by Vijay Jayaraj
Climate protestors destroying artworks and gluing themselves to roads without offering a shred of evidence for their alarm exhibit a malicious stupidity that is blind to the actual state of the world.
Why do these activists not hold up placards with graphs, histograms, and Venn diagrams? Because actual data show that life today is much better than at any time in human history. Ignored is the fact that the change in climate has made Earth better and helped to advance humanity.
Much of the progress in the last three centuries hinged on one important event in the 17th century: the waning of the Little Ice Age, which finally ended in the 1800s. Contrary to popular media and the politically correct, climate change has aided in the unprecedented growth of human civilization.
The Little Ice Age disrupted global plant growth and fostered periods of famine, disease and mass depopulation. However, since the advent of modern warming there has been an overall greening of the planet, more bountiful crop harvests and an eight-fold increase in humanity’s numbers. Contributing to the bounty has been the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric concentration has increased in recent decades.
Global maize (corn) production was approximately 205 million tons in 1961. Today the world produces five times more maize, — 1.16 billion tons. There have been similar increases for all major food crops, including rice, wheat, soybeans, cereals, nuts and vegetables.
Captures of marine fish during 1961–2018 increased from 34 million tons to 84 million tons. During the period, aquaculture production increased from two million tons to 82 million tons.
Meanwhile, malnourishment in developing countries reduced drastically from 34 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015, despite a rapidly growing population.
Improved nutrition and technological advancements have combined to make life not only better but also longer. In Oman, for example, the mortality rate for children under 5 dropped from 38 deaths per 100 births in 1950 to less than one. Similar progress has been registered across the world.
Transportation has become more affordable to the general population. Nominal prices for roundtrip airfare almost halved in the 2010s compared to 1980.
Electricity has become more available to households and businesses. In China alone, power generation increased by 18 times between 1950 and 2015, enabling 1.3 billion people to have greater access to electricity and experience remarkable economic growth.
People are better protected against nature’s fury than ever before. The annual death rate from natural disasters has plummeted globally since the 1920s and 1930s. This is because greater prosperity supported by cheap, abundant energy resources has provided sturdier infrastructure to withstand weather extremes and modern reporting systems to warn of dangers. Media reports of a world ransacked to an unprecedented extent by storms and floods are as false as the predictions of an overheated globe.
Species that were hunted to near extinction have been making a comeback, including the Arctic’s polar bears and India’s Bengal tigers. The number of humpback whales in the western South Atlantic doubled between 2006 and 2022. In Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, gray wolves increased from 1,100 in 1975 to 3,600 in 2018.
In all of the U.S., there were merely 487 bald eagle pairs in 1963. By 2006, there were approximately 10,000. Today, wind turbines remain the only major threat to bald eagles, with the government dismayingly allocating “bald eagle-killing quotas” for each machine.
So, notions of a climate emergency and a planet in terminal decline are fallacious. The numbers do not lie no matter how much art is despoiled or how many commuters are delayed by the misguided.
This commentary was first published at Real Clear Energy, December 14, 2022, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
Who imagines that GangGreen activists are interested in improved quality of life for anyone other than themselves?
The Mafia is more altruistic and humane than they are.
Yep. Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy. Read it again.
Those that support the various Marxist religious cults like GangGreen must be either stupid or evil! There are no other options when one considers history since the Russian Revolution.
The demonization of a trace gas that is the basis of ALL life is either sociopathic or nihilistic; our very bodies and virtually every product we use for food, clothing and shelter require CO2!
How many will be destroyed by this anti-human and anti-Life cult? Most likely more than all natural and man-made disasters previous!
“Since the end of the Cold War, every social metric relating to the global population’s health and material and social circumstances has shown unprecedented improvement. That is a devastating observation for a political movement that claims an equivalence between society’s sensitivity to climate and climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Eco-Hyperreality of Climate Science – The Bellows
Nevertheless, virtually everything related to the COVID pandemic has been detrimental to these metrics and well being in general.
For instance, excess deaths continue to be well above expected baselines in most industrialized nations.
“It’s a mystery,” they say. It seems to me it’s a result of intentional subjugation by the same powers that be who are pushing climate change.
Apparently, the UK NHS now has more funding, doctors, nurses etc than it did in 2019. Yet now it does much less than it did then.
That’s VFM (Value for Money)
One of the major problems, apart from staff shortages (over 130,000), the NHS has is bed blocking due to the dire state of community services in the UK. The Government has spent years deciding how to provide sufficient such services and how they are to be funded and have still not come up with any coherent plan.
The propaganda techniques which were successful for the climate crisis were scaled up for the COVID crisis.
Amazing the absurd things people will believe when it’s presented as unquestionable truth.
