Yesterday’s post on climate change was pretty gloomy. A combination of scientific uncertainty, green ineptitude and the volume of other insistent global problems competing with the green agenda for resources and attention add up to near-certain for greens who think the only way to Save the Planet is to cut carbon use by international decree yesterday.
Worse, one of the reasons the climate change movement won’t get what it wants is that the constipated global political system is already in critical overload. We are too busy failing to solve problems like poverty, war, economic instability, the culture clashes between the worlds various civilizations and religions and, oh yes, the proliferation of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction to have the time or resources to deal with the climate issue as its backers would like. In other words, civilization may not live long enough to worry about the consequences of climate change, and even if we do, our solutions and strategies are likely to be as partial, corrupt and incompetent as most of the other things our somewhat dysfunctional species attempts.
With an outlook this glum, why am I not investing in Canadian real estate and fallout shelters? It’s not that I’m a skeptic about the science of climate change. It’s that I’m a skeptic about Thomas Malthus (right). In the many, many years that have passed since I was a promising young sprout in pundit school the world has suffered through one Malthusian panic attack after another. The population bomb was going to create mass famines and untold disasters as those senseless third worlders bred themselves and us into a terminal food crisis. (Overpopulation was the specter that caused the Reverend Thomas Malthus to make the original Malthusian disaster prediction back in 1798.) The glaciers were going to sweep down from the north as the anomalously warm and benign climate of the latest interglacial period moved inexorably to its predestinated end. Huge plagues sweeping out of central Africa (or, more recently, the duck and pig farms of southern China) were going to scythe through our overpopulated petri dish of a planet — an inevitable consequence of the combination of a rising population and greater international travel. As water supplies dried up (overpopulation again, more recently mixed with climate change), a new era of destructive water wars was upon us (or soon will be: Malthusian tenses shift from decade to decade). Oil shortages were going to cause uncontrollable energy wars and/or drive prices up to unsustainable levels.
At this point, an old and crusty pundit like me has too many joint pains to jump up from the front porch and join the procession every time Chicken Little runs past my house on her way to warn the king about the latest horror. I barely look up from the bridge column in the daily paper to watch the crowd run past, cackling in that senile, cynical way that idealistically Malthusian young people so deeply loathe. I have become so hardened that I might even reflect that most of the chicken’s earnest followers out there in the road are simultaneously running two Malthusian horror movies in their heads that have incompatible plots. One is the Peak Oil horror film, predicting havoc as our doomed and destructive dependence on hydrocarbons exhausts the natural supply, despoiling the environment and driving the prices to ruinous levels. The other is the Mass Burning horror movie, in which non-renewable hydrocarbons remain so cheap and abundant that we burn them in such accelerating, vast quantities that the CO2 they release dooms the planet. A graceless old reptile like me can’t help reflecting that one of these two ideas might be right, but that they can’t possibly both be. If we run out of fossil fuels, we will stop emitting so much CO2. If we keep emitting ghastly quantities of CO2, then fossil fuel must be pretty damn abundant, given the projected increase in developing world industrial activity.
The projection of statistical trends into disaster scenarios is as old as the modern science of statistics. People once worried that England’s nascent industrial economy would come to a sputtering halt because forests were disappearing at increasing rates, driven by the need for charcoal. The Peak Charcoal scenario yielded in time to Peak Coal worries before morphing into today’s Peak Oil and Peak Gas scenarios. My favorite Malthusian crisis scenario is the horse manure problem. Nineteenth century statisticians calculated how much cargo a horse could carry, and then looked at the daily needs of London’s population for food and other material goods. From there it was a short step to calculate the amount of manure produced by each cart horse, the number of horses required to operate the manure removal carts, and basically to calculate a choke point: the point where cart horse manure would pile up so high in London’s streets that urban life would come to a crashing halt.
