Global Population and Global Warming
Ed Dolan recently posted a piece here in Medium concerning the future effects of global warming on the global economy. In a reply to a Response of mine he included this link: here are some interesting charts.
One chart showed the variations in global temperatures over the last 10,000 years (based on cores extracted from Greenland’s ice sheet). I noticed that over the most recent few hundred years before industrialization temperatures had been unusually stable in an odd way.
I was intrigued. It looked to me as though ‘naturally’ the planet was in for a significantly cooler period, but that cooling wasn’t happening. Temperatures were instead freakishly stable. Yet, to reiterate, industrialization had not yet happened. If we consider that variations in temperatures before industrialization were strictly ‘natural’, it looked as though this oddity must also be a ‘natural’ occurrence, as opposed to being the product of human activity.
What could account for that anomaly? Could simple growth in human population account for it? I did a Google search for charts showing global temperatures and global population and got this result.
Looking at various charts, it seems that population itself did account for the anomaly I noticed. Before industrialization population and ‘greenhouse gases’, especially carbon dioxide, grew in tandem. Beginning around 1600 there was an explosion in the growth of the human population on the planet.
So it looks like around 1600 hit one of those ‘inflection points’; between then and the onset of industrialization the sheer size of the human population was preventing cooling. When industrialization occurred, that absence of cooling became actual warming. We are now warming a planet that should be naturally cooling.