Two anti-growth movements were launched by radical environmentalists in the 1970s. A PopulationControl movement argued that that there were too many people, resources would soon run out, and billions die if drastic population curbing measures weren’t adopted. Believing this, Chinese Communist leaders adopted a brutal One Child Only policy which has had disastrous present consequences. Environmentalists launched an equally hysterical Global Warming movement by arguing that immediate drastic government action was needed to phase out the consumption of fossil fuels. This was to save Earth from runaway warming, given fossil fuel combustion’s side effect of producing CO2, a greenhouse gas.
China’s present demographic crisis is a casualty of the population control movement, a sister movement to anti-fossil fuel, global warming catastrophism. The movement was launched in the US and at the UN in the early 1970s. Its proponents argued that there were too many people consuming the Earth’s limited resources. Resources would soon run out, and billions of people die if urgent measures were not quickly put in place. Population growth needed to be cut back to less than replacement rate, by government coercion if necessary. A prestigious Chinese rocket scientist, Song Jian, after a visit to the Netherlands in which he was tutored in the fancy mathematical and systems modeling encouraged by The Limits to Growth and the Meadows-Forrester team at MIT that authored it, carried the gospel back to Beijing, along with the message that without severe population restriction, China could never grow into a modern economy.
Chinese premier Deng Hsiao Ping and the Central Committee were hypnotized by Song’s “expert” testimony and proceeded to adopt China’s One Child Only policy. Books and papers by Stephen Mosher, Robert Zubrin, Mei Fong, Susan Greenhalgh, and a recent Wall Street Journal article provide further details of how the Malthusian Limits to Growth program came to be adopted by the Chinese state, the unprecedented cruelty of the policy’s implementation there, and the demographic disaster it led to forty years later.
Different outcomes in India and the US
During Indhira Gandhi’s administration, specifically the Emergency Rule period from 1975 to 1977, Indhira’s son Sanjay implemented a cruel but mercifully briefer version of the environmentalists’ Club of Rome program. It focused on vasectomies for men, was massively unpopular, and was terminated a few years after its initiation. It contributed to the defeat of her government in 1977.
In the US, the Limits to Growth thesis was intellectually destroyed by population economist Julian Simon, It received a further death blow when Nobel economist Paul Krugman quoted Nobel economist William Nordhaus as describing the methodology of The Limits to Growth as “garbage-in-garbage-out.”
That phrase, garbage-in-garbage-out, should have been the motto of the other phase of Malthusian environmentalism, the Global Warming movement. Just as the Population Control movement complained that doom was near and action urgent, the Global Warming catastrophists no less frantically urged immediate drastic government action to restrict the consumption of fossil fuels. This was to prevent the planet from dangerous heating, given fossil fuel consumption’s side effect of increasing CO2, a greenhouse gas.
So much for growth and a rising standard of living
Inasmuch as fossil fuels are the principal energy source of present-day civilization, the proposal was effectively a call to throttle economic growth in favor of a steady-state or shrinking economy that would complement the severely reduced population the Limits to Growth book was agitating for.
Many of the same people, especially UN figures (Maurice Strong, Dr. Mostafa Kamal Tolba), played leading roles in both Malthusian movements. Unlike the population control movement, which is largely dead at this point, the global-warming-catastrophists now dominate the US Democratic Party and the left and socialist parties of Europe, Canada, and Australia. They and their cohorts and policies are as much a world-historical disaster as China’s One Child policy.
