Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth left no stone unturned, no receding glacier unphotographed, no graph unanimated, to point its moral: carbon dioxide generated by humans begets global warming.
Except one.
The human population curve.
Yes, he showed one. But while he was absolutely eager to show how Africa and South America fit together, how graphs of carbon dioxide levels and temperatures fit together, how graphs of temperatures and sea levels fit together, he did not do anything with the population curve. Two seconds and it was gone. But to anyone paying attention, anyone still awake after listening to Al Gore for an hour and a half, the perfect fit of the population curve with all the rest ought to have been a knock-you-off-your-seat.
Y’see, carbon dioxide has been building in the atmosphere ever since the Industrial Revolution started using fossil fuels to fire boilers in locomotives and ships, starting around 1850 as coal progressively replaced wood. But the curve really starts taking off in the 1940s. Which just happens to be when penicillin, the first of the true “miracle drugs�, entered the market in a big way.
Damn that Fleming and his flippin’ Petri dishes.
In 1940, Earth’s human population stood at about two billion, following 10,000 years of slow, steady increase. The 50 million lives lost as a result of World War II hardly made a dent, as has been the case with other instances of war, famine and pestilence throughout history.
During that whole period, disease took a horrible toll. At the start of the twentieth century, 1 in 200 women died from complications related to childbirth, even in “advanced� countries like the United States. Half of all children born died in infancy, usually from infectious diseases. Edward Bates, Abraham Lincoln’s first Attorney General and a candidate for President in 1860, had 17 children with his wife Julia. No, my fingers didn’t slip on the keyboard. That’s 17. Seventeen. The Bates mansion teemed with a large and active family. All nine of them. The nine that survived the microbial perils of infancy and youth. That ratio of infant survival was about normal for the time.
It wasn’t any picnic for adults either. Smallpox. Influenza. Typhoid fever. Malaria. Tuberculosis. Scarlet fever. Poliomyelitis. Any one of a hundred others. Any one of which could bite you at any time, and the physicians of the day could only hope that the mercury they dosed you with would kill the complaint before it killed you.
With penicillin, and the host of antibiotics and vaccines and other drugs that actually worked which stormed in on penicillin’s heels, all that changed.
Say you have mice, and plenty of food for the mice. But there are also plenty of cats. The cats keep the population of the mice low. Now take away the cats. The population of the mice will explode. Until all the food is gone. The resulting population growth curve will look almost exactly like that of the human population since the 1940s.
Almost … because the human rate of population growth is greater than that which has been measured for any other species that has experienced “release from predation� – like those mice from the cats. Perhaps that’s because the other measurements focused on one predator species per prey. Bacteria and viruses have been the principal human predators – and, with penicillin and its ilk, we wiped out hundreds of different predators almost simultaneously.
Used to be, if a child died as an infant, the loss was mourned but accepted. Part of the natural order. Happens to everybody. God’s will and all that. Now, if a baby dies, somebody’s ass is going to get sued. A fetus is born the size of a marble, with gills and a tail, and two years later the “human interest� section of the evening news shows a bouncing, healthy toddler. Did I say “healthy�? What about those fourteen allergies and metabolic deficiencies that they’re not telling you about? And the story’s right after the one documenting this year’s twenty percent rise in health insurance rates.
I swear, taking a twentysomething out to dinner these past ten years has been a challenge. Seems like every one’s got an allergy, a sensitivity, a chronic bowel or nervous complaint, for which they need to take $200 dollars worth of pills a month, and carefully manage their diet. Whatever the restaurant or the menu, there’s something I like that they can’t have. Before 1940, I wouldn’t be seeing these folk – they are the ones who would have contracted an infection, or been terminally weakened by their metabolic deficiencies, and passed to their reward by age 1.
Gone are the days when Bill Cosby could accuse his father of saying “You behave. 'Cause if you don’t, I’ll kill you. And it won’t matter, ‘cause I’ll make another one looks just like you.� Oho – so that’s why those Popes have been so uptight about The Pill all these years ...
All those people. Nearly 5 billion new ones in just 60 years. And they all want heat, and air conditioning, and trash disposal, and the medicines for what ails them, not to mention the right to burn their autumn leaves in their yards. And they’re all listening to politicians promising them a chicken in every pot and two SUVs in every garage …
And the scientists saw it coming.
Al Gore lionized the oceanographer (yahoo!) Roger Revelle, who, in 1957, co-wrote the first scientific paper predicting global warming as a result of fossil fuel consumption. Ironically, a colleague of mine sailed recently on the R/V Roger Revelle, investigating a phenomenon that may explain why global warming is actually happening not quite as fast as Revelle and his partners/successors predicted.
But Gore said not one word about the scientist who pointed a finger at the principal factor inducing all that fossil fuel burning. The growth of human population.
Unfortunately, Ehrlich’s seminal book, The Population Bomb, focused on the consequences of human population growth on its food supply. After all, starvation is the most likely outcome for those cat-less mice. He did not count on technology, a tool not available to mice.
At least temporarily, humans have kept food production ahead of population growth, have kept medical science ahead of most disease microbes (though the African AIDS situation should oughta be a reminder of how precariously we are poised at the divide between health and catastrophic global pandemic).
All of this activity, though, needs energy. And that means, at present, fossil fuels. And carbon dioxide, and … and …
If, as seems practically certain, human fossil fuel burning is responsible for global warming, and human population growth is a major contributor to that fossil fuel burning, then Viagra ought to be condemned as a crime against humanity.
Why didn’t Gore make this case? Guess he didn’t want to have to face the anti-abortion lobby. Again. Speaking of crimes against humanity …
I once made a couple of old ladies on a plane very mad at me by saying, “Penicillin is the worst thing ever to happen to humankind.�
That was twenty years ago.
Some things do remain the same.
- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.
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