Cause and Effect
How much did humans contribute to this year’s extreme weather events?
As hurricane Irene blasted up the eastern seaboard in August, it left record damage in its wake. Rivers in 10 states reached all-time highs, and communities suffered devastating floods. In all, it made 2011 the worst year, in terms of economic damage, from weather/climate disasters in the past 31 years. Yet Irene’s severity wasn’t exactly unexpected. Intense Atlantic hurricanes have been growing in number since the 1970s. Heat waves have become more common since the 1950s and droughts more widespread. And this summer was the second warmest in recorded history, after only 1936.
The public has begun to suspect that the severe weather is due to human-caused climate change and to wonder whether it will be the norm in a warmer world. Rising atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations trap heat in the air, causing surface temperatures to rise. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, likely leading to heavier rain events and worse flooding and drought in some areas. That all sounds like what we saw in 2011, but climatologists caution that it’s too soon to tell exactly what role climate change played.
It’s hard because “we don’t understand very well the potential role of natural variations in these severe weather events,” says Tom Knutson, a NOAA meteorologist who studies climate change’s effects and hurricanes. Further complicating the issue: Weather records vary widely. “We can’t make concrete conclusions yet,” he says. “There are too many unknowns.”
Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Australia’s Monash University who’s helping spearhead the International Panel on Climate Change’s latest science chapter on extremes, agrees. While “almost certainly global warming is exacerbating at least some weather and climate extremes,” he says, “we don’t have conclusive proof, at least as yet,” to definitively link our emissions with the extreme weather. Those sentiments are reflected in an IPCC report (PDF) on extreme weather released on November 18. Researchers concluded that there’s “high confidence” that the increase in maximum and minimum daily temperatures across the globe is due to humans pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as are more intense and longer droughts in some regions. (The IPCC’s next all-encompassing report is expected in 2013/2014.)
Still, the recent IPCC report and other research underscores that while no single weather event can be pegged to global climate trends, there’s evidence that some events will become more frequent. In 2010 Knutson and colleagues announced findings that indicate category 4 and 5 Atlantic hurricanes could double in number by century’s end, and that rainfall rates near these storms’ cores could rise 20 percent. The IPCC also projects rampant heat waves, droughts, and flooding this century, all likely exacerbated by human interference with the climate.
With evidence mounting and the consequences of inaction so catastrophic, Congress and the White House continue to dither. And at the climate talks underway in Durban, South Africa—attended by delegates from more than 190 countries—it doesn’t appear that there will be any breakthroughs regarding an international agreement to reign in greenhouse gas emissions. “We need to invest in solutions that will help lower emissions and transition us to cleaner forms of energy to head off some of the most severe consequences,” says Rachel Cleetus, a Union of Concerned Scientists senior climate economist. While new federal laws aren’t on the table now, she’s optimistic that this year’s storms will raise awareness. “Maybe the next time we have an opportunity to enact climate legislation, there will be a groundswell of support that makes politicians vote the right way.”
A Colossal Misunderstanding of the most important thing
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably and pseudoscientifically viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature, somehow disconnected from the population dynamics of other evolved species on Earth. The possible causes of human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure and numerous, so they have said for many too many years, that an adequate understanding of the cause of human population growth, much less a strategy to address the emerging and converging ecological problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species, has been assumed to be unapproachable. Their preternatural grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of human population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers ad infinitum, and like the endless expansion of the global economy, without adverse impacts. The dogmatic adherence of these politically correct experts to erroneous, unscientific theory regarding automatic population stabilization around the midpoint of Century XXI and a benign demographic transition to a good life for the human community at large cannot be accepted any longer as if it is based upon the best available evidence.
Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers is knowable as a natural phenomenon. Despite all the misleading, intellectually dishonest and deliberately deceptive ‘scientific research’ to the contrary, Homo sapiens can be shown to be, and now seen, as a species that is a part of and definitely not separate from the natural world we inhabit. Experts in politics, economics and demography have consciously fostered and continue obdurately to countenance a perilous disconnect between ecological science and political economy. Perhaps politics, economics and demography are themselves disciplines that are fundamentally disconnected from science. They appear to have more in common with ideology rather than science. To suggest as many too many politicians, economists and demographers have been conveniently doing that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics has so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems wrongheaded and dangerous.
According to research of Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., and David Pimentel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and the recent, skyrocketing growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misconception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more. Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately 2% per year. All segments of it grow by about two percent. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall as well as more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s research suggests that the spectacularly successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continues to result in even greater human population numbers worldwide. The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension, a colossal misunderstanding. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production and then distributing it cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late. Even so, this realization does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that the population dynamics of humankind is not biologically different from, but essentially common to the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, non-human organisms and even microorganisms have similar population dynamics. In all cases the governing relationship between food supply and population numbers of any living thing is this: food is independent variable and population numbers is the dependent variable. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because non-human species and what we call “primitive” human communities are not engaged in food production. Please note that among tribes of people in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors of “civilized” people not increasing their food production and distribution capabilities annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food. Prior to the Agricultural Revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human beings; and no food equals no people. The idea that food production must be increased to meet the needs of growing human population has been actually giving rise to skyrocketing human population numbers, not only since the Industrial Revolution but even more recently and intensively with the onset of the Green Revolution that began sixty years ago.