Not content to make a fool of himself confusing weather and climate, Al has now decided to lecture empower women on how to reduce the population for the benefit of the planet. Watch the video below, now we know why he doesn’t allow recordings of his lectures. Darn those Flip Video Cameras.
Al Gore How Empowering Women Fights Climate Change
And here is his wisdom of weather and climate
Al Gore Talks Extreme Weather, Climate
Recorded June 20th by Brian Merchant, hat tip to Chris Horner.
UPDATE: Tom Nelson on his blog points out the bottled water next to Gore.
Flashback: Pour the bottled-water trend down the drain
it’s time for those of us who care about the environment and are concerned about global warming to stop buying and drinking bottled water.
2007: Bottled Water Ban Not Enough
Following the radically liberal traditions of San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom banned municipal departments from purchasing bottled water, even for water coolers.
Spector,
Population growth has been slowing for decades, and more importantly, fertility rates have been slowing even more dramatically. Current population growth is driven by the demographic bulge created in previous generations, but even within this bulge of young fertile women, the birth rates are dramatically lower. This means the “projections” are not fantasy numbers, but based on the simple math of declining birth rates in what is now an aging population. There is no indication whatsoever of rising fertility rates, and as the demographic bulge from previous generations ages past fertility, the population has no choice but to level off and even decline. Unless an immortality drug is invented, in which case fertility rates will plunge even further.
The “S-shape” is indeed already present in the graphs, but not as easy to see when recent decades are compressed so tightly. Stretch them out a bit to take into account recent trends, and you will see the S-shape already there. It’s very much evident in the more developed nations, and as the rest of the world develops, it becomes more and more evident. Endless population growth on an exponential hockey stick is a myth that only the hard core fanatics still hold onto.
RE: Conradg: (July 3, 2011 at 2:07 pm)
” Endless population growth on an exponential hockey stick is a myth that only the hard core fanatics still hold onto.”
I have made no claim of “endless exponential population growth.” My description was limited to the appearance of the graphic on the Wikipedia World Population Page and intended to apply only over the specific time period of 1800 to 2004. I assumed this would be obvious to anyone who viewed that graphic.
Endless exponential population growth at a forty-year doubling rate will, in a relatively short time, require the conversion of the entire mass of the known universe to human beings.
Your claim is that population growth is a hockey stick, which is of endless upward exponential growth (until catastrophic collapse). This is clearly false in all developed nations already, and it is clearly false in all rational future projections of even the developing world. Since we are talking about the threat of future population growth, the only trends that matter in the 1800-2004 period are those of the last few decades, since women who are either dead or past their fertility period cannot have children. And those trends are all of an S-shaped growth pattern. Where they are on the “S” depends mostly upon their stage of economic and educational development. You can backtrack and limit your claims all you like in order to try to save face, but you are losing the argument.
One factor exacerbating the potential population collapse is the infamous Chinese ‘one boy/no girls’ de facto policy. Aside from the extreme inconvenience to the surplus boys, there are simply far fewer wombs available than would otherwise have been the case. Let’s just do a quick back-of-envelope here: Assume 50% of the population is still young enough to breed (generous, I think). Composed, IIRC, of about 28% males, 22% females. By the time they reach menopause, say 40 years, almost all the non-breeding 50% will be dead, and the next generation (assuming 1 child each) will comprise 22% + 50% of the current population, or a drop of 28%, plus their grandchildren, who will be about 44% of the 22%, or about another 10% of the starting level.
So 40 yrs from now China can expect to have 78% + 10% = 88% of its current population, of whom about 44% of 10% will be fertile females. 4.4%.
Again, Stein’s Law will have kicked in: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Clearly, things won’t progress that far before some kind of revolution occurs. But China has a demographic dragon or two by the tail, and is going to suffer the consequences.
As usual, the Green position is 180° wrong; we are going to be desperately short of both CO2 and people if their dominance and nonsense continues.
Small clarification to above: the 44% of 10% will be the remaining females who haven’t “used up” their one-child quota.
It has occurred to me that one interim pseudo-solution for the Chinese would be legalized polyandry, with the 1-child licensed issued to the husbands. Attractive fertile women could have quite a prominent role in such a society …
😉
typo: “licenses” not “licensed”.
