Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
UPDATE: Romm at CP makes some significant concessions to error with additions, but can’t bring himself to mention WUWT, credit Willis, or allow any commenters to do so either. He has been “disappearing” critical comments as evidenced by our own commenters reposting their disappeared comments here. It is comical to watch. – Anthony
UPDATE: That’s too funny, Anthony. He’s pulled out his entire section on population … ooops. The foolish part is not giving credit. I don’t care about the credit, I find I can get anything accomplished if I don’t care if someone else gets the credit. But it’s bad tactics, makes him look petty and unprofessional. I suppose now that he (and the Authors) have removed the population claims, I’ll have to look at the New! Improved! Now with ‘Super-exponential CO2’ part of the paper. Ooooogh … – w. [Later] The new analysis is now done, see”Not Evil, Just Destructive“.
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Anthony asked me to take a look at Joe Romm’s comments on a new paper called “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth”, by A.D. Husler and D. Sornette. The paper is available on Arkiv. It’s not peer-reviewed as far as I can determine.
I started to review the paper. I got to the opening comments (and the footnote) on Page 1 referring to the “ecological footprint”. This is a very bad sign, the “ecological footprint” has nothing to do with science. It is an advocacy tool.
Figure 1. Population density expressed as height. Image Credit
Then I got to the footnote on Page 2, and I could go no further. It says:
Thus, a constant growth rate corresponds to a population growing exponentially, with a doubling time given by (log2)/r. As the present growth rate is r(2010) ≈ 1.8% per year, this gives a present doubling time of 38.5 years. If nothing changes, the present 6.8 billion people will be more than 13 billion in 2050! This is in contradiction with projections of OECD for instance and other international organizations, which optimistically expect human population to stabilize around 9 billion individuals.
Other than the gratuitous exclamation mark, why did this stop me from even considering the rest of the paper?
I’ve mentioned before that one of my strengths is that I’m a generalist. Back in 2004 I did an extensive analysis of the relationship between population growth rates and nutrition. No reason, it was never published, I was just curious.
My results showed something very interesting. By and large, if the population growth rate in a country, region, or the world is decreasing, average nutrition (daily calories, protein, and fat per capita) increases. On the other hand, if the population growth rate is increasing, the country cannot feed itself, nutrition declines. The absolute growth rate is not important. It is the direction of the change in growth rate that determines whether people can feed themselves.
In any case, as a result of that 2004 research of mine, I knew that his talk of a “constant growth rate” for global population was nonsense, global population growth rates have been dropping for years. I also thought I remembered the growth rate being lower than 1.8%. I went back to the wonderful FAOSTAT database and updated my figures (note that their figures post-2008 are estimates). Figure 2 shows the actual global population growth rates since 1961:
Figure 2. Annual increase in population as a percentage, 1961 to 2008.
Now that we have the real data on the population, let’s examine his claims.
1. He assumes a constant population growth rate. In fact, the growth rate has been dropping for half a century.
2. He says the 2010 growth rate is 1.8%. In fact, it hasn’t been that high in about a quarter century.
3. He says that the population will be “13 billion in 2050”. This assumes a) the current growth rate is 1.8% and b) the growth rate is constant. Neither one of those assumptions is anywhere near true, so the conclusion is also invalid.
I calculate that if the trend continues, the growth rate will reach zero sometime shortly after mid-century. At that point I calculate the population will be about 9.5 billion. This is in good agreement with the UN FAO midrange estimate of the expected maximum population.
So that’s why I quit reading their paper right then and there. If they can get something bozo simple like the population growth rates that wrong, I fear I don’t really have time to hack my way through their more outré propositions regarding “super-exponential acceleration”, whatever that may be.
Joe Romm swallowed this one whole, opining (emphasis mine):
The paper itself is mostly for math and statistics junkies. It is essentially agnostic on climate science. But the conclusions are as stark as any in the climate literature:
• The human population is still growing at an exponential rate and there is no sign in the data that the growth rate is decreasing. Many argue that economic developments and education of women will lead to a decreased growth rate and an eventual stabilization of human population. This is not yet observed in the population dynamics, when integrated worldwide. Let us hope that the stabilization of the human population will occur endogenously by self-regulation, rather than by more stringent finite carrying capacity constraints that can be expected to lead to severe strains on a significant fraction of the population.
No sign in the data that the global population growth rate is decreasing?
You go, Joe.
w.
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Maybe the four earths is an exaggeration. I dont’ know – you say you’ve addressed it. I’ve just looked for some numbers.
