Asimov on the future (and global cooling)

[mmcirvin]

A popular argument against the climate science community's warnings about the Earth warming up is "they were all scared about the Earth cooling down in the 1970s, so why should we trust them now?" (sometimes it's even claimed that climate scientists were shrieking of an imminent ice age). The claim is made mostly on the basis of a badly sensationalized Newsweek article from 1975.

Well, here's a nice speech from Isaac Asimov in 1974 in which he seems to be endorsing global-cooling fears. Asimov was a chemist-turned-science-and-SF-writer, not a climatologist, but he was generally scientifically au courant and did his homework; was he reflecting the consensus of the time?

The answer is that there's some truth in the claim that global cooling was a concern in the Seventies, but it is not particularly damning to the climate scientists. The Wikipedia article on the history of the global-cooling hypothesis is pretty good. To make a long story short, global cooling was certainly a live hypothesis in the 1970s, because there really had been a slight cooling trend going on through the middle of the 20th century, an interruption in the "hockey stick" rise through the rest of the period. Many climatologists attributed this, as Asimov did, to the effects of particulate matter from dirty-burning fuels being released into the atmosphere and increasing the earth's albedo. Present-day climate models suggest that they were right about that, and that this effect was canceling out the warming effect of carbon dioxide. What's happened since the Seventies is that we've managed to reduce particulate pollution while continuing to increase carbon dioxide emissions: the famous "global dimming". We could possibly halt global warming by burning dirtier again, but the cure would be worse than the disease.

Asimov doesn't warn of an imminent ice age; the scientists in the Seventies who were talking about future ice ages were referring to time scales of thousands of years. Bad popularizations sometimes confused this with the recent cooling trend, but Asimov was too smart for that.

I remember being taught about this as a kid in the late Seventies and hearing it all presented in a very ambiguous way with no clear take-away lesson, because nobody really knew if human activity was going to warm or cool the Earth in the future; both were possibilities. Since then, the trend's become a lot clearer and the science has improved.



Asimov's whole speech is worth reading; it makes me miss him terribly, but reading it with a few decades' hindsight also gives me some hope. Some parts of it have aged poorly, but in some cases that's because people have actually, to some extent, done the things that he said we needed to do. Even the reversal of global cooling is to some extent an example of succeeding too well. Other bits have acquired additional layers of bitter irony; check out the section on war.

What impresses me in general is that though he seems to end on a pessimistic note about the ability of humanity to behave sensibly, throughout he concentrates on a hopeful vision of the future we need rather than simply insisting that doom is inevitable. That is, I'm afraid, a rare skill. And throughout there's the attitude that, as he wrote elsewhere, "if knowledge is the problem, ignorance is not the solution".

Of particular interest is the section on population:

There is no need to decide whether to stop the population increase or not. There is no need to decide whether the population will be lowered or not. It will, it will!

The only thing mankind has to decide is whether to let it be done in the old inhumane method that nature has always used, or to invent a new humane method of our own. That is the only choice that faces us; whether to lower the population catastrophically by a raised death rate, or to lower it humanely by a lowered birth rate. And we all make the choice. And I have a suspicion that we won't make the right choice, which is the tragedy of humanity right now.

What's happened? Have we made the right choice? Well, we have and we haven't. The Earth's population is far from stabilizing but now stands at six and a half billion, instead of the seven billion that he gave as a simple projection. We're no longer exponentiating, and that in itself is good news. Part of that is because people have, not everywhere or completely but to a greater degree than Asimov was willing to predict, put into practice the project that he urges further down, with gentle irony for his audience of mostly male engineers:

Well then, in the world of the 21st century in order to keep the birth rate down, we're going to have to give women interesting things to do that'll make them glad to stay out of the nursery. And the interesting things that I can think of that we give women to do are essentially the same as the interesting things that we give men to do. I mean we're going to have women help in running the government, and science, and industry...whatever there is to run in the 21st century. And what it amounts to is we're going to have to pretend...when I say "we", I mean men...we're going to have to pretend that women are people.

[group laughs]

And you know, pretending is a good thing because if you pretend long enough, you'll forget you're pretending and you'll begin to believe it.

On the other hand, part of the slowdown is because of catastrophe. In Africa, I'm pretty sure a significant chunk of it is because of AIDS, a disease whose victims, we now know, included Isaac Asimov.

