Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I went over to Andy Revkin’s site to be entertained by his latest fulminations against “denialists”. Revkin, as you may remember from the Climategate emails, was the main go-to media lapdog for the various unindicted Climategate co-conspirators. His latest post is a bizarre mishmash of allegations, bogus claims, and name-calling. Most appositely, given his history of blind obedience to his oh-so-scientific masters like Phil Jones and Michael Mann, he illustrated it with this graphic which presumably shows Revkin’s response when confronted with actual science:
I was most amused, however, to discover what this man who claims to be reporting on science has to say about the reason for the very existence of his blog:
By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. In Dot Earth, which moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section in 2010, Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Conceived in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Dot Earth tracks relevant developments from suburbia to Siberia.
Really? Let’s look at the numbers put up by this charmingly innumerate fellow.
Here’s how the numbers play out. I agree with Revkin, most authorities say the population will top out at about nine billion around 2050. I happen to think they are right, not because they are authorities, but because that’s what my own analysis of the numbers has to say. Hey, color me skeptical, I don’t believe anyone’s numbers.
In any case, here are the FAO numbers for today’s population:
PRESENT GLOBAL POPULATION: 7.24 billion
PRESENT CHINESE POPULATION: 1.40 billion
PRESENT POPULATION PLUS REVKIN’S “TWO CHINAS”: 10.04 billion
So Revkin is only in error by one billion people … but heck, given his historic defense of scientific malfeasance, and his ludicrous claims about “denialists” and “denialism”, that bit of innumeracy pales by comparison.
Despite that, Revkin’s error is not insignificant. From the present population to 9 billion, where the population is likely to stabilize, is an increase of about 1.75 billion. IF Revkin’s claims about two Chinas were correct, the increase would be 2.8 billion. So his error is 2.8/1.75 -1, which means his numbers are 60% too high. A 60% overestimation of the size of the problem that he claims to be deeply concerned about? … bad journalist, no cookies.
Now, for most science reporters, a 60% error in estimating the remaining work to be done on the problem they’ve identified as the most important of all issues, the problem they say is the raison d’etre of their entire blog … well, that kind of a mistake would matter to them. They would hasten to correct an error of that magnitude. For Revkin, however, a 60% error is lost in the noise of the rest of his ludicrous ideas and his endless advocacy for shonky science …
My prediction? He’ll leave the bogus alarmist population claim up there on his blog, simply because a “denialist” pointed out his grade-school arithmetic error, and changing even a jot or a tittle in response to a “denialist” like myself would be an unacceptable admission of fallibility …
My advice?
Don’t get your scientific info from a man who can’t add to ten … particularly when he is nothing but a pathetic PR shill for bogus science and disingenuous scientists …
w.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Willis – I strongly disagree with you on your post. While I do not agree with all of Andy’s views, he is one of the most objective and open journalists in the mainstream media. He has provided a much needed forum for debate.
I have no idea why you choose to attack him when there is plenty of science to discuss and analyze.
I also prefer that WUWT not post personal attacks on anyone. This only demeans the website which is otherwise an outstanding forum for a much-needed debate on climate science which is not available at most other venues..
Roger Sr.
Interesting, 7.24bn People If each had a space of 4′ X 6′ you would require 173.76bn Sq’ of space or 6323 Sq Mi. At 10,900 sq mi, the entire world population could fit on 3/5 of the space of Hawaii
Well said Dr.Pielke. Eschenbach is the last person to judge over other persons, while Revkin is certainly pro AGW, he is one of the more moderate people in the discussion.
Willis you are nitpicking this time: 7+2=9
Ha Ha
Roger A. Pielke Sr. says:
February 22, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Always someone who doesn’t like the way the sausage gets made.
Isn’t this the same Revkin who described Greenland ice in units of Manhattan’s melted?
Same guy who describes downwelling infrared radiation in “Hiroshima bombs” added?
Yeah don’t want to question his numbers – cause that would be rude.
Roger, the thing is I don’t want to wake up one morning to discover I’m living in a Venezuelian analog, due to excessive politeness.
I think he makes a fair point. We have a demonstrably imperfect understanding of physical and atmospheric processes – eg: 17 year standstill and other historic medium term changes in climate. However it is entirely plausible that the climate will change as a result of human impacts and a real risk that the current standstill is simply a pause not the new reality. In any event the benefits may outweigh the negative impacts, and the jury is still out on whether the costs of mitigation, even if IPCC fears are realised, can be justified.
Growth in human population is the real problem, notwithstanding an inability to add two numbers together with an accuracy of less than 60%. Historic trends provide only limited confidence that total population will stabilise, albeit at a higher level than current. Even if the projection is correct, the risks from increasing populations is likely to be far greater than that from moderate climate change – stress over resources, conflict, loss of natural habitats, loss of species, social unrest, increasing state control over human activities etc.
The killer point, though, is that human activity stands accused of driving climate change. The win-win strategy is population reduction which mitigates both risks. Focussing only on CO2 reduction is unlikely to be effective with the upward pressure on resource consumption as improved living standards are pursued. A much more difficult challenge with moral and religious implications. However If we don’t address the population issue directly, any action on CO2 will ultimately be futile.
