Guest essay by Geoff Chambers
“Ten Billion” by Stephen Emmott – a 120-page paperback Ehrlich-style Doomfest – is due out in the next few days, published by Vintage in the USA and Penguin in the UK. German, Italian and Dutch translations are also due. Publication was brought forward hurriedly because of the appearance in Britain of a spoiler – “Population: Ten Billion” by Danny Dorling.
Very briefly: Emmott argues that a combination of population growth, rising consumption, climate change, species loss and environmental depredation will lead us to catastrophe by the year 2100, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In his inimitable catch phrase: “We’re f*cked”. Dorling agrees with Emmott’s basic thesis but adds: “Yes we can”.
Both agree that massive behaviour change on the part of the citizens of the rich West is a necessary condition for saving the planet , change which no democratically elected government could implement. You’re left to draw your own conclusions. The conclusion Emmott draws is contained in an anecdote which is mentioned in practically every discussion of the book. Confronted with the dire predictions emanating from the work done by Emmott and his team of forty scientists at the Microsoft Laboratory in Cambridge, England, the reaction of one of the team was that the only thing to do was “teach your child to use a gun”.
The simultaneous publication of both books means that the conditions have been realised for a phony debate in Britain between “optimists” and “pessimists” over what to do, or whether anything can be done – a debate from which sceptics are excluded, since both sides implicitly accept the worst expert predictions found in official sources- a population of 10 billion and a 6°C rise in global temperature.
Emmott’s book is based on a one-man-show performed by Emmott himself at the Royal Court theatre in London in July 2012 – a show which got rave reviews from the green-leaning British press. Emmott is no actor and a very poor public speaker, but his position as Professor of Computational Science at Microsoft’s Cambridge Lab, plus visiting professorships at Oxford and London Universities, lent authority to his views, which were swallowed unquestioningly by the British press. Interviews in the Observer and the Financial Times established Emmott as an expert to be reckoned with, and there was talk of a TV series or a TED talk. The final format chosen for getting his thesis out to a wider public was a popular paperback.
The original playscript was never published, but Alex Cull and I gathered as much material from the play as we could find from interviews and critics and analysed Emmott’s thesis in a blog post at
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/08/it’s-a-fct-we’re-fcked.html
As more information became available, we followed up with a series of posts at
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/category/stephen-emmott/
Wherever we could check Emmott’s claims, they turned out to be false or exaggerated. His claim that a Google search uses as much electricity as boiling a kettle was the subject of a retraction at New Scientist, following a complaint from Google that the claim was out by a factor of a hundred. His claim in a talk that species lost is running at more than a thousand times the natural rate was based on a 20-year-old source which estimated loss at “a hundred to a thousand times the natural rate”. Emmott simply took the upper estimate and added “more than”. It’s true that there is an official UN estimate of a population of ten billion by the year 2100 (in a 2010 online update to the last official report in 2004) but Emmott fails to mention that the report has population flatlining by this time, and declining thereafter.
We haven’t read the book yet, but an extensive extract published by the Observer at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth
makes it clear that his basic thesis hasn’t changed. Nor have his two key catch-phrases, since “We’re f*cked” and “Teach my son how to use a gun” appeared at the top and bottom of publicity material issued by Penguin Books a couple of days ago at a number of news sites, for example at
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/13-graphs-that-suggest-the-planet-might-be-totally-screwed
The publicity handout is a collection of thirteen graphs, which I’ve analysed very briefly at
The Emmott / Penguin graphs in detail
They are, quite simply, terrible. They’d be a disgrace in an essay by a first year university student. In at least two cases, the timescale on the x axis changes half way along with no indication. They appear to have been drawn by hand by someone who can’t use a ruler. Decadal changes appear to happen roughly every 12-15 years. Scales are deliberately chosen to create hockeysticks. Future population growth is represented as a vertical line, instead of the S-shaped curve which every serious demographic study supports.
Since first putting up these graphs, Buzzfeed have added footnotes giving sources. In every case the graphs are “adapted from..” or “compiled from…”. In other words, they are the responsibility of the author.
In response to a comment on my article that I was “nit-picking”, I acknowledged that the graphs were probably the work of some hard-pressed intern at Penguin Books with an impossible deadline to meet. Since then, I’ve seen a paywalled interview with Emmott in the Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3805225.ece
in which the interviewer says:
“…all the graphs in his book, which you suspect he carries around in his head as well – graphs for world population, CO2 parts per million, global ocean heat content and loss of tropical rainforest and woodland, for instance – are lurching upward in ways they never have before.
‘It’s precisely because of those graphs that I think we are in trouble,’ he says.”
… which makes it pretty clear that the graphs belong to Emmott, the Microsoft Professor of Computational Science who, in a recent speech to a government-funded innovation thinktank, spoke of the need for:
“…an entirely new generation of entirely new kinds of scientists, of scientists … who are computationally first rate, and I don’t mean people who know where the on button is on their Macintosh, I mean conceptually and mathematically computationally first rate.”
I invite WUWT readers to amuse themselves by going through the graphs with a ruler and a fine tooth comb. It may be nit-picking, but there are an awful lot of nits, and it’s best to comb them out now before they hatch and we’re all scratching ourselves to death.