RE: Conradg says: (July 4, 2011 at 12:15 am)
“Your claim is that population growth is a hockey stick, …”
Once again, I have made no such claim! That description only applies to the graphic depiction of world population from 1800 to 2004 on the Wikipedia World Population Page. I believe this curve depicts a response to a net increase of abundance in modern times due to scientific advances and the tapping of stored energy resources.
Eventually, the per capita abundance will decrease with increasing population and expiring resources. This will force a population decrease or stabilization by *non-voluntary* population pressure effects. Some new technical advance, such as the development of a cheap, safe fusion power technology may delay, but not prevent this issue.
I believe that individual voluntary birth limitation drives will only result in the increased propagation of those less altruistic individuals not disposed to volunteer in the succeeding generations.
Government population control is the likely unacceptable and dangerous dark elephant in the room.
Spector,
Even the graph in question is not a hockey stick. It is clearly beginning to level out, especially if you decompress the last three decades of the graph. It is well on the way to forming an “S”, as every population scientist knows, and as all projections based on current fertility rates show.
Eventually, meaning rather soon, population growth will level off and begin to fall, as it already has begun to in the developed world (immigrants aside). All the rational projections follow that “S” shape very clearly. This means government control will not be necessary, nor will resource depletion be the cause. Prosperity and education are the cause
Resource depletion will not happen, either. Recovery and re-use technology will complement discovery and extraction, and substitution with new substances will occur. There are graphene structures now coming out of the lab which are more rigid and lighter than any metal. For one of them, a stretched sheet would support the weight of an elephant on the point of a pencil without serious deformation, much less penetration.
Made from coal, long before iron and aluminum, which are major fractions of the Earth’s crust, “run out”.
And so it goes.
RE: Brian H says: (July 7, 2011 at 1:39 am)
“Resource depletion will not happen, either.”
Resource depletion, per se, may not occur, but I suspect that most of the non-renewing ‘easy pickings’ may be gone in a few generations, especially as regards vital energy resources.
What you “suspect” is your own concern, and not evidence of anything.
You evidence zero comprehension of the economics or physics or history of the evolution of resource needs and fulfillment thereof.
Here’s the simple version for energy: frak gas is sufficient for centuries, and fusion and other plentiful sources are much closer in the pipeline than most think — certainly much closer than exhaustion of conventional sources.
The exploitation of all *non-renewing* resources should be subject to laws of diminishing returns as they become progressively harder to find and extract. Once all the easily found deposits of a given resource has been found and exhausted, we must go after the progressively more difficult to find and less productive sites.
Except for sites disallowed for environmental considerations, I think we are already extracting petroleum from the last of the easily found and easily accessed deposits. The future will probably see increasing focus on the more difficult offshore sites.
Eventually, we are going to have to find way to use our vast coal deposits, a less desirable temporary substitute for petroleum. Frak gas, as far as I can tell, involves a controversial method of recovering energy from a substandard deposit–by no means an ‘easy picking.’
Fusion power might make up for the energy extraction decline, but after over 50 years of research, it still seems to remain rather elusive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Power
There are so many things in error in that last post that I’ll just leave you with this: as the percentage of proven reserves of non-renewables as of a given date are used, the net remaining proven reserves rises by about that same percentage. From discoveries to improved extraction tech, the resource increase forces have about double the strength of the depletion ones.
Peak resource arguments are failing everywhere. As for those “environmental reasons”, they are mainly rationalizations for policies aimed at hobbling growth. The current US Administration is providing an almost caricaturish demonstration of that.
RE: Brian H: (July 15, 2011 at 12:59 pm)
“There are so many things in error in that last post that I’ll just leave you with this: as the percentage of proven reserves of non-renewables as of a given date are used, the net remaining proven reserves rises by about that same percentage.”
My reference is to total accessible non-renewing (exhaustible) resources, not just those we have discovered so far. Eventually, if mankind continues to exist, these resources will be gone and people will have to find a way to live without them. It is as simple as that. I think any such exhaustion must impact the natural limits on global population.
Of course, some of these resources may still remain available in inexhaustible, dilute proportions that require much more effort (expense) to recover.
As recycling never recovers 100 percent of a used resource, it cannot prevent the eventual exhaustion or dilution of a resource that is no longer available in concentrated form.
As long as these resources just gradually trail out, they will only become progressively more expensive and we will have time to adjust to their loss with minimal dislocation. If the price of gasoline continues to rise, you may see a time when people start switching their investments from General Motors to Schwinn.