Malthusians always have science on their side, and the science is usually pretty good. The processes involved are scientifically verifiable: the population is increasing at a certain rate; a single horse can haul so much freight so many miles in an eight hour day and, demonstrably, produces a certain amount of manure during that time. Do the math: the sums add up. And so, the Malthusians invariably say at this point, “What is wrong with you that you don’t panic? Are you a science denier, a dung skeptic? Can you not see that every day there is more manure on the streets? Do you realize that the dung isn’t just piling up in your neighborhood, but that dung removal totals are increasing all over the city? Are you a pawn of the cart horse industry, objecting to necessary regulations and taxes that are the only way to control the mounting road apple crisis before we all perish in a great stinking heap of horse hockey?”
The climate change panic (as opposed to the climate change concern) is a classic Malthusian panic. The facts of the case are somewhat complicated because the data is difficult to assemble and the climate system is fiendishly complicated, but overall the methodology is classically Malthusian. Do the math! Check the science!! We are all going to die!!!
For the student of comparative Malthusianism, the real question isn’t whether this particular panic has some scientific basis. They almost always do. The real question is why do these disaster scenarios, which over time tend to become more elaborate and more rigorous, not pan out? Why are there both trees and blacksmiths in England after so many centuries? Why have wages defied Thomas Malthus and kept rising for two hundred years despite the impeccable logic and math of his pamphlet? Why did the coal not run out? Why didn’t London perish ingloriously in the excrement of ten million carthorses? Why do the predictions of oil and water catastrophes keep getting deferred? Why haven’t we all died in a horrible plague? Why are these people so persistently scientifically and mathematically right but historically wrong?
It’s odd, when you stop to think about it, just how frequently things work out better than we had any right to expect. Who would have thought the brains of the descendants of savannah plains apes happened to be constituted in such a way that they could comprehend and even discover mathematical ideas that had nothing to do with the necessities for which their brains evolved, but apparently matched up at a profound level with the inner workings of the universe? Who would have thought that an animal evolved to live in small groups could learn to live in complex, multicultural societies? Or that ears evolved to detect danger should have the capacity to experience everything we hear and feel from music? Who would have thought that there was so much electric bandwidth, a spectrum invisible all these years that just happened to be beautifully suited to human communication? Theologians can dispute with atheists where this unearned benefit comes from or what it means, but you would have to be blind not to see the unexpected ways in which humanity fits into the universe we inhabit.
It’s not that a deus ex machina mysteriously steps into history from time to time, waves a magic wand, and gets us off the hook. It’s rather that human beings are really much more creative and adaptable than we sometimes realize. We are very good at solving problems, exploiting opportunities, and in general using what we’ve got to get what we need — but we are significantly better at doing this than we are at understanding how it’s done.
Perhaps one way to think of humanity is to think of a vast parallel processing computer network. Our species is constantly receiving vast quantities of data and constantly changing our behavior in response to it. When a big problem emerges, affecting us all over a country or the world, millions and billions of us start making changes in our behavior, trying new strategies and dealing with it in various ways. We are constantly monitoring one another as well; when somebody’s coping strategy is working, other people pick it up. When something is failing, we let it go. From moment to moment, all over the world, human beings are processing information, shifting behavior, collecting feedback and rethinking their behavior. A lot of this isn’t conscious; just as baseball pitchers can throw a curve ball without necessarily being able to understand the math that could describe the ball’s flight, so people who have no education or training in formal logic are able to process real world information and make good decisions.
Big problems like overpopulation or even carthorse overcrowding communicate themselves to many people, and they begin to shift their behavior. As, for example, people in developing countries take note that advances in public health are reducing infant mortality, both sexes adjust their behavior and reduce the number of pregnancies for each woman. As the changing balance of supply and demand alters the economics of family life and reduces the advantage of having additional children, people change their ideas about how many children they want — and the rate of population growth slows and, in some places, fertility rates fall below the replacement rate and the population starts to decline.