Energy consumption per american = 10,381 W
Energy production of world 1.504*10^13 W
(wikipedia)
divide one by t’other gives you 1.449 billion people
6.750 billion (real population)/1.449 billion (americans fed by present energy production) = 4.66 earths for us all to live like Americans
I’m sure you’ll tell me where I’ve gone wrong…
Well of course it’s growing at an exponential rate. It’s just the rate of growth is not growing.
Even this last claim is one to dispute, that the planet’s growth rate is declining.
We have a number of countries whose growth rate is below replacement level, including Russia, Japan, Italy etc. Many other countries maintain population through immigration, such as UK, and even the US is close. So if we have formerly large countries with declining populations and low birthrates, it could be that the other countries with large birthrates end up being the dominant portion of the population. Even if the growth rate in those countries is just constant or declining, due to their larger share of the population, the overall growth rate could climb from 1.8%.
Jit says:
March 17, 2011 at 9:08 am
“Someone in the UK calculated we can provide for 30 million with our own resources. We presently have 60+ million and therefore rely on imports and our own wealth relative to the rest of the world.”
UK area 243,610 km ^2. Arable Land 23%. So, about 56,030 km^2 of arable land.
62,698,362 inhabitants. That makes 893.64 m^2 of arable land per person. An acre is about 4064 m^2, so that’s about 0.22 acre per person. Let’s say we plant potatoes everywhere. Hmmm… let’s see, what will we yield…
“^ The yield of Calories per acre (about 9.2 million) is higher than that of maize (7.5 million), rice (7.4 million), wheat (3 million), or soybean (2.8 million). Audrey Ensminger; M. E. Ensminger, James E. Konlande (1994). Foods & Nutrition Encyclopedia. CTC Press. ISBN 084938981X. http://books.google.com/?id=XMA9gYIj-C4C&pg=PA1104&dq=potatoes+calories+per+acre.”
I assume that means per year.
9.2 million times 0.22 gives 2.024 million calories per person per year. Or 5545 calories per day per person.
So it looks like the current population of the UK can easily be fed even without using the seas as a food source, or importing food.
Now you will have to resort to some Green maths, telling me that it costs more energy to grow potatoes than what you get in harvest because of all the tractor fuel or something like that… I’m not that interested, though, i think your source is bunkum.
Sources:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potatoe#Role_in_world_food_supply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre
Jit, you don’t need four earths, just an earth that is four more times productive. The US has been blessed with immense natural resources and has developed technology and the will and the legal structure to maximize those resources. You can apply that to Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand too. There is no natural reason that Russia and China and India should not be economic powerhouses. Vast natural resources, plenty of ariable land, but not the government structure to maximise those resources. China has grown very fast but how much of that is due to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and a handful of potent, international cities? The backwater of China is poor, ignorant, isolated and brutal, and it benefits the CCP to keep them that way. Russia, other than poor access to the sea, which is not nearly as critical today as it was 100 years ago, has utterly vast natual resources that should have every citizen in the nation living at or above Western European standards. How many places on earth are more harsh and unforgiving than Australia? Yet Australia is thriving economic player.
Jit,
“Energy consumption per american = 10,381 W
Energy production of world 1.504*10^13 W
(wikipedia)
divide one by t’other gives you 1.449 billion people.
I’m sure you’ll tell me where I’ve gone wrong…”
Does it need saying? The energy being processed today, is the energy that is demanded by the world today. And I am using ‘demanded’ in the economic sense – ie, using dollars to bid for it – not merely wanting it. So your equation translates to: if we consider the energy used by Americans today, we would need 4.7 times as much to provided everyone in the world with the same amount of energy. Therefore we need 4.7 Earths.
In 1950, American’s consumed a fraction of that energy – call it f. Somebody could have made the same assertion in 1950, that we would need 4.7 Earths to provide everyone with the same per capita energy f.
And yet, as demand increased, so did the energy provided. If you are saying that today, uniquely in history, there is no more energy to be had, then your argument may stand up. But as demand increases in the future, more power stations will be built, whether coal fired (and there is a lot of coal), shale gas fired, uranium fission, thorium fission, or fusion – which will happen in some form in the future, though not from toroids I expect.
I would. People on the frontier were not looking to get rich quick, for the most part. There was and remains value in self-determination away from civilization. When settlements get truly established to become self-sufficient, that’s when potential wealth from local resources may finally be tapped. Initially, yes, colonization is painful even if the environment is hospitable, the American continents were luxurious to colonize compared to what frontier life on Mars would likely be. It was when San Francisco was a viable city that the gold rush kicked in. The same will be true of Mars.
