Limits to Growth – or We’re All Gonna Die

 

William R. Forstchen had an excellent piece recently at American Thinker on today’s climate crisis:

Oh my God -- we’re doomed.  The UN’s Panel on Climate Change came out with a frightening report earlier this month that we are sitting on a global time bomb, and according to CNN, “time is running out,” without immediate drastic action.  The UN report states that if global temperatures reach 1.5 C above the pre-industrial temperature norm of 1850-1900, the resulting melting of the polar ice caps, rising oceans, and unprecedented ecological disaster will follow.

I read this a few days back on a dark and stormy night while working on my own tome about disaster, the next book in the One Second After series.  One Second After examines what would happen if we were ever hit by an enemy using an Electro-Magnetic Pulse generated from detonating a nuclear weapon in space.  But ecological disaster, which is all but inevitable according to the highly respected UN report, was far more frightening.  Closing off working on my book, I brewed yet another cup of coffee, sat back and pulled out a well-respected study on this existential threat to all mankind.

I started to thumb through the pages of a work that took a team of international experts years to research and has sold well over 12 million copies since publication.

I turned to the chapter on fossil fuels.  The report states we have only about twenty more years of oil out there, we are already at peak oil, which will then start to go downhill and the wells will run dry no matter how much we scramble to get more.  There will be a final rush to pump one more drop of oil even if at the cost of twenty dollars a gallon, but that in turn will accelerate the depletion into a death spiral.  Natural gas will not save us, as we turn to that source as oil runs out, we’ll deplete that as well.  Again, a death spiral. 

Climate is the big one this report.  Despite our feeble efforts to address the radical changes already taking place, the disaster will explode within ten to fifteen years, due in large part to the depletion of farmlands worldwide from the use of toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil exhaustion, and encroaching urban population.  The results: famine, disease, and mass starvation then triggering political instability in which hundreds of millions will die.

The list went on and on, a list that would render any sane reader numb with despair.  But me?  I could only smile at it all. . . 

The punchline:

You see, the book that I was reading, Limits to Growth, was published more than fifty years ago in 1972. . . .

And every predicted doomsday catastrophe has failed to materialize.  Read the rest here; Mr. Forstchen’s column includes specific doomsday scenarios with all those missed “deadlines.”

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An alternative to blowing up the sun

 

Mike Nuen had a stand-up comedy routine back in the 70s;  he proposed that in order to solve a few problems, all we had to do was blow up the sun.  Any potential consequences to the Earth’s climate or weather patterns could be easily handled by the Army Corps of Engineers.  He always got good laughs during the routine.

Now some group of demented climate change warriors (billed as the Climate Overshoot Commission) is seriously proposing something pretty similar. Here’s the headline and sub-head from PostMillenial:

Scientists Consider Dimming The Sun To Solve Climate Change

The Thomson Reuters Foundation asked
"Could 'dimming the sun' help turn down global heating?"
and said the answer may be stratospheric aerosol injection

So their deliberations include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere from aircraft -- specifically to interfere with incoming sunlight, and this presumably could “fix” the climate change “problem.”  Read about this insane proposal here.

“Dimming the Sun”?  What are they thinking?

I am not a scientist, just a concerned layperson.  But it would seem to be impossible to overstate how dangerous this idea is, and it is frightening to consider that the group is getting enough attention for the report to be linked on a major aggregator, Rantingly.  As far as I have read, science is nowhere near to understanding how and why the Earth’s climate cycles function as they do.  Scientists know certain contributing factors and variables, such as geothermal activity, the Earth’s axis in relation to the sun, and so on. Anthony Watts has a big page specifying potential variables at his website, WattsUpWithThat; click here.

In the not-too-distant past, Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, conducted experiments at the CERN particle accelerator to attempt to measure the impact of incoming “charged particles from the sun, [how they] interact with cosmic rays as they approach Earth” and how that interaction affects cloud seeding, arguing that “the amount of cloud cover determines how hot or cold the planet is.”  His hypothesis remains controversial;  many in the science community really did not want to hear about it;  see here.  That should tell anyone who is interested that the field of climate science remains in a state of uncertainty, with competing working hypotheses.  And like most other fields, politics and funding now play large roles in all of this.

As far as I have read, the uncertainties far outweigh any certainties concerning the multiple variables influencing Earth’s climate, it should be obvious that deliberate interference with the sun’s many effects on Earth would be not just foolhardy and reckless, but potentially suicidal. 

Earth’s climate has been variable during its 4+ billion year existence. We still don’t understand how it has taken care of itself.  Nobody seems to know what optimal temperatures are, much less how they might be sustained or reversed.  No idea.  Any deliberate interference surely COULD accelerate the next Ice Age.  Or worse.

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