at. If we were looking at bacteria, some of which can have a new generation in a couple of minutes, then the difference between exponential and super-exponential might be important. However, if we were to just look at human growth over a couple decades the difference would be negligable. So small that the O(n) we talked about (the stuff that grows so slowly it doesn’t make a difference) would in fact make a difference.
Conclusion: Well there is none. Except for the fact that I highly doubt that populations grew at an even enough rate for them to be sure it was a super-exponential pace during the 60’s. In addition, we did get to learn something kinda cool. so there’s that.
“What does “super-exponentially accelerating” mean?”
It means that Mary Poppins can fly with an umbrella.
The pro-AGW researchers and their supporters are just simply, really bad at math.
It shows up time and again. The number of peer-reviewed climate science papers that make no sense at all mathematically is astounding.
They are out to push their belief and correct usage of the figures will simply, not get in the way.
A mathematically-inclined person would simply, be forced to leave on their own or be forced out of this realm of science. All that is left is emotion-driven, non-mathematical thinkers. Climate models, which are supposed to solve mathematical physics-based equations, are re-tuned into emotional answers.
Willis, you might get some mileage out of the graphing tool at Gapminder:
http://www.gapminder.org/
Here’s energy per capita versus GDP per capita on a log:log scale (had to use log:log because of the outliers Luxembourg and Qatar):
http://www.bit.ly/gTBTrs
Pretty good relationship between the two variables IMHO.
Bulldust says:
March 17, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Yes, I use it from time to time. Your log/log plot is interesting. Makes the point I made that energy use and GDP inextricably linked.
w.
Just to reinforce Bulldust on Gapminder.
Now here is a mathematically-inclined person explaining reality in a way you have never seen so clearly explained before.
Spend some (lots of) time at the website.
Perhaps all sensible people are wrong, the warmistas do have a valid point: as society evolves to support more middle class people, that is those people with a sedentary lifestyle, and as more CO2 allows for the return of the megafora of eons past, we will all be easy prey for the return of Titanoboa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoboa
I, for one, thank the alarmists who line their pockets in the desire to save us from historical monsters and ecosystems.
/sarc off
Perhaps my current comment is unduly influenced by my having recently watched Conan the Barbarian.
Is “super-exponential” even possible? Doesn’t that really just mean that the exponent was increased?
Adam @March 17, 2011 at 5:57 pm may have beaten me to this observation, but I can’t easily understand what he wrote.
IanM
In 1968 Paul Ehrlich celebrated the impending death by starvation of a projected 80% of Earth’s global human population. In 1974 his colleague John Holdren, lately Science Commissar for the clownster Smudge Administration, referred to fellow humans as “a mass of seething maggots.”
Through the 1980s and ’90s, the Green Gang of AGW hysterics chortled over the imminent end of energy-intensive industrial/technological civilization in the West. Over the last decade, James Hansen has glowingly reviewed Keith Farnish’s warmist tracts “Time’s Up” and “A Matter of Scale,” advocating communo-fascist sabotage and violent subversion of global energy economies.
This mindset is not nihilist but Thanatist, a Luddite sociopathic fantasy that “loves death more than life,” purposefully seeking the extreme-reactionary retreat of
peace and progress wherever impoverished populations struggle to survive. No wonder militant Islam is these clacking mechanists’ vehicle of self-destructive choice.
AGW catastrophists indeed are hyper-partisan, but Thanatist principle is all that matters. Let’s face it: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen, Farnish hate humanity on principle, and in practice wish fervently to see you dead.
In the Dark Ages, when Europe made its first switch to dependence on artificial energy, via the intensive use of water power, laws were passed in France, England and elsewhere that required that all grain be milled by the water mills. It was illegal to used hand-powered querns to grind one’s own grain as one required it. These laws were passed to allow the mill owners, usually feudal aristocrats and the monasteries, to take a portion of the tenant farmers’ final milled product as their own – a payment for the use of the watermill that was called the ‘soke’. The payment was up to 10 % of the total flour milled for the miller and another 10% for the landlord’s ‘Right of Soke’.
When the vertical windmill was invented in England in the late 12th century, the soke law was also applied to the new technology. The point of this is that the elites have always done their damnedest to control access to and use of energy, for their own continued profit and comfort.
Royalty and the aristocracy claimed all the forests in this era, thus owing and controlling access to fuel, which became an urgent problem as deforestation changed Europe’s landscapes in the 12th-14th centuries. When coal became essential a a source of heating and cooking fuel in England, access to the coal was also limited by corporations that formed to exploit this. Queen Elizabeth I was the main shareholder in one such corporation. Nothing has changed…
Willis Eschenbach (March 17 at 3:25pm)
“The warming in the last 30 years is widespread over the globe, and is greatest at higher northern latitudes. The greatest warming has occurred in the NH winter (DJF) and spring (MAM).” Well I live in the NH and I see no such thing! How does the early onset of winter with below average(what’s an average anyways?) temperatures for most of the winter count as a warming. Simply noting the record lows and highs shows 1930 – 1955 to be way warmer on average than what we are experiencing now. To bad the claims are not panning out and are primarily full of hot air! Its even more amusing to see the local peoples confusion as to why it’s so cold. So they question the local climate guru at our local propaganda shop(University) and the first thing he says is, “Well, it’s winter for one thing!”. What a lame hoot!
The only thing super-exponential is the rapid and precipitous decline in real science.
Willis;
Here’s another prediction based on best previous algorithms:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/images/stories/faq7.jpg
In practical terms, it shows that population growth levels off to just about insignificant levels THIS DECADE. (Another version of that graph, that shows the even-more-accurate lower-edge-lowerband projection, has a peak in 2030, not 2040, btw.)
