Global (S)warming - ITPS - "It's The People Stupid"...
This post is accompanying an earlier post which brought up the possibility that we have just simply covered the earth with too many people and the combined effect of the demands brought by this populace is causing havoc every time a weather event occurs. After writing this, it kept niggling at me that this would come across to younger generations as some old fart raving about the old days and they would dismiss it. This blog attempts to take the global argument and make if much more personal to each one of us by forcing us to evaluate our present situations with our memories of how the "world used to be" before the climate changed and started to threaten our status quo.
So, let's look at some demographics. The population of the earth is presently about 8 billion. Of this, 1 billion are situated in North and South America - the remaining 7 billion are overseas in asia, india, middle east, eurasia, etc. Of the Americas, the USA has a 2019 population of 365 million people (Canada is 37 million) which seems to be quite reasonable compared to the much higher numbers being shown in the rest of the world.
But we're not really concerned with the rest of the world because quite frankly - it isn't our world. We watch the events in our own environments and make our opinions, conclusions and predjudices based on the significance of how much our lives are affected by climate and weather events. We are told to behave ourselves and to prepare for hard times by politicians and moral leaders as their policies kick in and the sacrifices begin. Failure to comply means future armageddon - agreement means we will reverse the degradation causing climate change and presumably return to our former standard of Utopia - only better because it will be clean.
So let's look back - each of us to different start dates. I go back to 1945 and so I will look at the year 1950 as my "good old days" and try to compare this with our situation today. My childrens' date would be around 1975 and my grand childrens' date would be around 2005. You need to take your own starting dates and think of the changes that have occurred since you became aware of the world around you.
First, it is obvious that each generations "good old days" is different from the other. If my sons can't remember the 50's (because they weren't here) then obviously they are not going to relate to them either. The same applies to my grand children who won't relate to their parents' good old days and certainly NOT to grand dad's. It means that as we all face today's problems we all look to solve those problems from different approaches, flavoured heavily by our experiences and memories of how great things were before the whole environment deteriorated and came back to haunt us with personal weather related disasters.
However population numbers are not opinion or emotion based, so let's determine how our numbers grew over our happy times.
USA CANADA RICHMOND, BC
1950 152 million 15 million 20000
1975 214 million 23 million 80000
2005 296 million 32 million 175000
2020 350 million 37 million 220, 000 ( bit of estimation)
cars, etc. 265 million 25 million (cars as consumers? all types of motor vehicles, 2017)
The USA in 1950 had a population of 152 million people (Canada was 15 million). My God, this means in the short span of 70 odd years the USA has added over 200 million people, presumably through birth and / or immigration. That's double the population in 1950! Where the hell did they all go? - Well, the answer is probably "everywhere". Global swarming in your face.
Need perspective? Well, consider that Richmond is a typical municipality / city. It is a significant part of Greater Vancouver and makes many demands on services such as roads, drainage, garbage, sewage, transit, energy, food and shopping supplies, etc. At 220, 000 people we could see that the gain of population in the USA is roughly equivalent to 1000 Richmonds! That's like an average of putting 20 Richmonds in each state! More realistically, spread those 1000 Richmonds over the popular populated areas of the USA (vast tracts of most states are still "empty") and think about how the load on those areas ( California, Florida, Coastal Areas, Mississippi, Great Lakes, New York, East Coast etc.) has increased in just 70 years.
Look at how the population increases have been distributed in the following.
Massive increases in population in large swaths of the country, coincidentally associated with "climate change" disasters have settled in communities like Richmond. Only one small area on the map is showing a decrease. All the others are showing gains in people and of course infrastructure to settle them. Again, consider that within these states the populations are not spread out evenly over the available area (they still have deserts and forests and farmland in abundance.) So the concentrations and increases are magnified into the centres that, if situated in the path of natural weather aberrations will suffer greatly when (not if) those aberrations occur.
TORNADOS. - it's on the hotseat as this blog is being composed. We have been media exposed to several images lately as Tornado Alley coughs up its share of annual weather / settlement disasters. Global warming enthusiasts are hard at work tying this to climate change and doing the usual guilt trip on how we need to stop burning carbon to get back to "normal" - you know - the days of The Wizard of Oz. But here's a chart that shows the tornadoes are "relatively" constant, not increasing in frequency. (of course there is variation but there's no trend upwards).
So, why all the hysteria and all the damage. Infrastructure. Built with population growth and increased density of people IN THE AREAS WHERE THESE WILD STORMS HAVE ALWAYS OCCURRED.
HURRICANES - same story for Atlantic based hurricanes. There is a slim argument that they are increasing in size and duration and they certainly are increasing in property damage and displacement of populations. The argument that there are more of them doesn't cut it however as the chart below doesn't show any real trend to increasing frequency (they go up and down on a year by year basis) but we know they are hitting highly populated areas the damage goes in proportion to the levels of infrastructure being exposed.
Look at the two lower curves and don't let the upper curve draw away your attention. They just aren't increasing in numbers with any definitive trend from bad to worse, or the opposite. The damage HAS to be due to the massive populations that have placed themselves in their traditional paths. When they hit (as they always have) the damage can be enormous.
HEAT WAVES - lots of hysteria about heat waves being due to climate change after a few days of heat in Europe this last summer (by the way, it snowed in Alberta in September). Again, no record to demonstrate it in the USA anyway as being something that is long term or on any trends at all - increasing or decreasing.
THE MORAL ? - KISS (keep it simple stupid) leads to ITPS (it's the people stupid). Stop building in disaster prone areas or build to suit - no more straw houses - or expect the Big Bad Wolf to "huff and puff" and blow your house down! Stop looking for Climate Change as the villain and get honest - we caused our own problems when:
WE PUT OURSELVES IN HARM'S WAY. NOW DEAL WITH IT REALISTICALLY, NOT BY RUNNING TO THE WIZARD.
Please note: these images and the discussions surrounding them are easily found on Google. I'm not even going to attempt to make a bibliography because this isn't a scientific paper, it's an opinion piece. If you doubt me go search them out. The exercise is quite revealing.