Asimov on the future (and global cooling)
Mar. 30th, 2006 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA 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:
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.
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!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:
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.
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.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.
[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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 06:37 pm (UTC)