In London, the rising costs of supplying a growing city on the horse and buggy principle set people to thinking about different ways of managing the flow — and created a market for those horseless carriages that are now causing so much trouble.
The core point is that the fallacy of composition is overrated, as is its logical cousin, the problem of the commons. More often than we suppose, individual behavior responds to large forces. If oil is becoming scarce and the price of gas rises, people drive less and/or buy more efficient cars. If water is becoming more scarce, they conserve, they recycle, they start to think about more efficient ways to desalinate sea water or use less in agriculture and so forth. The bigger the problem, the harder we work on it — the more strategies we try, the quicker we are to adopt the ones that work, and the bigger rewards we pay to innovators who come up with new approaches.
My guess is that Malthusian panics are part of humanity’s coping mechanism. The problems to which Malthusians point are almost always real problems, but the solutions they advocate are usually not the way out. Malthusians classically go for big interventionist fixes, when humanity’s most efficient method of solving problems is to nibble them to death rather than swallow them whole. Billions of people change their behavior; innovators perceive the economic rewards of addressing a growing problem and little by little, bite by bite, we nibble the problem down to size.
In its lunge for the grand global solution, the climate change movement was making the classic Malthusian mistake. It was relying on a single dramatic solution to a vast problem, rather than working to prepare the way for a multitude of tiny fixes. The growing environmental footprint of human activity on the natural environment is a real problem; the industrialization of the developing world is going to greatly increase the potential for serious damage to the environment. Of all that I have no doubt.
But it is precisely because the problem is important that I believe that we need problem solving tools that are sharper, more flexible and more serious than the crude and blunt instruments now under discussion. Climate change is only one of a series of major environmental issues that will confront us in the coming decades. The unsustainable overfishing of the seas, the toxic waste being generated and almost certainly carelessly disposed of in rapidly industrializing countries, the loss of habitat for key species and the considerable problems of atmospheric cleanliness unrelated or only tangentially related to greenhouse gasses: these and many more will have to be dealt with.
Putting so much of the world’s environmental energy and talent behind a quixotic solution is a bad idea. That energy, creativity and commitment needs to work more efficiently and strategically if the world is to make enough progress on enough of its environmental issues. Malthusian panics are part of the process by which humanity comes to grips with big problems, but they are rarely the source of the fix. The climate change movement needs to move past Malthusian panic into broad engagement with social development. There are lots of people in the environmental movement who already think this way; we need more.
While the problems change, we should notice that the solution favored by environmentalists and all the other Malthusians has remained essentially the same now for more than two centuries: handing strict control over most aspects of ordinary peoples’ lives to the Malthusian enthusiasts themselves.
At some point we ought to recognize that it’s not really about the ‘crises’, it’s about the belief among a certain type of people in modern society that democracy doesn’t allocate to them the power and deference they believe they ought to have.
I had a bone to pick with you up at the top, but by the time I got to the end your piece was so well done and persuasive I’d forgotten all about it.
Great analysis, but it immediately raised the comparison in my mind to the recent debate about health care. Is there a problem? Yes. The Malthusians (Democrats) went for the big interventionist fix, a “lunge for the grand global solution” and even though the American people don’t seem to generally like it, they got it in place. Is there still room and time to undo the lunge and “nibble the problem to size”?
Neville has it right.
These ‘crises’ — particularily the man-made global warming one — are actually a pretext for a hidden agenda to transfer power from the people [hoi poli] to the ‘progressive’ elites.
“It’s odd, when you stop to think about it, just how frequently things work out better than we had any right to expect. ” Ain’t that the truth! Real progress is painfully slow, almost invisible It’s only the setbacks and bumps along the road that get reported in the media, the more sensational the better. It’s been like that ever since the birth of the popular press in the 19th century, if not before. Bad news sells!