Here is a nice Xmas present for all my skeptical friends:
An evaluation of the greenhouse effect by carbon dioxide | Bread on the water
let me know what you think!
Nice article.
In the top chart, the CO2 concentration line should be continued over the same time range as temperature is instead of ending it at 2021. Along with this, it would be instructive to include similar charts covering other time scales.
As far as the top chart is concerned, I took this from the CO2 Coalition. I didn’t think they would mind, because it is clearly marked as coming from them and therefore it is a good advertisement for them. If there is anyone here from the CO2 Coalition that has an update on that chart re. the CO2?
I think I will put another graph on the bottom of my essay, to cover another time scale as well, as you suggested.
I have a problem showing the CO2 (going up) in one chart during a time when there was no change in global temperature. I now put two graphs at the end. What do you think?
I fixed it by scaling
Henry, I think your mental construct of the molecules behaving as reflective spheres is screwy. A body physically emits electromagnetic waves with an energy proportional to it’s temperature to the 4th power. If there is another body around at a colder temperature (but still warmer than absolute zero) some of those electromagnetic waves are “cancelled out” by the EM waves from the colder body. OK “cancelled out” isn’t tech-speak, but then neither is the shiny spheres construct.
Total energy emitted by a body at T is the area under the T curve. Energy “cancelled out” by the colder body is the area under the colder curve. Total Q that can be transferred is the big area minus the little area. And you can see that the curve for T=300 K (a warm summer day) still has a significant absorption from a 200 C (for illustrative purposes close to CO2’s 15 micron band, 193 C IIRC) absorber/emitter. And for a body at 300 C a 1% difference is 3 C, about 3 times the “global warming” number. So I get what you are saying, but I don’t know that the average environmental undergrad relying on his high school physics is going to.
I am not sure if you have understood my essay. It is not easy. The relationship between temperature and wavelength is given by Wien’s Law. This is what is shown in fig. 3.
I am saying that earth is not a black body (with emission then starting at 4 um if the top is 10.05 um.
I also don’t know if you understand spectrophotometry. What causes the extinction? If you think there is only absorption, and this absorption is continuously absorbed and changed into heat, should not my cuvettes eventually have exploded, after leaving it on for long times after finishing my test? (due to my forgetfulness in switching the instrument off)
Q -“what causes the extinction” A. -absorption of photons
Q- “ should not my cuvettes have exploded” A. – no they absorb and emit also. And the warmer they are, the more they emit.
And they emit over a fairly wide range. Weins law is just the temp a thermometer in contact with the object would show. A hot iron object will glow red at 1000 C, a few percent of its photons striking your retina…but red light at .7 microns has a Weins law temp of 4100 C, so like you say, it’s not easy….
Instead of the word emission, I mostly used the word reradiation or back radiation. Nothing wrong with that? Fig.2 proves that this is happening.
With a chart/graphic like this, there has got to be a way to apply the data to the mass of each green house gas in the atmosphere.
With an atmospheric mass of 5.2×10^15 and water vapor at 4% of the atmosphere, we have a mass of 208×10^12 worth of water vapor. With CO2 at 425 ppm, we end up with a mass of 2.21×10^12 worth of CO2. Throwing CH4 into the mix at 1.9 ppm gives a mass of .998×10^12.
For ease of reading, I kept the magnitude the same.
Can it be calculated the contributing factor or temperature value for each identified gas?
I should state the unit of measure is metric ton.
The back radiation of co2 to earth is cancelled by the backradiation of co2 to space. Methane absorbs at 7.5 um. The earth had no emission here. The net effect of more CH4 is therefore cooling rather than warming.
Water vapor overall isn’t anywhere near 4%. That would be the water content of air saturated at about 28 C and sea level. As you increase to top of troposphere 11 km up, water vapor drops to below 10 ppm. H2O has rained and snowed out as the air convected upward due to being slightly buoyant due to its water vapor content.
Humans have never had it so good … yet the bitching and fearmongering accelerates.
At the same time, the warmunists demand that we all have less … we’d better smile and vote Democratic while eating our reduced ration of gruel in the cold and the dark.
I’d like to bitch about the cold temperatures in the Colorado mountains. It’s -2F at Winter Park and will not warm much above that. So, it’s an extra layer of clothing in addition to hand warmers.
destroying artworks
Not so surprising, they are nihilists and misanthropes. Besides, the arts were captured long ago by the new ideologies and belief systems of the woke middle and upper middle classes [on behalf of the elites]. The hilarious part, however, is that totally right-on approved woke films with top line casts and rave reviews are tanking at the box office. Eg She Said.
