The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  Perhaps it needed someone with the imagination of H.G. Wells to envisage a world transformed by the internal combustion engine (which was being developed in the 1860s) and the gas turbine (1930s). However, by the 1860s, the dynamo, discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831, was being commercialised. During the 1870s, dynamos were generating electricity cheaply enough to power factories and begin to replace steam on railways and tramways.[25]

  Marx and Engels displayed a much deeper grasp of the dynamic power of capitalism than Jevons. In the same year Jevons was making his assertions about the future’s dependence on coal and steam, Engels received a letter commenting on the similarity between Darwin’s account of plant and animal life and Malthusian theory.

  ‘Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond the economic forms of the animal world,’ Engels replied:

  We start from the premise that the same forces which have created modern bourgeois society – the steam engine, modern machinery, mass colonisation, railways, steamships, world trade – these same means of production and exchange will also suffice … to raise the productive powers of each individual so much that he can produce enough for the consumption of two, three, four, five or six individuals.[26]

  The third antecedent is Frédéric Bastiat. In Schumpeter’s unkind estimation, Bastiat was like the swimmer who enjoys himself in the shallows but drowns when he swims out of his depth. ‘I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist,’ Schumpeter commented, ‘I hold that he was no theorist.’[27]

  Theorist or not, when it came to enquiring why Malthus was mistaken, Bastiat asked the right question: Why did Europe no longer suffer from periodic famine? The answer, Bastiat thought, had been provided by another French economist, Jean Baptiste Say. As civilisation advances, the means of existence – the living standards people at any given time think are the minimum needed to maintain themselves and their families – diverge from the means of subsistence, the bare minimum needed to keep body and soul together.

  The means of existence, by reason of social progress, have risen far above the means of subsistence. When years of scarcity come, we are thus enabled to give up many enjoyments before encroaching on the first necessities of life. Not so in such countries as China or Ireland, where men have nothing in the world but a little rice or a few potatoes. When the rice or potato crops fail, they have absolutely no means of purchasing other food.[28]

  Malthus’s population principle should therefore be amended so that population growth is no longer linked with the means of subsistence, Bastiat argued, but with the means of existence; ‘the point where the [population] laws of multiplication and limitation meet, is removed, and elevated.’[29] People will have as many children as they can afford and maintain a certain standard of living, one that tends to rise over time.

  Bastiat’s insight is relevant to the debate on global warming a century and a half later. The greater the gap between the means of existence and the means of subsistence, the greater a society’s resilience to climatic disaster, however caused. Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. In the early 1980s, it suffered an intense drought, causing an estimated A$3 billion in losses.[30] If a similar drought hit sub-Saharan Africa, the issue wouldn’t have been the scale of economic losses but the extent of the humanitarian disaster. The difference is a function of economic development. In rich countries, people don’t die from drought and crop failure.

  Bastiat’s ameliorist position reflects a different cast of mind from the pessimistic outlook of Malthus and Jevons. Malthus, he thought, had ‘fixed his regards too exclusively on the sombre side. In my own economical studies and inquiries, I have been so frequently led to the conclusion that whatever is the work of Providence is good, that when logic has seemed to force me to a different conclusion, I have been inclined to distrust my logic’.[31]

  Bastiat’s view of the harmony of class interests was in complete contradiction to Marxism’s class warfare analysis of history. Marx and Engels viewed Bastiat, a liberal, bourgeois economist, with even greater disdain than Schumpeter did. But in responding to Malthusian views on environmental limits to population growth and economic activity, they were on the same side of the argument. Writing in 1895, towards the end of his life and of a century that had witnessed the greatest increase in production up to that point in history, Engels remarked:

  I do not understand how anyone can speak today of a completion of the Malthusian theory that the population presses against the means of subsistence at a time when corn in London cost twenty shillings a quarter, or half the average price of 1848–70, and when it is generally recognised that the means of subsistence are pressing against the population which is not large enough to consume them![32]

  Capitalism would collapse because it produced too much too cheaply, Marxists used to argue.

  That couldn’t be said of the collapse of communism in 1989. For sure, the environmental degradation of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe revealed that communism had been faithful to its founders’ Promethean ideology of man’s subjugation of nature, just as it required the subjugation of mankind. However, communism did not fail because it had poisoned the Earth, polluted the skies or drained inland seas. Neither did it fail because it had run out of natural resources. As an economic system, it failed because it could not produce.

  The functional extinction of Marxism as a living ideology was to have a profound impact on the success of the idea of global warming and its ascendancy in the early 1990s. The decline of Marxism removed one of the two economic antecedents from the nineteenth century that would have opposed environmentalism and alarmism about global warming. From the 1960s onwards, the growth of the environmental movement would expand to occupy the space on the political spectrum vacated by classical Marxism. It left the ameliorists, Bastiat’s successors, to fight the battle alone against the depletionists, the descendants of Malthus and Jevons.