William Happer speaking at an event in Teaneck, New Jersey. (photo by Gage Skidmore)
As for the Global Warming movement’s scientific status, Princeton emeritus physics professor William Happer writes:
There is no credible scientific support for the claim that the current warming is, or will be, an existential threat to humanity. On the contrary, more atmospheric CO2 will probably turn out to have been a major benefit to life on Earth, since additional CO2 has such a positive effect on the productivity of agriculture forestry and on photosynthetic life in general.[1]
A movement driven by politics rather than science
Indicating how politically – as opposed to scientifically – driven the global warming movement is, almost all Republicans oppose the movement’s attempts to restrict fossil fuel consumption. Conversely, almost all Democrats endorse it. Despite neither party’s members understanding much about the scientific issues involved, the instincts of the Republicans, nevertheless, are sound. From long experience, especially from the Covid epidemic, they have a justified suspicion of expert testimony underwritten by hundreds of millions of their tax dollars to achieve dubious benefits while raising the costs of gasoline, heating oil, agriculture, and all the rest of the commodities they must purchase to maintain their standard of living.
Fortunately for Republicans, their instincts prove sound in this case – as opposed to their support for trade protection and immigration restriction. The scientific case for a movement to suppress fossil-fuels in the name of saving the planet from disastrous global warming is very weak. For that reason, Democrats have resorted to vilification of their opponents, censorship, driving away advertisers from their opponents’ websites, and refusing to debate – the latter after serial losses to Steven Koonin in Oxford-style debates.
Historical failure, weak ECS case
The major problem for global warming catastrophists is that their theory that the CO2 byproduct of increased fossil fuel consumption directly causes planetary warming, while superficially plausible for the post-1976 period, falls flat on its face when it attempts to explain the temperature and CO2 data from most other historical periods going back 500 million years. This will hardly do. A theory that fails for most of the data it needs to explain is an embarrassment. But Democratic politicians don’t care. Global Warming theory is politically useful for grabbing political control over all aspects of the economy, and what Democrat politician isn’t interested in that kind of power, scientific niceties be damned? This gambit, however, can only succeed if the dissenting scientific voices are suppressed.
Unable to handle historical climate data, climate catastrophists emphasize the relatively high Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) that their models crank out as output once favorable feedback estimates – the “garbage in” component — are fed into the models as inputs. The ECS value – the “garbage out” component — represents the warming that would be produced by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 after the oceans have had time to equilibrate. Recent reports from the UN’s IPCC come up with a “best value” estimate of 3o Celsius (roughly 5o Fahrenheit). This ECS value suggests a dominance of positive feedback mechanisms if fossil fuel consumption continues at its present pace and predicts unacceptable planetary warming by the year 2100.
Negative feedbacks dominate
Earth, however, for the past five hundred million years, the Phanerozoic, despite swings in temperature, atmospheric composition, and occasional large-scale extinctions, has been uniquely favorable to the thriving and diversification of life by comparison with the rest of the solar system. That strongly suggests that negative feedbacks dominate and thus a lower ECS than 3o Celsius. Professor Happer suggests a value of 0.75o Celsius.
As Professor Happer notes,
It is very hard to defend a climate sensitivity as large as 3°C. Most estimates of the direct, ‘instantaneous’ effects of a doubling of the CO2 concentration, a 100% increase, imply a decrease of radiation to space of only about 1%. Because of the T4 Stefan-Boltzman law of isothermal blackbody radiation, which remains approximately valid for Earth with its greenhouse gases, a 1% flux decrease can be made up for with a 0.25% increase of the absolute temperature T. An approximate value of T is about 300 K, so the feedback-free temperature increase from doubling CO2 should be about 0.75 K or S = 0.75°C. To get a politically correct sensitivity, say S = 3°C, requires that positive feedbacks increase this number by a factor of 4 or 400%. But most natural feedbacks are negative, not positive, in accordance with Le Chatelier’s Principle.[2]
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Yesteryear’s Chinese Communists and today’s climate alarmists ignored the Hippocrates’-inspired classical medical admonition, primum non nocere — “first, do no harm.” Instead, they based expensive and destructive policies on incomplete knowledge of complex phenomena. Friedrich Hayek called such pseudo-science “scientism,” the superficial appearance of science without its substance.
[1] William Happer, Foreword to Javier Vinós, Solving the Climate Puzzle, The Sun’s Surprising Role” (Critical Science Press. Kindle Edition). [2] Op. cit.
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