Amazing art and sculpture can no longer be distinguished from any wrong or crime that may have been committed by the artist, they must be cancelled. There can be no redemption. Take the case of Eric Gill. And bear in mind he died in 1940 and that his diaries did not become public knowledge until 1989….
“A man has taken a hammer to a statue on the BBC’s Broadcasting House in central London. The Prospero and Ariel statue was carved by Eric Gill and has been on display at the BBC since 1933.
There has been a campaign to have the statue removed for several years, because the sculptor recorded sexually abusing his daughters in his diaries.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-59972806
Look out Caravaggio.
Whilst not wishing to condone abuse in any form, where do you stop?
Should every Epstein-produced movie be taken down?
Should musicians such as Jackson, countless rock stars and their groupies, and lately Madonna be banned from the airwaves?
If we banned all the work by these people Netflix and many radio stations would have nothing to do
I can make the distinction, I don’t ban art because I disapprove of the artist
Did you read my post?
This is important. LISTEN! Y’all are yelling in an echo chamber. You’re right, usually, and a whole lot righter than the greenieweenies, but you aren’t being heard by the reasonable people out there. There are some Things You Might Do immediately. There are some TYMD that you can figure out. But if y’all don’t figure it out, you’re just masturbating your egos. TYMD now:
1. Do not use abbreviations without a legend of some sort. You won’t get through to a home Economics teacher in Springfield without the key being prominent and understandable.
2. Make sure your units make sense. Confusing KWH (kilowatt hours) with MWH (megawatt hours), for instance, doesn’t play well with anyone In the food industry trying to understand what you’re blathering on about. They probably won’t read through to your conclusion. Worse, they’ll laugh at you and us.
3. When you mention that subsidies are payed to support stupid technologies, remind the Drywallers in Jacksonville who pays for those subsidies, (even people who don’t pay taxes pay for subsidies, in the inflation loss on their income).
4. Proofread, proofread, and poofread again. Blameing spellcheck is lame.
Start figuring out more TYMD. Now.
If it’s right, if it’s important, if it’s worth writing, then it’s worth sharing WIDELY. Here’s a thought: if an article , in being peer reviewed, is found especially worth sharing, it should be PROMOTED WIDELY. No, that is not being done. Trust me. IKWITA (g).
But all that improvement is anethema to a hardcore green, as people are a plague, in their view.
As the saying goes, capitalism lifted billions out of poverty while socialism was murdering 100M civilians and fomenting wars to kill more.
Malthusian delusion dominates modern environmentalism. Human innovation has led to more abundance of everything. The disconnect from reality echo chamber programming causes is the biggest threat to human development and freedom I have observed. These people don’t live in the real world.
Indeed, it is Malthus. When you hear the lament about “sustainability,” what you are really hearing is that there are too many people, every one every minute breathing out CO2, CO2, a gas, oh horror!! just like in the gas chambers. This is the mindset of environmentalism. It must be countered, some how, because it is just crazy. Who will stand up and tell us that the emperor has no clothes on, none whatsoever.
Energy in Africa
Two contrasting news articles appeared recently, one, that the Earth’s population had reached 8E9, and the second that the US is working hard to prevent South Africa from reaching energy parity with developed nations.
Sad.
I, and others, have pointed out that as a population increases in average prosperity, the drive to decrease family size decreases. This is partly due to cultural changes and also to the reduced need to hope that some part of your progeny will survive to take care of you in old age.
By trying to drive African nations to use Chinese solar panels to replace coal and oil drives these nations into the wrong cultural hands and further from self development.
But…where is a model of a good energy culture? Almost everyone has gone Woke Green, The WEF and CCP are certainly the stupidest governmental pattern ie you will be stupid of your culture and you will own nothing but we will tell you you are happy…..Or Else!
Perhaps France, with more nuclear and less EU and USA?
“the drive to decrease family size decreases”
I think you’re missing an “increase”.
Yes, windmills for Africa, just what they need!
Elevated living standards are not the aim of the Great Reset
The WEF etc, want western societies to regress to 3rd world conditions, not the elites of course, just the proles
The elites are anxious, with a growing global population, that resources will also become unavailable to them, despite their billions and that must be negated at all costs
There are global elite forces working on this daily, their weapons are nut zero, climate alarmism, CO2 vilification, EVs, renewables, covid and its global restrictions was likely one too – however, as History has shown over and over again, they will only push the common people so far
Somehow I think this plan (if true) is going to backfire. Who will be maintaining the elite’s airplanes and airports? Who will build and deliver new and shiny gadgets?
A medieval population? Sure.
“Ignored is the fact that the change in climate has made Earth better and helped to advance humanity.”
And now we have the Kardashians and Drag Queen Story Time.
Can we please bring back the LIA?