The great challenge he describes of countering dire warnings about "race suicide" is very much with us today. There's even a parody of it at work in modern American liberals' fretting that conservatives are outbreeding them. I don't know any way of getting around it other than what he described, the hard work of trying to identify with other people and groups instead of thinking of demographic war between us and them. Differential reproduction may work quickly over the centuries, but so does the spread of ideas. It's worth remembering that, while children do retain the values of their parents to some degree, if this were an ironclad law, religious conservatives with huge families would already comprise essentially the whole population of the US; since I'm descended from such people three or four generations back, I'd be one of them. Just as with climate change, it's an error to look at just one force in isolation.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I don't know any way of getting around it other than what he described, the hard work of trying to identify with other people and groups instead of thinking of demographic war between us and them. Differential reproduction may work quickly over the centuries, but so does the spread of ideas. It's worth remembering that, while children do retain the values of their parents to some degree, if this were an ironclad law, religious conservatives with huge families would already comprise essentially the whole population of the US...

THANK you. I've been trying to say this for weeks, and you just put it better than I ever managed.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

Your last point is one of the reasons I don't want to have children. My set of beliefs and preferences seem so weird (compared to the average) that it seems unlikely any kids I might have would end up sharing them. I fully expect they'd be driving an SUV out to the suburbs, eating steak every meal, and I'd still love them because that's just how the hormones work. I don't want to be in that situation.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. There were some bits that strike me as naive, probably even for the time - there must have been 5-6 civil/guerilla wars going on in various bits of the third world when he wrote that. Not quite Lebanon, yet, I guess.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think Asimov's notion of a war might have been heavily colored by The Big One.

Instead of his excessively flippant characterization of guerilla warfare, I prefer Matt White's characterization (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm) from his critical evaluation of the democratic peace theory: most wars are civil wars, often with some international involvement. International wars in which one established government attacks another are what we think of when we hear the word "war", but they are relatively rare; Iraq started out as one but of course now it's another civil war with third-party involvement.

Asimov's Turner Thesis In Space! notion, of space exploration as the great risky adventure of future humanity, also seems a little naive to me these days, though it's a very common notion among science-fiction fans. Actually binding your daughters and sons to space empire is really expensive in terms of resources, so if you're living in a world of limits and caution you might have trouble doing it. Just doing a lot of science there is cheaper, and to me it is a profound adventure. But I don't get the impression that most people feel that way; it's just more pictures of rocks and stars.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Nobody seems to have properly appreciated before the fact just how hard it is to cut corners in the process of removing mass from earth's gravity well. Doesn't seem to be possible to do it cheaply. People were a bit too happy about the comparison between Columbus & the early space program, I guess.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always the possibility of some kind of radical departure (say, feasible space elevators), but, then again, it's always easy to be outrageously optimistic about the thing that hasn't been tried yet.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, while I think his take on technological unemployment is probably right over the very long term, it's a bit dismissive of the short- and medium-term dislocations that happen as a result. And the thing about the short term is that it never ends.

Miscellaneous comments about Asimov, Doomsaying

[stevendaryl.livejournal.com]

I had not heard that Asimov died of AIDS.

About doomsaying: There is a fine line to walk when the topic is something potentially catastrophic, such as overpopulation, global warming, nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, etc. On the one hand, if you overemphasize the threat and the dire consequences of inaction, you sound like a crank, and people dismiss what you are sayin. On the other hand, if you are too nuanced about it---constantly bring up the uncertainties---we don't know for sure, things might be bad, but maybe not, we can't know what the future holds, etc.---then that just encourages people to feel comfortable doing nothing.

The other problem with acting to prevent catastrophes is the bad incentive structure. The benefits of preventative measures fall on everyone, while the costs fall on those who act responsibly. The incentive structure for bad behavior is the opposite: the benefits come to the irresponsible, while the costs are born by everyone.

Yet another problem with doomsaying is that skeptics always have inductive reasoning on their side: All predictions of doom in the past have all been proven wrong, so by induction we can assume that modern doomsayers are wrong, as well.

Re: Miscellaneous comments about Asimov, Doomsaying

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was AIDS; that didn't come out until just a few years ago. He got it from a blood transfusion involved in surgery, in the early days of the epidemic before they were screening the blood supply.

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

Good timing. George Will, "Let cooler heads prevail".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033101707.html

Cooler Heads?

[stevendaryl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if global warming is for real, nobody's head will be cool! Our heads will just get hotter and hotter.

I think there is ample evidence this process has already started...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was partly motivated to post that by some stupid thing George Will said.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I also get the impression, reading some of the takedowns of the Will article, that Asimov was going just a little beyond what the data implied even according to the climatologists of the time; they weren't willing to say that a straight-line extrapolation of the cooling trend was realistic.