  Jevons’ forecasts, or prophecies as Keynes called them, also tell a story relevant to our day. We cannot definitively verify economic forecasts to justify calls to tackle global warming. Unlike Jevons’ contemporaries, we can see whether the fame The Coal Question earned him was justified by events.

  Jevons simply took a three and a half per cent annual growth rate and extended it for a century.[33] For the first decade, the forecast wasn’t too bad with a 3.1 per cent average rate of growth a year.[34] But by 1881, the divergence was unmistakable, with actual output of coal nearly twelve per cent less than Jevons had reckoned. The divergence kept growing and coal output peaked and started to decline in the second decade of the twentieth century.

  Overall, Jevons calculated that Britain would need to produce one hundred and two billion tonnes of coal in the period 1861–1970 with annual production in 1961 projected to be 2.2 billion tonnes. It was this colossal number, which Jevons argued was beyond Britain’s physical resources, that led him to conclude that Britain’s ‘present happy progressive condition’ was of limited duration.[35] In reality, total coal production in the hundred years to 1965 was a shade under two billion tonnes, less than the annual amount Jevons had forecast for 1965. The forecast by one of the most brilliant economists of his or any age was out by a factor greater than fifty. By 2007, British coal consumption had fallen to around sixty-three million tonnes, of which some twenty million was produced domestically – less than one per cent of what Jevons had projected for the last year of his series.

  Even more spectacular than Jevons’ over-estimation of the importance of coal was his dismissal of petroleum. Here is the Jevons coal curve again, this time with the rising curve of petroleum imports.

  Keynes said that Jevons wrote The Coal Question to shock and establish his public reputation. The book was a bestseller. It led to Jevons meeting Gladstone who told Jevons that his book was masterly. John Stuart Mill argued that because Britain’s p
rosperity was limited, the National Debt should be paid down – a proposition that Keynes argued should have been dismissed with only ‘a little reflection’. If demand for coal was to increase indefinitely at a geometric rate, future national income would be so much greater than present national income that the dead-weight represented by the National Debt would become of little account.[36]

  How did Jevons get it so wrong?

  One of his economist contemporaries said that not only was Jevons simply a genius, he was also a brilliant logician. Jevons believed that forecasting the future was a matter of logic. He once wrote in his journal of waking one sunny morning with the sure sensation that logic had disclosed the future to him, only for it to slip his grasp – epistemological optimism taken to a delusory extreme. Then there’s the role of character, as explained by Keynes: ‘There is not much in Jevons’ scare which can survive cool criticism. His conclusions were influenced, I suspect, by a psychological trait, unusually strong in him, which many other people share, a certain hoarding instinct, a readiness to be alarmed by the idea of the exhaustion of resources.’[37]

  Keynes went on to relate that he’d been told by Jevons’ son, an economist of some note, about how his father

  held similar ideas as to the approaching scarcity of paper as a result of the vastness of demand in relation to the supplies of suitable material … He acted on his fears and laid in such large stores not only of writing paper, but also thin brown packing paper, that even today, more than fifty years after his death, his children have not used up the stock he left behind of the latter; though his purchases seem to have been more in the nature of speculation than for his personal use, since his own notes were mostly written on the backs of old envelopes and odd scraps of paper, of which the proper place was the waste-paper basket.[38]

  The rationality of Jevons’ response to his fear of resource depletion provides a contrast with the manner of his end. Ignoring the advice of his doctor that he avoid swimming, on holiday one August, Jevons drowned at sea.

  In December 2007, NASA climate scientist James Hansen wrote to the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, sending a copy of his letter to the Queen. Britain, along with the United States and Germany, had contributed more carbon dioxide emissions per capita than any other country, Hansen claimed. Accompanying the letter was a short analysis of ‘basic fossil fuel facts’. There was a graphic totalling carbon dioxide emissions in the period 1751–2006. Coal was the single largest culprit. ‘Fully half of the excess CO2 in the air today (from fossil fuels), relative to pre-industrial times, is from coal,’ the analysis said.[39]

  Is this a bad thing? As the economist Ronald Coase reminded us, to answer the question, we need to know the value of what is obtained as well as what is sacrificed in obtaining it.

  Suppose that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum, a climate scientist had found a link between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures. And suppose the politicians of the time, invoking the precautionary principle that society should not do things that might involve unknown and unquantifiable risk, had followed the advice of today’s leading proponents of the global warming consensus. As a result, fossil fuel extraction would have been capped when Britain, the world’s leading coal producer, was mining less than twenty million tonnes of coal a year.

