“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”
—Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), English demographer and political economist [i]
Part 2 of this timeline of climatism ended in 1615, with the Club of Rome Roman Inquisition perceiving Galilei's heliocentrism as foolish.
1670-1715
The Maunder Minimum was an extra-cold period during the Little Ice Age, named after Edward Maunder (1851-1928), the English astronomer, who noticed that it coincided with a period of sharp decline in solar activity.
The sun shows long-term variations with scales ranging from several decades to a few millennia in addition to the basic decadal-scale cycle, and sometimes brings deep minima (cold periods) in its activity, lasting for several decades or even more than a century. Man-made climate change sceptics argue that the sun is pretty big; and hot; and therefore has a major impact on climate, as the meme above implies. Today, it is almost impossible to get funding for climate research related to the solar cycles as it does not fit very well with the politicised alarmist man-made climate change narrative.
“I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!”
—Phil Jones, Director of Climate Research Unit, UEA, UK [1]
1733
John Kay (1704-79), the English inventor, patented the flying shuttle, which allowed a single weaver to weave much wider fabrics, thus allowing for mechanisation and automation. The Industrial Revolution, and with it, the consumer society, starts in earnest. By 1789, there were 2.4 million spinning machines in England, driven by hydropower.[2]
1769
James Watt (1736-1819), the Scottish inventor, patented his steam engine, a further landmark in the Industrial Revolution. Fast reserves of coal were essential for Britain’s economic ascent.
Cheap energy remains a key input factor for economic prowess, wealth creation, misery reduction, prosperity, and broadly distributed happiness. (The correlation coefficient between electrical energy consumption per capita in kWh and happiness based on the 2021 Happiness Report was 0.58 based on a regression including 145 countries.)
The world population was around 760 million at the time, and life expectancy was around 26 years. The one billion mark was reached in 1804. The 2-8 billion marks were reached in 1927, 1960, 1974, 1987, 1999, 2011, and 2022 respectively.
“The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.”
—Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Austrian School economist, in Human Action
1780s
Vulcanic eruptions in Japan and the Island in 1783 resulted in global cooling, crop failure, and rising food prices toward the end of the Little Ice Age. (In Bern, Switzerland, there was snow on 154 days in the winter of 1784/85, compared to around 0-20 days now.)
A drought in 1788 in Europe resulted in further rising food prices. In France, the population grew faster than food production. In the summer of 1788, hailstorms destroyed what was left of the crops, and the cold winter of 1788/89 brought economic activity to a standstill. In the spring of 1789, there was flooding and more misery. On 14 July 1789, the French had enough of all this and stormed the Bastille and chopped off the heads of the tyrants. It was also the day on which wheat prices peaked. [3]
A revolution is only three meals away.
At the time of this writing, in 2024, European farmers were revolting again. This time, it was not hailstorms harming economic activity but man-made climate policy. The farmers have had enough, a bit like the peasants in 1789.
1793
William Godwin (1756-1836), the English philosopher, argued that human reason, not political revolution, is the key to progress.
“People aren't stupid. The problem is that our educational system has an amazing blind spot concerning risk literacy. We teach our children the mathematics of certainty—geometry and trigonometry—but not the mathematics of uncertainty, statistical thinking. And we teach our children biology but not the psychology that shapes their fears and desires.”
—Gerd Gigerenzer (b. 1947), German psychologist [4]
1798
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), the English demographer and political economist, published An Essay on The Principle of Population. He stated that population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio while subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. He erred. William Godwin rebutted Malthus’ essays in 1820.
The case is far from closed; Malthusian doom persists to this day as an integral tool for advocating the "four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse" (overpopulation, rising pollution, climate destruction, and natural resource exhaustion), thereby scaring (mainly) young people.
1790-1820
The Dalton Minimum, named after John Dalton (1766-1844), the English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist—the first scientist to use the term atom for the smallest particle of matter—like the Maunder Minimum, describes an extra-cold period due to low solar activity. This cold period coincides with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Based on the records of carbon-14 in tree rings and ice cores, the sun has experienced five such deep minima during the past millennium, the last of which was the Dalton Minimum.
"Bizarrely, the Financial Times seems to think the economy will recover 25 years
after a mass extinction.
Spoiler alert: There won't be an economy."
—Extinction Rebellion, @extinctsymbol, Twitter, 14 September 2021
The Modern Maximum, a solar maximum being the opposite of a solar minimum, was from around 1914 to 2008. During the past decade, the sun’s activity has tended to decline, raising concerns that the sun might be heading for the next grand minimum. This is negative, as global cooling is the bigger killer than global warming, as mentioned. From the perspective of humanists, that is. Deep ecologists can’t wait for it to get colder.
1801
William Herschel (1738-1822), the German-born British astronomer, was the first to find a connection between sunspots and regional climate, using the market price of wheat as a proxy. The influence of solar activity can be seen in the historical wheat market in England over ten solar cycles between 1600 and 1700, but the subject is controversial. Almost any causality between solar activity and climate change is anathema to the IPCC as it doesn’t fit their computer-model-worshipping-hockey-stick narrative.