Yes, the first wave of settlers are moving into dangerous territory. That’s what exploration is. There’s a reason the developed world has a segment of the population that is continually inventing extreme sports, this world is tamed. If a frontier existed, likely most of those guys/gals would be there.
Seems to me that Co2 increase is less than quadratic.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/derivative/mean:84
The derivative grows less than linear.
Another good Hans Rosling in re Slabadang at 5:49
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth
Jit says:
March 17, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Sure. You have described what we can do with our present energy production. The obvious conclusion is that we need to increase our energy production by a factor of four, not increase the number of earths.
w.
Can’t say I blame you for stopping at the summary. As with many others I stop at the title. I see current “science” as a distraction. AGW = bigger/smaller/same size biscuit weevils. Search “the literature” and whatever you want for your current campaign will be somewhere in the “peer reviewed” pile.
This particular paper will probably turn up in “the literature” at some point. “Reviewers” having removed the the more obvious campaign slogans and what not.
In the end it’s like a bunch of bank robbers heading down main street throwing money off the back of the truck. By the time people have finished fighting over the $1 bills the robbers are well away with the billion dollar loot. Science isn’t some magical investigation into the unknown it is a paid for POV . A peer reviewed paper costs X, the revenue from that peer reviewed paper and it’s implications earns you Y (see WWF).
Scientists have become nothing better than prostitutes – their pimps tell them what to do – they do it. Trying to fight amongst the stream of $1 bills from the back of the getaway vehicle just keeps you quiet while the big money gets away. All you need to read is “ecology”, “footprint”, “sustainability” or “carbon” – you know damn well who is paying for the “peer reviewed” “science”. It used to be a joke in this country … “first against the wall”. No more.
Tom Laws says:
March 17, 2011 at 10:07 am
“A few things we know for certain, … That fossil fuel reserves are an inarguable finite quantity…”
Wrong! (or from above Romm!) We don’t even know what “fossil” fuels are. Perhaps they are mushed up dinosaurs and we will eventually run out, or perhaps the Earth continues to produce more “hydrocarbon fuel compounds” on the fly. Last I heard, the jury was still out. Until we know for certain, however, your rant also sounds a bit Malthusian.
What are the main causes of death and are they likely to be removed due to development? What is the rate of birth? As a function of time, one hopes that everyone gets “richer” and has fewer babies, but also live longer.
We need to find more resources on other planets etc… this should be our main objective. Unfortunately our main objective appears to be to create misery.
Willis,
“Sure. You have described what we can do with our present energy production. The obvious conclusion is that we need to increase our energy production by a factor of four, not increase the number of earths.”
Doh! You put it so much more simply than I did in my response.
Ok, fair cop…
now someone tell me just how we’re going to increase energy production fourfold with dwindling fossil fuels, every molecule of which we burn is bitterly resented by the greens, with nuclear paddling backwards rapidly owing to Fukushima, and with wind providing a flea’s flea of a sufficiency…
And that’s just energy… there is also food…
@ur momisugly DirkH
Not at all! I don’t know the answer to that. But I think it would be nice to retain a smidgeon of semi-natural habitat and not live in a world entirely made of potatoes, eh?
Willis;
It seems that the projection that has by far the best record is the UN FAO lowrange estimate, lower bound of.
That now says “peak in 2040, ~8bn”.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/images/stories/faq7.jpg
http://esa.un.org/unpp/
From http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth#FAQ1
Brian H says:
March 17, 2011 at 4:17 pm
This has been true for decades, the low end estimates have been the best. When I was a kid, population was supposed to stabilize at about 12 billion. Then it was 11. A decade later it was 10 billion. Now it’s at nine billion, with the low end estimate at 8 billion.
The US population has doubled since I was a kid. The global population has more than doubled since 1960. Yet despite that, both rich and poor alike are better fed and better clothed and better educated and healthier and live longer than they did in 1960.
We’re now at about 7 billion people. If we level out at 9.5 billion, that’s a 35% increase from today. If it’s 8 billion, it’s 14% increase. The planet has plenty of resources for that size of increase. Sure, I’d like it to be a quarter of that, but we’ve got what we’ve got, and we have the resources to feed them. As history shows, we’ve been doing better at it every decade for the last half century.
