Will Billions Perish?

The problem with allowing politicians and other non-scientists to practice science is that they have no idea what they are doing and may get things so dreadfully wrong that vast numbers of people are seriously harmed. To the politically inclined, science is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Real scientists are fascinated by the complexity of the world. Non-scientists dread it. They want simple explanations that suit their simple minds and ulterior motives.

A case in point is amateur scientist and billionaire Bill Gates, whose recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, claims that the case against carbon dioxide is rock solid. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas. And we should consider polluting the stratosphere with millions of tons of chalk to reflect the sun’s rays. That is all wrong, dangerously wrong. Anyone with scientific training recognizes that water vapor (humidity) is the premier greenhouse gas. Every adult realizes that the Earth’s climate has not changed much over his or her lifetime. Despite large variations, the climate is obviously not going anywhere fast. The Global Temperature Anomaly measured by NASA satellites was slightly below normal in April, reflecting a modest La Nina.

A far better recent book, Unsettled, by Steven Koonin points out that the science of climate is anything but settled in favor of alarmists. And he has impeccable credentials, as a theoretical physicist at New York University and as a former top Obama Administration scientist.

Koonin challenges the major teachings of climate orthodoxy: “Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900” and “the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.” “Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.” “Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.” “The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.” Hence, there is no urgency to do anything about man-made carbon dioxide.

The Gates proposal to dump millions of tons of chalk into the stratosphere could go dreadfully wrong and produce a ‘Year Without a Summer’, as occurred in 1816 after the explosion of Mt. Tambora in present day Indonesia. That in turn brought about the greatest famine of the 19^th century.

The most obvious way to avoid climate disasters is to ignore those who do not understand elementary climate science and to prepare for the worst disasters that Mother Nature can throw at us.

Bill Gates is far from the worst of the human threats. The biggest ones come from those who have the power to ruin the planet and every reason to do so in pursuit of absolute power. I am obviously thinking of the big actors on today’s political stage: President Biden, President Xi, and President Putin. They command enough resources that they can do plenty of damage. Biden promises vast damage to implement his Green New Deal; Xi promises to help while not helping at all; Putin, lacking the economic clout of his rivals, just sits back and chuckles at their follies. His predecessors in the Soviet Union tried large scale weather modifications and came up empty. The Russian climate is still as inhospitable as it ever was.

To understand why so many lives are at risk from climate nonsense, we need to consider where we have come since 1969, when Paul Ehrlich predicted that “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.”“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s” ( from Ehrlich’s 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe!).

Although Ehrlich is often cited as the premier alarmist of our time, he was correct that the growth of the human population was outstripping the global food supply and widespread famine could have occurred, as it has many times in the past. But it did not. Why?

The explanation is that competent science prevailed over all the purveyors of doom and gloom, with their heavily political motives. A great agronomist by the name of Norman Borlaug, figured out how to dramatically increase food production in countries on the brink of starvation. Those countries were Mexico, Pakistan, and India. Much of the remainder of the world followed Borlaug’s lead in developing cereal grains that were optimized for high yields in each area. Borlaug’s innovations included energy intensive farming methods and fertilizers. His work defines ‘Modern Agriculture.’

Figure 1 shows what Borlaug was able to accomplish by developing semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat. These in conjunction with the introduction of modern farming techniques, turned countries that previously had to import food into self-sufficient nations or even exporters. This vast increase in world food production is called The Green Revolution. Borlaug is credited with saving a billion people from starvation. For his monumental contributions to humanity, Dr. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold medal, and many other major awards.

Borlaug had a silent partner that should be acknowledged: rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, as shown in Figure 2. We know from the work of Sherwood and Craig Idso that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 dramatically improve agricultural production, as shown in Table 1. Figure 3 shows the famous pictures of Sherwood Idso’s pine tree experiments. He demonstrated substantially increased growth, thanks completely to enhanced carbon dioxide.

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is hugely beneficial.

But no one wants to ask the obvious questions. What happens if scientifically illiterate people, egged on by relentless propaganda from political opportunists, become so superstitious that they fear the scientific progress of the last 400 years or even the last 100 years. Do they aggressively start to dismantle that progress, as President Biden is promising to do? If they should accomplish what they promise with CO2, what will happen?

Biden wants to roll back atmospheric CO2 to something like 350 ppm, because he fears the very gas that sustains all life on this planet. That takes us back to the late 1980s, when the Earth sustained only five billion people. A 65 ppm drop will decrease food production by about 10%.

Other moves to dismantle energy intensive agriculture by eliminating diesel tractors and eliminating fertilizers made from natural gas threaten to return agriculture to the days before Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution. Even his genetically-modified “GMO” super crops are under attack.

Do we really want to abandon pillars of the modern world, just because scientific illiterates have become superstitious about real progress? The UN World Food Program has already expressed alarm at our large-scale burning of corn-based ethanol instead of petroleum for motor fuel, because it threatens famine in poor countries.

Sustainability will take on a whole new meaning as the human population now at nearly eight billion is not sustainable beyond three billion in Biden’s Post-Modern world. How many will perish?

Reversing scientific progress to suit the superstitious is dangerous.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.