Eric1skeptic says:
July 8, 2013 at 3:32 am
Manfred said: “Take Pakistan again, for example. Only 27% of the population believes family planning is moral, but 84% favour making Sharia the law of the country and 76% of those favour death penalty for leaving Islam.”
Manfred, I think you are a little off base. The patriarchal nature of Islamic culture may well enhance the birth rate. But that comes more from pressures from parents and not from religious beliefs about family planning (i.e. contraceptives). The wife (or wives) can easily make their own decisions as the society becomes more wealthy with more leisure or employment opportunities. OTOH, that economic advancement may be retarded to the extent that Islam may permit more autocracy. But that is also improving, not monotonically, but slowly improving with the overall advance of mankind from hunter-gatherer with 20 children (mostly dead before reproducing) to urban technocrat with no need or desire for children.
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I don’t think, I am “off base”.
I think you and mainstream USA missed the development of the last 10 or 20 years within the Muslim world. Which is that large parts of the populations have organized in way that makes them and their children immune to such “modern” influence. This is happening within the Arab world, in Turkey, in Bangladesh, in French communities, around the globe.
Until not long ago, societies have been much more open. There was interest and curiosity in other cultures, awe and attraction for modern achievements, western values and western views of human rights.
But this has changed. Movements like Salafism have completely stepped out of society and set up rules and enforced those rules which keep their group tight and growing.
You wouldn’t have seen many veils in Turkish cities not too long ago, today you have whole districts even in Istanbul with women wearing whole body veils.
Saudi and Qatar salafist preachers are often spreading the most radical messages. It is happening in Europe and even remote locations like Mosambique and Argentina..
I am amazed about the ignorance in the US, not only by the current administration but also by McCain and others, who strangely team up with the financiers of the most radical forms of Islam in various conflicts for whatever reason.
As we now have these closed societies, populations growth has to be judged not by the mean of all groups of a society but each part separtately.
And the outcome in my view is, that population growth may have receded strongly in parts of the population and lead to a lower overall slowdown. But these groups are becoming increasing marginal and outnumbered and population growth will pick up again..
I see Nobel prize written all over this one,
We have seen demographic transitions in most countries. Some, particularly in Africa, lag, but they’ll eventually exhibit the same pattern. What most Malthusian alarmists don’t realize is that we’re experiencing the precursors of population peak right now. The number of infant girls has already begun to shrink. Almost all the population growth from here on out will be product of population “momentum,” rather than new growth. Once today’s young women and girls have entered and exited the childbearing years, there will be fewer to replace them and global population will begin a long, slow decline,probably around 2060.
I have to be amused by these concerns about over-population. You’ve heard it time and again that we do come up with solutions to disappearing resources. The only way we are able to do it is with more population. I am concerned that if the population truly peaks at 10 billion, we will stagnate. It takes tremendous brain power to achieve the advances we have made. There would be no HDTV, GPS, 50,000 seat sports arenas, Kindles and PCs without the huge population we have now. We couldn’t afford it as a race, we couldn’t devote the resources to developing them. I don’t believe we will reach the stars unless we continue to grow our population.
I don’t say this because I love to be surrounded by throngs of people (Star Trek’s “Mark of Gideon” comes to mind). Indeed, after living in 30 years in Southern California townhouses and homes with neighbors whose walls are only 10 feet from my own, I retired to 80 acres in Nevada where we can’t see a single house from our place. (It is glorious!) But we wouldn’t have DishTV, or high speed fiber internet without all those people living in Los Angeles, London, Moscow, and a thousand other cities. We couldn’t even sustain the mentioned luxuries with a planetary population of 160 million people, let alone the 160 thousand I’ve heard some say is the limit of this planet. Those people need to get out a little – see the world. They need to study up on technology – see how difficult it is to create a 14 nm chip manufacturing facility – let alone the design or the chip itself. In the 80’s I heard that the Macintosh OS was the result of 10,000 man years of software development. How do you do that with a small population?
A peaking population is likely the result of having machines that do agriculture, washing clothes, etc., so that we don’t need 10 kids to perform that labor. Maybe we’ll be alright with only 10 billion people on the planet. Maybe we need Mars to grow beyond that and really open new worlds to us.
In a review of the book “Ten Billion” by Stephen Emmott at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/09/stephen-emmott-population-book-misanthropic?
Chris Gooddall of the green think tank Carbon Commentary says:
“Emmott’s book is error-strewn, full of careless exaggeration and weak on basic science. Its reliance on random facts pulled from the internet is truly shocking and it will harm the cause of environmental protection. As might be expected, the best sceptic bloggers are already deconstructing its excesses line-by-line”.
By “the best sceptic bloggers” Gooddall presumably means Jo Nova, Donne Laframboise, Willis Eschenbach and me. It’s only slightly ironic that I’m not allowed to comment on the article, since I’ve been banned six times from commenting at the Guardian for the crime of persistent disagreement. If anyone else feels like commenting, you’ve got an open goal there, (or net, or whatever it is you have in your North American games).