Based on FAO numbers. Their datafile is here: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ .
John Blake;
My favourite Ehrlich-ism: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
I love reading Willis’ commentaries. And this one sums up so well what is the philosophical difference between the climate alarmists and those that are searching for the truth. If we really want to help the poor of this world – really want to – we need to help raise their standard of living, and that centers around making energy affordable for them. Demonzing fossil fuels has the opposite impact, and its associated policies will make very little difference in the climate of 2100.
My AGW-believing friends believe they’re position is best for the poor. I believe the opposite. It is a philosophical difference, which science could address if it were truly open, transparent and honest.
Thanks, Anthony, for your role in bringing this issue to light in so many ways via your blog, and to Willis for his cerebral commentaries that enlighten us all.
Correction to above: the levelling-off is actually most noticable in the next decade, though it is significant before 2020.
The article at Climate Progress, and commentary, is truly sad.
The only credit they give is the typical back-handed comment. “There’s also a dumb mathematical error in a footnote that is transparently at odds with the data (including the data in the study), which the anti-science crowd has naturally pounced on. It isn’t germane to the study’s main conclusions.”
All of the other corrections – sorry, no credit for that, Anti-Science Crowd.
Despite the correction, I noticed they did throw in their own anti-science zinger. “Sornette’s point on population was primarily that the very recent trend is not consistent with the rosier population projections — and we’re already well past the planet’s carry-capacity. Hard to argue with that last point.”
What’s that? They’re predicting continued population growth well into mid-century while simultaneously stating that the planet is “already well past the planet’s carry-capacity?” Once the carry-capacity is achieved, then, by definition, population can’t increase for any sustained length of time. So if we’re already “well past”, how do they justify sustained growth for decades?
It is little appreciated, Willis, that this statement in your conclusion is true: “The fact that we are depriving the world’s poor of energy now…” .
This is not just a threat, it’s occurring. The “strategy” is mainly the withholding of support for cheap proven energy sources in favour of pie-in-the-sky renewables. It is accelerating, and will become blatant and drastic unless cut off very soon.
I’ve come up with a much better title. Romm should tell his friends so they can cut and paste….and why do I get a sudden vision of these guys sitting around a low kidney shaped table in little chairs with paste in their hair and fingers awkwardly maneuvering round handled blunt scissors?
Anyway, here is the title. Gosh I hope they like it.
Super-Exponential Extremisitous Populatory Growth related to Ginormous Leaptuous Hotness.
Rommian must be a definable thing by now, yes?
I don’t know that I’d say nutrition is the thing re population growth, other than as a proxy. I’d incline toward infant mortality as the true proxy-less metric. The more likely you are to have children that survive to adulthood, the less children you have.
geo says:
March 17, 2011 at 9:39 pm
I was looking at it the other way round, geo. Rather than seeing if nutrition affected population growth, I was looking to see the conditions in which societies can and can’t feed themselves. As I said, very interesting results. The population can be growing and the country can maintain nutritional levels … but only if the rate of population growth is falling. If it is rising, then nutritional levels fall. I hadn’t expected that, which is the best kind of result.
w.
Pamela Gray: Hotness
Insufficiently erudite. Try thermality.
Willis,
Your post is great. Thanks.
Now I have some free time as the Fukushima Daiichi Site nuclear plants are essentially near stabilization. Phew.
Several comments:
First, an observation about your concluding statement, “The best way to protect the poor from the ravages of the climate is to make them middle-class, and that takes energy. “ Although in my view you are right in your concluding statement, I think the premises and context of your concluding statement should me more explicit. Rather than say “make them middle class”, shouldn’t you say allow them to be middle class by supporting the kind of science, philosophy of society and government that has been shown (by history) to successfully protect those who want to aspire to be middle class? When you said “make them middle class”, I had visions of authoritative government deciding again what is best of people instead of people deciding themselves . . . .
Second, regarding the word ‘Evil’ in the title of this post and your previous related post, I do not think that evil actually does exist and that it cannot exist in an objective view of reality. Evil is not real in a rational view of the universe. Evil is a supernatural and/or religious concept and without a supernatural/religious context and premises the concept of evil is empty. So, a better title would have been something like “Not Ethically Challenged, Just Intellectually Inept”. NEC=>JII ;^)
Third, regarding population versus wealth discussion, with a totally free market of ideas, means and actions then the relationship of demand ( of ,say, energy) and supply must be calculated by means of the value (bucks $) that people voluntarily participating in the market place on energy. If energy is a very high value consistently in the market, it will become cheaper through the free economic process. That process is, in order of appearance regarding energy: first we have free individuals; second we have then free markets; third we have voluntary valuation of need for energy where high value means economic resources dedicated to it over lesser values; fourth we have unrestricted competition and entrepreneurial innovation with the high value economic resources allocated; fifth finally cheap energy. That process is fast! Population increase in a free society is a demand increase. I am sure the economists in this thread will want to add to this ad infinitum.
Fourth, Willis you know Romm is intellectually low hanging fruit. Right? So, I can only imagine it is just that you are having tremendous fun playing with an ideologically blinded pseudo-intellectual. You had your day of fun, now let’s get after more important tasks, like for instance, critically monitoring and universally exposing the AR5 gaming of science by the IPCC and insider AGW scientists/bureaucrats. OK?
John
juanslayton said on March 17, 2011 at 10:58 pm:
Pamela Gray: Thermality
Nah, “hotness” is better. “Smoking thermality” doesn’t work at all. Even my spellchecker doesn’t like “thermality.”
He doesn’t like me to drive my car or fly, he doesnt want me to reproduce, he doesnt like the bubbles in my beer
He’s not evil, he’s my wife
/joke
EO