That’s no reason to be complacent, anyone who has worked in the developing world knows that the challenges are endless. But there’s also no reason to be depressed or predict catastrophe, we’re doing better than ever in all of history. Which, given the huge and rapid rise in world population in the last century, is an accomplishment we can all be proud of … before going back to work on the same issues.
w.
Jit says:
March 17, 2011 at 4:04 pm
That’s a reasonable question, Jit. I can give you a general answer. France today gets the majority of its electrical power from a source which was totally untapped at the start of the last century. I would be surprised if the same were not true of this century.
Which technology will it be? I suspect the winner will be either some type of algal/microbial produced oil, or some kind of synthetic photosynthesis splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, or use-once “candlestick” nukes powered with uranium extracted from sea water, or some kind of fusion power breakthrough … and that’s just the technologies we know about. Atomic energy was a fantasy in 1900, and by 2000 it is the largest or second largest source of energy in many countries. So I don’t know how we will do it.
What I do know is that humans are eternally ingenious and inventive, and that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
Resources for food is not a problem. We could feed 15% more people in Africa just by reducing the currently 25% post-harvest loss. The rain-fed grasslands of the Sudan alone could be a breadbasket feeding all of Africa. The problem is not food or resources for food. The problem is human ills – wars, distribution, corruption, poverty, greed, and all their cousins that have plagued us throughout history.
Hey! Wait a minute!!!
Copying someone’s written or spoken material is plagiarism.
Using someone else’s work without crediting the source is also a BIG No-No.
One would think then that removing written material based on someone else’s pointing it out, that that does, in fact, need crediting as a source.
Any edit to an existing paper or article should have a note informing the readership of the change. Especially errors that are caught and corrected.
It is to Joe Romm’s shame – and he knows it – to have used something he hadn’t verified. How big a “Tsk tsk” does it take before a scientist gets his medals removed and gets drummed out of the service? Does one need to become a complete joke first? Or do his peers take him in the back office and explain a few things to him?
But you know what? Willis is getting Romm to eat crow, no matter. Romm is beginning to get the idea that he is a loser masquerading as a scientist.
Joe: Sloppiness is not science.
So the new lexicon is “Super… [insert AGW label of your choice]”. Thanks for cluing us in, author of the super-paper. However, the game was up for half the reading public when warming became “change” and then “Catastrophic…” was added, but some are hanging on till they see “Super Duper…”. However, that still leaves “Ginormous…”. But who am I to keep you from your appointed hour of self-destruction.
After reading Willis’ updated comments, it appears that Joe Romm suffers from this syndrome.
@ROM (March 17, 2011 at 3:47 am):
One aspect of the declining global population growth rate that I have often pondered is the economic question.
Our entire current global economic system is based on growth, growth and more growth and when the global population increase finally slows down to a stop and becomes a static global population of around the 9 to 9.5 billion then global economic growth will also slow right down.
I suggest that our entire current global economic system is based on central “banking” making new money available at artificially controlled low interest rates and the subsequent Cantillon effect. It is that structure that requires eternal growth as does any Ponzi scheme. A market-chosen monetary medium of exchange (e.g. gold, silver) whose supply is not under deliberate control, while offering no panacea to all economic plagues, would cure the dual maladies of enriching those who have early access to new money at the expense of those farther down the line and boom/bust business cycles caused by mistaking the availability of cheap money for future consumer demand and thus the cause for increased investment in production factors.
(I put scare quotes around “banking” because contemporary central “banks” are not the secure repositories of stored money, but rather the creators and distributors of fiat money.)
Joe is cherry picker in chief. Prostituting his degree to make people believe his agenda, especially those who will be prone to arguments from authority. It is those that he is trying to recruit to his religion.
Another inconvenient assessment by Willis.
You would think that, given the scrutiny, Romm would now be extremely careful about what he swallows and spews. But apparently not. He must have Tiger Blood or something. But this is so obvious and so careless that one might almost think he’s getting so desperate and stressed that he is losing it…
But this research actually does fit the general AGW method of using bogus short terms trend stats to make simple straight line projections. 13 billion and, what was it, 5 C by 2050.
On a more serious scientifically valid note, when my eyes glazed over as I started reading this that globe with the density spikes kind of looks like somebody with a Mohawk and a goatee I saw protesting at Cancun.
Anyhow, why worry about 2050? Now that the link between CO2, The Warming, and Earthquakes has been clearly established in recent poor reviewed media reports, and the Mayan 2012 prediction looms, may as well stock up the root cellar with carbon credits and brace for the apocalypse.