  Posing the counter-factual provides a reality check. If today we implemented deep emission cuts, we cannot be sure how different the future would be in terms of economic development or how the climate of the future might be. But we can be fully confident that if the combustion of coal and other hydrocarbons had been severely restricted from the start of the nineteenth century, the economic take-off of the Industrial Revolution would not have happened: we would all be a lot poorer, our lives would be shorter and most of us would be earning our living working in the fields.

  We can also see that the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were not outweighed by the costs of any resultant change in the climate, insofar as such changes can be attributed to industrialisation. The Maldives, or any other inhabited islands, did not sink beneath the oceans – if Darwin was right about the formation of coral atolls, they would not have anyway.* Neither is Bengal inundated. There hasn’t been a mass extinction of species due to climate change. It is quite possible that such changes in the climate as a result of industrialisation might, in fact, have been benign. Would a colder world have made us better off – with no coal, no electricity, no gas-fired central heating?

  Around the time that Marx, Engels, Bastiat and Jevons were debating Malthus, a scientific breakthrough was occurring with the first experimental demonstration of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. Before it could happen, scientists needed to have identified and isolated carbon dioxide. And to do that, they had to discard one of chemistry’s most cherished theories.

  It was in the 1750s, during the early stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, that Scottish chemist Joseph Black demonstrated what he called ‘fixed air’ had fundamentally different properties from ordinary atmospheric air. In the last three decades of the century, Joseph Priestley prepared and differentiated some twenty new ‘airs.’[40] At this point, scientific understanding encountered a block in the form of the phlogiston theory of combustion. This explained chemical changes caused by combustion in terms of a substance, phlogiston, being lost into the atmosphere.

  The invention of phlogiston wouldn’t be the last time that scientists invented something to explain something else. In the nineteenth century, scientists invented ether because their materialistic assumptions required something through which light could undulate and electromagnetic occurrences happen. ‘If you do not happen to hold the metaphysical theory which makes you postulate such an ether,’ Whitehead wrote, ‘you can discard it. For it has no independent vitality.’[41]

  The overthrow of the phlogiston theory is a locus classicus in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which describes how a scientific paradigm defines scientists’ field of study, then experiences a crisis to be supplanted by a new paradigm in a process similar to a political revolution. Kuhn challenged the idea that scientific knowledge proceeded through cumulative breakthroughs. The depreciation of historical fact and context was deeply ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, Kuhn wrote. Science still needed heroes, so it revised or forgot their works that did not fit the present. The outcome was ‘a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear and cumulative’.[42] History, Kuhn argued, did not bear out this linear view of scientific progress: ‘Cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development.’[43]

  The phlogiston theory broke down because it demanded greater and greater contortions to explain how the escape of a substance was consistent with the increased weight of what was left behind: phlogiston was incorporeal; it was the lightest known substance; it had negative weight.[44] This enabled the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who had established his oxygen theory of combustion seven years earlier, to administer the coup de grâce. In an extraordinary passage anticipating Popper’s theory of science, Lavoisier wrote in 1785:

  Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it. Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not; sometimes it is free fire, sometimes it is fire combined with an earth; sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it. It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours. It is a veritable Proteus that changes its form every instant![45]

  In 1800 Frederick William Herschel, a German astronomer settled in England, found that sunlight passing through a prism produced heat just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum. Herschel had stumbled upon infrared radiation. In th
e 1820s, Jean-Baptiste Fourier took Herschel’s discovery as the basis of his speculation that the Earth’s temperature could be ‘augmented by the interposition of the atmosphere’, because, as Fourier hypothesised, ‘heat in the state of light find less resistance in penetrating the air, than in re-passing into the air when converted into non-luminous heat’.[46] Had Fourier ‘discovered’ the greenhouse effect? The self-styled Newton of heat wasn’t sure. It was difficult to know how far the atmosphere influenced the average temperature of the globe. Fourier, a formidable mathematician, despaired of solving this problem: ‘We are no longer guided by a regular mathematical theory.’[47]

  Whether or not Fourier could be said to have discovered the greenhouse effect, it had not been demonstrated experimentally. In 1859, a few months before Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, the Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered that different gases absorb radiant heat of different qualities in different degrees. Provoked by an interest in glaciers and Alpinism, Tyndall set up a series of experiments to, as he said, put these questions to nature. After seven weeks of intense experimentation in his basement laboratory at the Royal Institution, Tyndall declared ‘the subject is completely in my hands’.[48]

  Three weeks later at a lecture attended by Prince Albert, Tyndall demonstrated his findings and concluded:

  The bearing of this experiment upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious … the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.[49]