“The End is Near” LOL
“The Progressives had their way for much of the 20th century. But it became apparent that centralized experts weren’t disinterested, but always sought to expand their power. And it became clear that central planners can never have the kind of information that is transmitted instantly, as Friedrich von Hayek observed, by price signals in free markets.” Glenn Reynolds
Mankind is undergoing a cultural evolution from a knowledge limited Authoritarian, Monopolistic, Centralized power, Command style organization, to a knowledge inclusive, Democratic, Free Market, Diffuse power style organization. This knowledge inclusive style is more flexible and adaptable, able to change direction, and kick failing policies under the bus. While Authoritarian styles fight to maintain the status quo, keep things unchanged, and get trapped in ruts and dead ends, which wastes time, treasure, and blood. You’re going to make mistakes and it’s better to admit them as soon as possible. “You’ve got to know when to fold them, and cut your losses”
Concentrated Power vs. Diffused Power
The founding fathers had it right: Power Corrupts
Those cultures which incorporate the Diffused power systems most fully will gain the most efficiency and become the most successful.
“There’s no arguing with Success”
I agree with Neville, most of the global warming/change panic is motivated by a desire to regulate more than by the genuine urgency of the problem. “Never waste a crisis” … even if you have to create it.
Prof. Mead’s post is ultimately a description of the operation of free markets. Price changes are the signals that lead to such mysteriously-coordinated activity.
What we need are serious leaders and scientists to help us identify externalities that need to be addressed, rather than scare-mongers. At the risk of being a Malthusian myself, I don’t see any near-term prospect that we’ll get such leadership.
It was clear from the beginning that climate change was politically driven. The driver? A consummate career politician, Al Gore. Gore has semi-truthfully said of himself that he is working a 12-step program to wean himself off his addiction to politics. Semi since I would suggest he’s still at step 1, that of identifying the problem.
My sister is an astrophysicist with NASA and previously with the Hubble program from its origins. She is a skeptic, but more along Mr. Mead’s lines. She suspects warming may be caused by solar irradiance (solar cycles), but says not enough is known about them. When a scientist says “not enough is known,” believe in their credibility. When one says, “the science is settled,” don’t. She was previously in one of the top positions at NASA, but foolishly discussed her suspicions with her new boss several years ago. Her boss dismissed her concerns by saying it didn’t matter if it was true, we needed to stop polluting the earth anyway. Not in my opinion a very scientific attitude. Soon thereafter my sister was moved out of the D.C. offices of NASA and demoted in the process. This is the Spanish Inquisition approach to science.
I agree with Mr. Mead, though I am more skeptical than he that the origins of climate change are manmade. Nonetheless, Mr. Mead’s approach, which is to fault the politicizing of the issue for its declining interest, while remaining open to the possibility that it is manmade, is exactly the right way to go. Here’s the equation of the warmers: take the science, politicize it through a mix of fear tactics, insults and threats, and access the MSM-as-Spanish Inquisition to finish the job. This is not the way to go.
But there’s good money it prophesizing (?) doom, just ask Al Gore.
Tremendous article Walt but you kinda lose me at the end when you appear to almost recommend the same top down solutions you disdain.
I don’t trust the current leaders and elites to come up with a global solution that isn’t exclusively to their benefit.
“Sometimes I tthink the desire for coercion comes first, then the theory to justify it…”
Instapundit, Oct. 17, 2009
This so-called ‘grand problem’ was seen almost immediately as a vehicle for leftist power-seizure and global taxation. It was never about the weather. The “hockey stick” chart was faked years ago, and everyone working with it knew it was faked. The emails reveal the extent and sliminess of the conspiracy.
Leftist power, not ‘solving problem’.. Malthus doesn’t enter into it.. Lenin or Stalin, maybe.
[...] That’s why I like market solutions over government solutions. Via Doing What Comes Naturally – Walter Russell Mead’s Blog – The American Interest. [...]
“At some point we ought to recognize that it’s not really about the ‘crises’, it’s about the belief among a certain type of people in modern society that democracy doesn’t allocate to them the power and deference they believe they ought to have.”