Terry
Thanks, Roger.
And a note to Willis Eschenbach about carelessness (I agree that my 2007 population math – there from the first day of the blog – badly needs updating; leaving it up unchanged this long was careless).
Despite repeated references to David Victor in the introduction to the Denialism post, you somehow missed that it was the text of a lecture by him at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
All of the assertions you complain about are his.
This is a guest post – kind of like yours here at WUWT.
I’m sure Anthony doesn’t agree with everything you wrote. I don’t agree with everything David said. But it’s important in open forums to air a range of views.
As for your lapdog references, etc., sheesh….
(Accidentally posted under an unrelated WordPress ID a minute ago.)
[Thank you for the response. If so, to maintain traceability and accountability, should the “unrelated” item be deleted? Mod]
[Andy’s identical comment under “pacebrazil2014” – deleted, and no I don’t agree with this post entirely. – Anthony]
Willis
I endorse Roger Pielke Sr.’s comments.
A simple PS on that error would be sufficient.
Far more important is to address the challenge of how to provide fuels to replace the 6%/year depletion rate in current oil wells. while the population grows 24% to 9 billion (say the current 1.5%/yr), say 2.5%/year to allow for economic growth. i.e., how do you find replacement fuels for 10%/year of current crude oil production (then add for depletion of natural gas liquids etc. used for fuel.)
See: Kjell Aleklett’s post: The IEA raises a little warning flag on future oil production – World Energy Outlook 2013
This is 2014 and he is talking about conscripting the people of 2050 to our vision of future needs. That is the equivalent of our being handed a world designed by the futurists of 1978. If one could bring the most brilliant of minds forward from 1978 to today that person would be a babe in the woods around our contemporary technology and the way time has change our world. Nobody would listen.
Mr. Revkin – you sir are an imperious ass and a moron today and you would considered the same in 2050 should any of your vacuous screeds survive.
Revkin’s post (at least the part on “climate denialism”) is based on a speech by David Victor. He doesn’t appear to be making a comment about it pro or con, so it’s difficult to know how he actually views it. In any case, since the views are those of David Victor’s, he is probably the one who needs attacking. Among the things he said was this:
“We should talk less about consensus and more about the consequences of being wrong—about the lower probability (or low consensus) but high consequence outcomes.” I’m reminded of Greg Craven and his idiotic outcomes grid (“The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See”). In other words, they just want to side-step the science and go right to policy. They know they’ve lost on the science. But with policy, they can play these mind games, and try to scare people.
I’ve long suspected that the real ‘Green’ agenda behind AGW and ‘de-carbonising’ our society is a population cull of some sort. Having an interest in demographics – it was once an essential part of a ‘planning’ role I filled – I have tried to follow the world population trend ever since, and while it does seem likely that 9 billion will be achieved, the interesting question is; where will the biggest growth occur. At present Europe’s population is ‘growing’ only because os inward migration. This is true of the UK, North America and Australia as well. China has recently relxed its ‘one child’ policy, because there are now around 1.6 males for every female and a large proportion of their younger males will never find a marriage partner. India, despite its growing population, set to equal or overtake China’s in the not too distant future, faces a similar imbalance, but with typically Asian ingenuity, they are trying to attract brides from Europe and elsewhere.
The big and unchecked growth remains in the poorest nations where child mortality rates are highest, though, with modern medicine, these were, until recently, falling. The anti-vaccination campaigns in many western countries, however, have impacted in ‘developing’ nations and the killers of TB, Polio, various Poxes and even plague are making a come-back. How much of that is factored into the growth predictions I do not know. I do know that southern africa, specifically South Africa, is now saddled with a population of over 50 million when the agricultural resources can probably – according to an expert I used to know – support about half that number, and would be better able to support about a third of it.
So, perhaps the Green/AGW peeps have a point. It does come down to far too many people. Now, the BIG question is – which of the world’s peoples should be culled …
Sorry I really don’t see the sense of this post. He made a rule of thumb estimate, and it is a quite acceptable approximation. So, no matter if it is silly to be a afraid about rising population or not, the calculation is fine. And guess what, natural science is all about approximations (ye of course not that silly ones about population growth), we don’t do pure science which applies only to mathematics.
Back to the topic, this is just a very disturbing ad-hominem attack. I know you could do better.
Oh dear, the Revkins of this world lurch from bad to worse. You can hear the temper tantrum in the cave even from this side of the globe and as Anthony says, Revkin not be taking down the numbers soon. After all, the rest of the true believers will need more false information to thrive on for a few months.
And so it continues.
Max Erwengh (1:17pm) confuses an accurate attack on numbers with an ad hominem attack. Mislabeling is so convenient when you’re called out. You need to do an awful lot better, Erwengh.
