“Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that.”
—Vaclav Smil (b. 1943), Czech Canadian environmental scientist [i]
Part 7 of this timeline of climatism ended with the idea that the aversion to nuclear energy cost millions of lives.
1973 cont.
Klaus Schwab (b. 1938), the German engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the then-called European Management Forum (1971-87), drew up the Davos Manifesto in Davos, Switzerland. The manifesto set out to change business ethics and launched the stakeholder model. The main focus, and Mr. Schwab’s core expertise, is the social responsibility of corporate management and its business ethics.
In the WEF’s 50th meeting in Davos in June 2020, Mr. Schwab promoted The Great Reset Initiative, which is based on three components: the first involves creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; the second component includes building a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way—based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics which would incorporate more green public infrastructure projects; the third component is to "harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution" for public good.
Fun fact: In WEF’s 2022 Global Risks Report, which was published in January 2022, one month before Putin attacked Ukraine, the word “war” was not mentioned once, and the word “climate” was used 243 times.
1974
Mikhail Budyko (1920-2001), the Russian climatologist, proposed that if global warming should ever become a problem, an artificial haze in the stratosphere could be engineered that could cool the planet, similar to major volcanic eruptions. Budyko’s solar radiation management idea (SRM), dubbed “Budyko’s Blanket,” is considered an early concept of what today is called geoengineering.
Today, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and SRM are probably the most practical ideas related to geoengineering. Scientists are divided on the subject. We know that geoengineering measures will have side effects. However, we do not know what these side effects might entail. Scientists have proven over and over again that they do not fully understand the climate. It’s too complex and chaotic. The geoengineering cure for the problem, therefore, could be worse than the problem, like with DDT.
Nuclear energy angst is where the precautionary principle kills.
Karan Singh (b. 1931), the Indian politician and former minister of population in India, said at the UN population conference in Bucharest: “Development is the best contraceptive,” referring to the fertility rate being inversely related to GDP per capita.
Source: IR&M, Maddison Project Database (MPD) 2023, CIA factbook
Today, the fertility rate is negatively correlated with HDI (Human Development Index), i.e., the higher the society's prosperity, life expectancy, education and secularisation, the fewer babies are produced. [1] Cynics now argue that not overpopulation of the fearmongering ilk is the problem, but extinction. If all countries prosper to reach an HDI of, say, 0.75, the fertility rate will drop below 2.1, i.e., the rate at which grownups are replaced with kids. However, newer research finds a Fertility J-curve that measures an increase in fertility beyond an HDI of around 0.9 but still remains below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids per woman. The chart shows GDP per capita vs the fertility rate.
“The IEA really believes that “Net-Zero” will reduce energy poverty to 0 by 2030, when so far exactly the opposite has happened because of unreliable and system expensive wind and solar… this is puzzling, to be kind."
—Lars Schernikau, 5 November 2022
The International Energy Agency (IEA), an autonomous intergovernmental organisation, was founded in Paris in response to the 1973 oil crisis. Its primary purpose was to help countries coordinate their energy policies and ensure reliable, affordable, and clean energy. Initially, the IEA focused on energy security, particularly for its member countries, mostly OECD nations. The IEA's role has evolved significantly since its founding. Over the years, the IEA's focus expanded beyond oil security to include various energy issues, such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, and climate change. Like many scientific and policy organizations, the IEA often emphasizes the severe consequences of climate change and the urgent need for action. This can sometimes be perceived as alarmist, especially by those sceptical of the severity or immediacy of climate threats. The perception of fearmongering often depends on how the messages are received by different audiences. What some see as necessary caution, others may view as exaggerated fear tactics.
Excursion: Why do so many people oppose nuclear energy?
One answer I found was Hiroshima. Nuclear energy is associated with death, not just death, but sudden, large-scale, and efficient death. It’s the dread risk discussed in the excursion of Part 2 of this series. (To the US generals, the atom bomb was a gain in efficiency as one atom bomb did as much damage as around 350 bomb raids over Tokyo. The cost of human life (of the good guys), material (fuel, bombs, and shot-down B-29 Superfortress bombers) and logistics of 350 bomb raids were much larger than just one raid and a single drop of one bomb.)