Uh-huh. So at some unknown time in the future your model (assumptions with no arithmetic) says we might run out of X before we don’t need it any more because we’ve switched to Y, so we should slow down our use of X so that unknown possibly but not necessarily problematic eventuality will occur somewhat later.
Good luck with that.
RE: Brian H: (July 17, 2011 at 9:52 am)
“Uh-huh. So at some unknown time in the future your model (assumptions with no arithmetic) says we might run out of X before we don’t need it any more because we’ve switched to Y, so we should slow down our use of X so that unknown possibly but not necessarily problematic eventuality will occur somewhat later.”
Yes, if we find an alternative, Y, to exhaustible resource X, we may stop using X provided that Y is cheaper to use than the remaining X. Otherwise, slowing down the use of X cannot prevent the ultimate exhaustion of that resource. Sooner or later it will all be gone. As X becomes harder to find and extract, it will become progressively more expensive and this of and by itself will force a gradual reduction of the use of the resource being exhausted and motivate a search for a Y alternative.
I think the only reason for intentionally reducing the usage of a given exhausting resource would be to minimize an anticipated population reduction shock as the resource expires.
Again, insistently assuming facts not in evidence. Never in history has mankind failed to find a new source of energy, at lower cost. Horsepower, wind, water wheels, steam, coal gas, kerosene, gasoline, nuclear, etc.
So your claim is simply a silly tautology. “If we run out of cheap energy, we’ll be sorry!” Uh, yeah. But no sign of that happening yet. Or ever. Once we break Obama’s and the EPA’s fingers, and thus their grip on the throats of finders and users of energy, frak gas and oil will be available for centuries. And fusion will be in place within a decade or two, anyway.
So, “NO”, we will not cripple our present to avoid an implausible imagined boogie-man in the future. Your request is denied.
RE: Brian Hall: (July 19, 2011 at 8:12 am)
“… assuming facts not in evidence. Never in history has mankind failed to find a new source of energy, at lower cost. Horsepower, wind, water wheels, steam, coal gas, kerosene, gasoline, nuclear, etc.”
There is a first time for everything. We are now rapidly exploiting energy resources that were slowly built up over multiple thousands of years of geologic time. Once all the petroleum and coal have been used up, man will have to get by on whatever we have left. That may or may not support the current world population.
This is not a matter of being sorry. It is what will happen if we do not find an alternative replacement energy source. Crippling the present will only delay the inevitable. It seems logical to suppose that man will eventually have to get used to living in a world devoid of geologically concentrated natural resources.
@Spector:
Oh Paaleeeze… Not that old tired “running out” canard again!
We have about 400 years of coal, proven. We’ve got somewhere around the same amount of tar sands, shale oil, et. all. Recovery all proven technically, just oil is too cheap to count it as ‘reserves’. We have over 10,000 years from the Uranium on land alone. Add in the Thorium, it’s about 30,000 years. Add in the PROVEN RECOVERABLE from the sea and it’s effectively ‘the life of the planet’. (It’s just that at about $140 / lb it costs a bit more than land based so we don’t do it yet – still vastly cheaper than oil and coal per BTU though).
There is NO energy shortage. There never has been, and there never will be. There is only a shortage of willingness to exploit particular sources.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/everything-from-mud/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Please, lose the paranoia, lose the fear. Learn that all that is needed is imagination and realize that EVERYTHING is a resource. We never “run out” as it never goes away.
RE: E.M.Smith: (July 19, 2011 at 3:34 pm)
“@Spector: Oh Paaleeeze… Not that old tired “running out” canard again!”
Be that as it may, we do appear to be expending our petroleum resources. The follow-on replacements may or may not support a population as large as we have now. My comments apply specifically to those easy to get (cheap) expendable resources (from ancient geologically concentrated deposits) that we are now exploiting.
There is nothing to fear. It’s just the way it is. Either we will develop a new low-cost, long-term source or alternative for each expiring resource deposit or this will prove to be impossible. In either case, man will adapt to each situation.
In some cases, we may indeed be reduced to getting it all from mud or seawater; it will just be more expensive and energy intensive that way.
Nope, no first time for things that never happen. Like unicorns, free lunches, affordable dispatchable renewables, and energy depletion.