1815
Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora erupted and injected so much dust into the upper atmosphere that global cooling occurred. Based on one estimate, the so-called Tambora-Freeze results in global average temperatures falling by 3-4°C for a couple of years. Widespread crop failure and famines were the result. 1816 is known in North America and Europe as the Year Without a Summer. Cholera started expanding in India in 1816, reaching Russia in 1830, Europe in 1831, and North America in 1832. [5] Again, global cooling is no laughing matter.
The magnitude of the Tambora eruption was 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) scale. (The VEI is the Richter scale for volcanic eruptions, i.e., it has a log scale and is open with the largest volcanoes in history, given a magnitude of 8. Mt. Pinatubo was a 6. The 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, Island, were a 4.)
The Toba supervolcano eruption, which occurred approximately 74,000 years ago in present-day Indonesia, was an 8 on the VEI scale and is considered one of the most significant volcanic events in human history. There is a hypothesis that this massive eruption caused a dramatic climate change, known as a volcanic winter, which led to a population bottleneck in the human species. The extent to which it almost drove Homo sapiens to extinction is debated.
One idea of geoengineering involves simulating a volcano eruption for its cooling “benefit.” The idea is to cool the atmosphere artificially. The risk is a potentially cooling double-whammy: We artificially cool the atmosphere, and then a VEI 6 or 7 puts us into a Little Ice Age remake. (A triple-whammy if the sun is heading for the next grand minimum.)
Necessity is the mother of invention.
1817
Karl Drais (1785-1851), a German forest official, invented the bicycle because runaway food price inflation during the Little Ice Age made food for horses too expensive.
1827
Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1768-1830), the French mathematician and physicist, predicted an atmospheric effect keeping the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be. He is the first to use a greenhouse analogy. [6]
1828
Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), the Swedish chemist, discovered Thorium and named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. (The one with the hammer, for Marvel fans.)
“Fun fact.
You don’t know anyone who used to support nuclear energy, learned more about the electrical grid, and switched to supporting wind and solar.”
—Erik Lindberg, X, 15 November 2022
Thorium can potentially solve mankind’s energy problems; it’s an option. It is perceived as a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium and plutonium, albeit slightly less efficient. Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium, and large quantities exist already, i.e., have already been mined. This inventory is also in friendly countries, rather than autocracies, like many other metals required to maintain and improve living standards. This means with uranium and rare earths, there is geo-risk; with Thorium, there is less geo-risk.
Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882), the German chemist, discovered that urea can be produced from the inorganic starting material. Urea is widely used in fertilizers as a source of nitrogen. Today, more than 90% of the world's industrial production of urea is destined for use as a nitrogen-release fertilizer. Urea has the highest nitrogen content of all solid nitrogenous fertilizers. Therefore, it has a low transportation cost per unit of nitrogen nutrient.
1830s
Louis Agassiz (1807-73), the Swiss-born American biologist and geologist, presented evidence of past changes in Alpine glaciers, pointing to ancient Ice Ages and showing that the climate has not always been stable.[7] Karl Schimper (1809-67), a German botanist and a colleague of Agassiz, suggested to Agassiz in 1837 that he ought to use the term “Eiszeit” (“ice age”).
In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit imposed on a third party who did not agree to incur it.
William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852), the English economist and amateur mathematician, was an early supporter of population control and introduced the concept of the overuse of a common by its commoners, what we today call externalities.
1840s
Justus von Liebig (1803-73), the German chemist sometimes called the “father of the fertilizer industry,” discovered that applying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash to crops boosted yields. This discovery continued the Neolithic Revolution from 10,000 years ago and is a precursor to Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, which allows billions of humans to be fed.
“Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.”
—Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), American agronomist and the father of the Green Revolution [8]
1848
A wave of revolutions descended upon Europe towards the end of the Little Ice Age, and Karl Marx published his manifesto after a long period of global cooling and the misery that goes with it. His timing was impeccable.
“I wish Karl would accumulate some capital, instead of just writing about it.”
—Mother of Karl Marx [9]
To be continued…
[i] Thomas Malthus, An Essay on The Principle of Population (1798), Chapter I.
[1] “Highly confidential” leaked email to Michael Mann in 2004. Fred Pearce, “Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review,” The Guardian, 2 February 2010.
[2] Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung (München: Beck C.H., 2007), Die scheinbare Abkoppelung von den Kräften der Natur, Kindle.
[3] Wolfgang Behringer, Kulturgeschichte des Klimas: Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung (München: Beck C.H., 2007), Die kühle Sonne der Vernunft, Kindle.
[4] Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy – How to make good decisions (New York: Viking, 2014), 14.
[5] Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), Prologue, Kindle.
[6] Michael Marshall, “Timeline: Climate Change,” newscientist.com (4 September 2006).
[7] Timeline: How the world discovered global warming, reuters.com, 2 December 2011.
[8] The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1970. Full quote: “Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply. Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry. Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.” Also in Mankind and Civilization at Another Crossroad, 1971.
[9] The World's Greatest People, All Things Family, Audio CD, Volume 1, Disk 6.