Many people fear nuclear energy, similar to being afraid of flying commercially. Around 1,000 people die per year in commercial aviation and around 1.35 million in traffic accidents. But people are afraid of the former, not the latter. Nuclear energy is like commercial aviation: It’s safe, but in an accident, many people die at once, at least according to Hiroshima-biased public perception.
The funny thing about the atomic bomb drops is that, according to some historians, but not all, they saved lives on a net basis as they ended the war. The same historians also argue that the Cold War remained non-nuclear, i.e., cold, because everyone on the planet knew the devastation of nuclear bombs because of Hiroshima. (Against popular myth, the Americans had a third bomb set to be dropped on 19 August, 10 days after Nagasaki, based on declassified information available today. This bomb was called “Third Shot”. Japan surrendered on 15 August.) This means we, sapiens, had 79 years of peace thanks to being able to split atoms, i.e., nuclear energy. (Another argument against nuclear energy I encountered was that Homer Simpson works at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.)
Q: When was it possible to grow melons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki post
1945?
A: 1946. (Scientists at the time estimated that nothing would grow for 75
years.)
Scientists estimated that the area around Chernobyl would be inhabitable for 20,000 years. Shortly after the 1986 disaster, people started to (illegally) resettle in the area. They seemed quite alive when interviewed a couple of years ago, one lady being 93 years old. Hanging out around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant before installing the New Sarcophagus in November 2016 was around 46 millisievert (mSV) per year. Now, it’s closer to 8 mSV/year. (A millisievert is a measure of radiation dose which accounts for the fact that ionising radiation can affect different body parts to differing degrees. Severe radiation poisoning starts at 2,000 mSV. The normal background dose is around 2-6 mSV/year, of which 80% is natural. A transatlantic flight is around 0.08 mSV. The maximum dose permitted for US radiation workers is 50 mSV/year. The lowest annual dose at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident is 100 mSV. The accumulated dosage estimated to cause fatal cancer many years later in 5% of people is 1,000 mSV, which is also the maximum level allowed radiation exposure for NASA astronauts over their career. The typical dosage recorded in those Chernobyl workers who died within a month was around 6,000 mSV. The highest dose received by a worker responding to the Fukushima emergency was 670 mSV.)
Three engineers who volunteered to drain water from tanks beneath the burning reactor in the days immediately after the explosion at Chernobyl waded through highly radioactive water and debris to reach the release valves. Two of the three men were still alive in 2021 despite having minimal protection from the radiation during their mission and living in Kyiv. The third man, Borys Baranov, survived until 2005.
One aspect of the Chernobyl disaster is that wildlife moved back into the area as soon as people were evacuated. It’s not that radiation levels were attractive to moose, deer, wolves, and boar; it’s just that human habitation is much deadlier for them.
Q: How many people died from evacuation, the rise in heating costs, and
radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011?
A: Around 2,202, around 1,280, and 0 or 1, depending on source.
Concerns about leaks or accidents involving waste storage also contribute to public fear. One somewhat comical aspect I picked up from a nuclear energy advocate is that nuclear energy is the only business whereby waste products are dealt with professionally, i.e., the waste is sealed and stored. All other industries just let their waste into the air.
Film tips: Chernobyl (dramatised HBO TV mini-series, 2019) and Nuclear Now (Oliver Stone documentary, 2022).
Related article: Imagine - A quantum leap in humanity’s pursuit of happiness
1975
Warnings about the environmental effects of aeroplanes lead to investigations of trace gases in the stratosphere and the discovery of danger to the ozone layer.[2]
Wallace Broecker (1931-2019), the American geochemist, put the term "global warming" into the public domain in the title of a scientific paper.[3]
The Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China collapsed, killing between 170,000 and 230,000 people. Typhoon Nina caused the Banqiao Dam failure, leading to the collapse of the dam and several others, resulting in massive flooding and subsequent deaths from both the immediate impact and resulting diseases and famine. The second worst hydroelectric disaster, the Vajont dam disaster in Italy in 1963, caused around 2,000 casualties.