I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Thomas L. Friedman. Except in his case, he seems to think democracy doesn’t allocate to Chinese dictators the power and deference they ought to have in this country as role models.
Teleological thinking. Bleh.
It was actually on this blog IIRC that I first encountered the following: if every thirty years we have a record breaking winter cold in the northern hemishere then it can’t be “too warm”…OTOH if each summer all the snow cover between the great lakes and Hudson Bay disappears then it can’t be “too cold”… So basically “party on”.
Mr. Mead, you are undoubtedly on to something here. Like you, I have been hearing predictions of disaster all my life, from the Club of Rome to Paul Ehrlich to Al Gore. These Malthusians remind me of the flying saucer cult described in Leon Festinger’s classic “When Prophecy Fails.” The cult leader had received a message from space aliens that the world would come to an end on a specific date. When that date had passed and the world had not, in fact, been destroyed, observers were surprised to find that the cult itself did not disappear, it’s major prophecy and raison d’être having been exposed as false. Instead, the cultists simply revised their beliefs – the only reason that the world survived was because of their faith, which had preserved us all. Such will be the case with Al Gore and his acolytes. When they are holding the 2042 Winter Olympics in the Ozark Mountains, they will assure us that is only because of the warnings they issued and the changes that they forced that allowed us to survive.
Did someone say, ‘Hide the Decline?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoYTotZRjE
Excellent essay. Suggested typo correction:
”the loss of habit for key species” (should be: habitat)
Let us speak plainly, the Malthusian solution isn’t just about control, it is about killing people. Lots and lots of people. They must die so that the self-anointed may continue living.
Restricting carbon usage means restricting economic growth, plain and simple. That means the poor today will stay poor, indefinitely. Besides shortened life spans, disease, etc, poor societies are less able to deal with catastrophe than rich societies. Compare Chile and Haiti. Solving the “problem” of global warming will doom millions.
The Malthusians see everyhting as a zero plus game. For me to win, you must lose. For me to have more, you must have less. It is the flaw in all their calculations – they are all static projections. Curves go up to infinity.
Global warming is laughably a rich man’s problem. For the poor, getting enough to eat tommorrow is a slightly bigger concern than warming in 50 years. Given there are more of them then there of us, there is zero potential to solve the problem with carbon controls, and the idea is laughably stupid.
“My guess is that Malthusian panics are part of humanity’s coping mechanism. The problems to which Malthusians point are almost always real problems, ”
Not quite, or people would be rioting in the streets in panic by now. Rather, it’s more of a gaming device employed by individuals to see if they can use panic and discord to divert resources into their pockets. Harold Hill wasn’t worried about the dangers of pool halls: he wanted to make commissions off selling band instruments to the rubes. Al Gore is the King of Carbon Trading: if he were REALLY concerned about AGW he’d resign because it gives the obvious appearance of a conflict of interest.
It’s not just humans, either. We had a new dog that was always getting bullied by the older dog. We’d hear the screaming, come out, scold the older dog and give the new dog a treat. A couple of weeks into this my wife looked out the window and saw New Dog screaming her fool head off while the other dog lay under a tree on the other side of the yard looking mournful. A couple of good swats taught her the jig was up and the “bullying” stopped. Same thing with the Malthusians: screaming gets them rewarded. Of COURSE they’re going to play the Chicken Little card early and often. It works.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always the false face of the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Menchken
I’m fascinated with the similarities I’m seeing with today’s social/economic situation and those in the 1930s. Chaotic economies, a lack of faith in democracy and a belief that authoritarian regimes are the only way to ‘save us.’
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
-Nietzsche
[...] Russell Mead on Malthusian Panic Jump to Comments Read the whole thing, it’s [...]
“Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they were
also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving
the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power.
They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.”
– Harry S Truman
I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions.