I think we usually denote precision by the number of decimal places, and since Andy said “nine” billion, which has no decimal places, rather than “9” billion or “9.0” billion or “9,000,000,000.0”, he’s rounding to the nearest billion, (don’t we all ?) and because China is closer to “one” billion than “two” billion, twice China’s “one” billion is “two” billion, which added to “seven” billion makes “nine” billion.
Roughly.
Terry:
At February 22, 2014 at 1:01 pm you assert
No, that is plain wrong. Population decrease is the real foreseeable problem.
The world population is projected to peak around 2050 and then to decline. There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries.
Increased affluence in poor countries could be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries. Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
The stresses from overpopulation which you describe derive from the mistaken Malthusian idea that human population acts like bacterial population in a Petri dish: i.e. population increases until resources are consumed then collapses. But that is plain wrong. For all practical purposes the resources used by humans can be considered to be infinite, and that is why ALL Malthusian predictions have been wrong.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
As I said in the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to this obvious truth.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish.
Richard
What he doesn’t seem to understand is that he’s a ‘useful idiot’, ‘shill’, whatever, for the political powers that want to gain control over every aspect of our lives, down to the air that we breathe, even to tax breathing (which is what a carbon tax is ultimately. As in all things, corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do. They pass along the cost of the tax to consumers AND energy is a ‘product’ that people cannot simply decide not to buy or select a substitute for, they HAVE to have it). That he doesn’t see that is very sad.
Roger A. Pielke Sr. says:
February 22, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Roger:
I share your dislike of personal attacks but they are common even in the history of unpoliticized science, let alone in politics. Unfortunately, much of climate science today is intertwined with the nastiest brand of personal attack politics. I agree with your appeal to moderation but I am skeptical about the outcome. Too many proponents of the CAGW theory choose to play dirty.
Is it not a sad state of public discourse that “one of the most objective and open journalists in the mainstream media” sees it fit to crown his contribution with an inflammatory headline and accompany it by a picture of obviously stupid monkeys?
Revkin’s article about David Victor’s speech is titled:
A Look at the ‘Shills,’ ‘Skeptics’ and ‘Hobbyists’ Lumped Together in Climate Denialism
I am sure you notice he puts quotes around “shills”—as he quotes Victor—but none around the asinine “climate denialism” insult. This seems to be his standard usage.
I am sorry but I have little respect for “objective and open” journalism of this kind. I will not call Andrew Revkin names here but it seems he sees no problem with doing so to others in his mission of shaping public opinion.
What I find most interesting about Revkin’s article is the language. He consistently uses “Denialist”, “Denialism” instead of “Denier”, “Denial”. And it isn’t just Revkin doing it – most of the people he quotes are doing it too. This looks to me like yet another orchestrated language shift along the lines of global warming –> climate change –> climate weirding –> etc. It is bizarre the way they keep switching language. Who decides these things?
Anyway, as people do not speak of Holocaust denialists or Holocaust denialism, this looks to me like an attempt to hide their tracks and make the smear less obvious. The new language is close enough to the old to still be offensive. But the slight distance gives plausible deniability so that if someone takes them to task over the use of the D word they can pretend we are too sensitive and it is all just a coincidence.
(I suspect this is headed for the moderation queue due to use of the D word.)
David L. Hagen:
I answer the question in your post at February 22, 2014 at 1:05 pm in my post addressed to Terry at February 22, 2014 at 1:41 pm.
My post is in moderation limbo but if it does appear then I think this will be a link to it.
Richard
You’re both wrong. Way wrong. The UN spreadsheet to look at is the Low Fertility one, previously the Low Band. It’s the only one ever even close to accurate. It says peak at ~8bn in 2045 or so, declining continuously thereafter. If you want to play Demographer, have a boo at this:
http://www.fpri.org/ww/0505.200407.eberstadt.demography.html
Seems too of some note and of need to be included in the math would be the current numbers on abortions along with the sterilizations of women in China. Seems to be sure to cause a some what different out come on the date and numbers.
The population might only be going up to 9 billion by 2050, or 30% on today’s figures, but emissions are going to go up even faster. Global CO2 emissions in 1990 were 22.2 bn tonnes. They rose to 33.6 billion tonnes in 2010. By my calculation emissions will be 60 billion tonnes in 2050, or 2.7 times higher than in 1990.
The rich countries of Australia, Canada, EU, Japan and USA (ACEJU) have figures of 10.7, 11.2 and 11.0. If all the rich countries reduce their emissions by 80% (like Britain is crazily trying to do), then CO2 emissions will be still 2.3 times higher than in 1990. If, like Andy Revkin, you believe the climate catastrophe that these emissions levels will cause, then the rich countries will have done little to abte the costs of these nasty consequences, but will have to bear the huge costs of cutting those emissions. In Britain, Germany and elsewhere, these those costs are turning out to be far higher than anyone projected.
“By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today`’
if so we should rejoice, agriculture is feeding this many people which means the climate is in better shape then than now.
As far as I know when the climate goes pear shaped the first thing to suffer is agriculture and then the population, I could list the civilizations effected by climate in the past but i think we all know.