Today, hydroelectric power is considered safe when measured by deaths per TWh. Some statistics exclude the Banquiao dam failure as it is an extraordinary outlier.
1976
Amory Lovins (b. 1947), the American physicist, published an article in Foreign Affairs warning about risks associated with both fossil and nuclear energy and favouring “the soft path,” favouring “benign” sources of renewable energy like wind and solar.
Amory Lovins remains an environmental thought leader to this day but doesn’t fall into the watermelon green (green on the outside, red on the inside) camp preaching the four horsemen of environmental apocalypse gospel and worldwide, supra-nationalist collectivist ideology. He is interested in energy efficiency, private enterprise, and free market economics.
1979
The First World Climate Conference, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), was held in Geneva, Switzerland, adopting climate change as a major issue and calling on governments “to foresee and prevent potential man-made changes in climate.”[5] Essentially a scientific conference, it was attended by scientists from various disciplines. In addition to the main plenary sessions, the conference organized four working groups to look into climate data, the identification of climate topics, integrated impact studies, and research on climate variability and change. The Conference led to establishing the World Climate Programme (WCP) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).
The uncertainty of man’s impact on climate has not changed for 42 years.
The National Research Council published the Carney Report, named after Jule Gregory Charney (1917-1981), the American meteorologist and close colleague of Edward Lorenz of chaos theory fame, who chaired a study group on CO2 and climate. The report was one of the earliest modern scientific assessments of global warming. The study found that the so-called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), a measure of how the climate system responds to a doubling of CO2, was 1.5 to 4.5°C, with the most likely value at 3°C. The higher the ECS, the larger the human impact from CO2. The funny thing is that 42 years and billions of research dollars later, in IPCC’s sixth assessment report in 2021, the range of 1.5-4.5°C was the same.
“Fear is a market… Fearful people are easier to govern.”
—Gerd Gigerenzer (b. 1947), German psychologist and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy [6]
Norman Myers (1934-2019), the British biologist, published The Sinking Ark, in which he estimated that 40,000 species per year go extinct and that one million species would be gone by the year 2000. As of 2023, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed 875 known species as having gone extinct since 1500. Interestingly, North America presently has more terrestrial bird and mammal species than when the first Europeans arrived five centuries ago.[7]
While the "four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse" (overpopulation, rising pollution, climate destruction, and natural resource exhaustion) are the main areas that create fear, extinction works just as well as a fearmongering propaganda tool. Predicting the apocalypse is nothing new; it’s ancient. The Book of Revelation tells the story of the end of the world, the ultimate consequence of humankind’s fall. Hence, the biblical reference in the title of Myers’ book.
Myers went beyond the biological aspects of extinction, analyzing the economic, political, legal, social, and cultural factors that contribute to it. He emphasized that everyone is responsible for preserving biodiversity and that the solutions require global cooperation.
To be continued…
[i] Jonathan Watts, “Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’,” The Guardian, 21 September 2019.
[1] Secularisation is a prerequisite for women's rights, which is a prerequisite for girls and women having access to education. Educated women have more options than remaining at home cooking for their patriarchs. This increases prosperity and life expectancy, thus raising the HDI and reducing fertility.
[2] The Discovery of Global Warming, history.aip.org (February 2021).
[3] Richard Black, “A brief history of climate change,” BBC, 20 September 2013.
[5] Michael Marshall, “Timeline: Climate Change,” newscientist.com (4 September 2006).
[6] Angelika Hager, "Psychologe Gerd Gigerenzer: Angst ist ein Markt,» profil.at, 7 March 2020. Translation is my own.
[7] See Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom – Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 242 and 259.