I have been exposed to Malthusian “crises” since childhood beginning with the threat of nuclear war; was angrily confronted by a total stranger for “daring” to have a third child with “all this population” in 1978; and now threatened with runaway global warming, wherein I see only hucksters like Al Gore scamming people with carbon credits like the ancient Catholic Church allowed the practice of indulgences.
My fear is that the similiarities seen by TBlakely are going to manifest in a resurgence of the Eugenics Movement in a more palatable “environmental” context; I’ve already had comments from a person in my office that there are “too many people and something should be done.” And we all know how that played out in the 40′s and 50′s in Germany and Russia.
[...] homepage current issue subscribe search by author search by title back issues contact Previous Post remove this ad Posted on April 9th, 2010 Good News For Gloomy Greens Posted In: [...]
Excerpted from “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” by John Ralston Saul. Dr. Mead, this and the rest of the book speak very eloquently to your point. Anyone who wants to be invited to the party tomorrow night has to have read this book first!
“The philosophers of Europe, England and American threw themselves into the arms or reason, convinced that birth would be given t new rational elites capable of building a new civilization… And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites… But grand, integrated ideas don’t necessarily change societies… A civilization unable to differentiate between illusion and reality is usually believed to be at the tail end of its existence. Our reality is dominated y elites who have spent much of the last two centuries, indeed of the last four, organizing society around answers and around structures designed to produce answers. These structures have fed upon expertise and that expertise upon complexity. The effect has been to render universal understanding as difficult as possible… Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated… The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme—the theme song of their expertise… However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application…The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it. “
It’s actually too bad that we humans are so resilient.
I once heard that in preparation for the blitz, the British government arranged for thousands of beds in mental hospitals to accommodate the people who would go nuts from the constant bombing. But of course, they didn’t go nuts: instead, it was their “shining hour.”
If people were more delicate–say, if they dropped dead from fright–then we would have had long since to evolve beyond war, or go extinct.
Nice piece.
Mankind has huge problems presently and will have even more problems in the future. In some ways the ‘population bomb’ warning turned out to be correct. If we had only 4B people on the planet now things would be very different on many fronts.
The analysis of the Malthusian panics are interesting except for a small but significant difference between those panics and the one concerning Global Warming.
The traditional analysis assumes that the inputs can be modified to change the end (projected) result.
In the case of Global Warming, there is a significant risk that a point will be reached where the Earth’s warming due to greenhouse gases, among other things, will go on ‘automatic’. Human inputs will not matter one way or another after that point is reached.
So a Malthusian panic regarding Global Warming has within it a subtlety not encountered before in other panics.
I strongly suspect that this extra dimension makes the panic into a Panic.
New Climate Model
I recommend this post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/06/a-new-and-effective-climate-model/#more-18240
I found the discussion to be very enlightening as the author provides a detailed summary of the logic behind his new climate model. It provided me with a lot of additional insight into the physics behind the Earth’s climate. Many of the commentators also appear to be well versed in climate science.
[...] The public discourse rarely covers this side of the debate. New laws, regulations, and mandates are discussed as necessary solutions to newfound ills. Supporters of free-market, bottom-up solutions are caricatured as puppy-killers, in cahoots with big business. The reality is that they believe, as Russell Meade writes, “humanity’s most efficient method of solving problems is to nibble them to death rather than sw…” [...]
I was very happy to recently discovery this blog, an island of constructive, nuanced analysis in the ocean of destructive, partisan discourse on the Internet.
However, on this particular issue, I’m surprised that someone of such extraordinary learning lacks a sophisticated understanding of the issue, though the science is understandably outside his field of expertise. I challenge Mr. Mead to put aside his usual studies (though I’ll pick up some of them after reading the Reading List post), and spend the time necessary to acquire a sophisticated understanding of the science of climate change.
For example, many points in this post have been addressed in detail by the scientific community. Mr. Mead’s words are rightfully respected and influential; he could provide a great service to all of us by investing in gaining expertise in a critical issue.