Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
For the usual completely dubious reasons, I have to think of an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. I thought I would compare it to population growth. This is the graph.
Figure 1. Atmospheric CO2 levels and population growth, 1800 – 2020
When I look at that graph, I notice that the increase in CO2 is generally in agreement with population growth, but there is a slowdown. Now, this makes complete sense to me. The population increases when a baby is born… but the baby does not participate in CO2 generating activities until the baby is an adult.
So I decided to see if I could use the standard formula for latency and resizing that I used in my recent post on CO2,Feel The Bern“, to see if CO2 levels could be simulated using only population growth. Here is the result of that calculation.
Figure 2. Atmospheric CO2 levels calculated as a lagged and variable version of population growth.
There are a few interesting points about this result. First, the fit is very good. The remaining standard error, which is the average difference between the calculated value and the actual CO2 level, is only one ppmv. That’s about a third of a percent error…very small.
Next, the half-life of the calculation is 30 years, a reasonable value for a child growing up and participating in CO2-producing activities.
Next, over the past 170 years, lambda has not changed at all, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased for every additional billion people…
Most curious.
After seeing all that, I had to think about the future. This is the United Nations population projection. They say the population is likely to peak at around 11 billion by 2100.
Figure 3. United Nations Population Projection to 2100.
So… assuming the population is at 2100 until 2200, and other things being the same, two assumptions are rarely true… here is the CO2 forecast to 2200.
Figure 4. CO2 to 2200 projection, using the method of Figure 2 with the same tau and lambda values.
And to complete the circle, here are temperature projections based on estimates of future CO2 changes.
Figure 5. Past and future temperature anomalies based on the CO2 projections in Figure 4. Please specify that I Not assumes that the average global surface temperature is a function of CO2 levels, so this is purely done as a theoretical exercise.
And finally, I recall Mark Twain’s comment about the length of the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. Its length is now only nine hundred and seventy-three miles.
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years Lower Mississippi has shortened itself by two hundred and forty-two miles. That’s the average of an allowance per mile and a third per year. Thus any calm person, neither blind nor foolish, can see that during the old political Silurian period, just a million years ago by November of next year, the Lower Mississippi River was a million years long. three hundred thousand miles, and congested. The Gulf of Mexico is like a fishing rod.
And similarly, anyone can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will join their streets. , and comfortably ran along under a single mayor and a reciprocal council of butchers.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such a wholesale conjecture profit from such a trifling investment in fact.
Now, back to pressure washing…
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Como De Costumbre: I can defend what I write. I choose my words very carefully, and I am often asked and always prepared to defend them. However, I cannot defend other people’s interpretations of my words…so please, when you comment, quote exactly the words you are referring to.
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