Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20^th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.  

In 2023, Earth “shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency,” Coernicus announced on January 9, 2024.[1] The use of the word, shattered, seems hyperbolic, or exaggerated, to draw attention, but sometimes small differences in numbers represent significant change that is difficult for us non-scientists to perceive. “Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit).”[2] Very gradual change is the default for the Earth’s climate, which is why a long-term perspective is needed even to assess the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.

“The agency had calculated that 2023 was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming,” the agency’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said.[3] To be sure, not all of the 1.48 Celsius increase from pre-industrial times was due to pollution. “Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes. . . . Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere.”[4] Even so, 1.3 accounts for most of the 1.48 degrees, and is thus significant. This can also be inferred by the estimate that “2023 was probably hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. Our species, homo sapiens, has only been around for 300,000.

It looks like hope is running dry on whether economies will push us—or, more accurately, whether we will push ourselves—beyond the 1.5 Celsius limit of global warming agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement. To be sure, “(f)or the first time, nations meeting for annual United Nations climate talks in December [2023] agreed that the world needs to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, but they set no concrete requirements to do so.”[5] However, even though renewable sources of energy had “expanded at record rates, fossil fuels maintained an 82% share of total primary energy consumption” in 2022.[6] Even at the same share, “carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose 0.9% in 2022 to a new high of 34.4 billion metric tons, indicating lack of progress in curbing worldwide carbon output.”[7]  Emissions thus “moved further away from the reductions called for in the Paris Agreement.”[8] Juliet Davenport, president of EI, said, “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”[9] So even in the midst of shattering records, governments generally were still allowing their respective economies to increase their emissions, or at least enough governments were resisting taking measures that would reflect knowledge of how rapidly the planet was warming overall.

The lack of concrete requirements had rendered the Paris Agreement toothless, and thus no match for the pressures that governments are always under to facilitate and not thwart economic growth and not to stand up to corporate donors to political campaigns in democracies. More abstractly stated, non-binding international treaties are no match for the human urge for instant gratification and the desire for more wealth (i.e., greed). In spite of our great reasoning ability, our species also has expediency “hard-wired” into our biology. A big unanswered question is whether research into means to “capture” carbon in the atmosphere (and oceans) will undo the damage caused by our species’ heedless impulsive refusal to self-regulate itself.

In the movie, “The Matrix,” agent Smith likens our species to a virus because we keep spreading. In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion; by 2024, 8.1 billion humans were alive on Earth. Clearly, such a enormous increase in just 123 years must be significant for the planet's ecosystems, even a shock. Few of us even realize that, in line with Thomas Malthus’s thesis that human population can outstrip the world’s supply of food—which stirred controversy among Deists who could not accept such a large flaw in God’s design of the Creation—the exponential increase of our species’ population is a, or even the, underlying cause of the rising carbon emissions from cars, trucks, heating, agriculture, and industrial production levels. Simply put, more people means more cars, and thus more exhaust; more people means more widgets, which means more factories as well as more freighters on the seas, more trucking and more freight-train hauls; and more people means more dwellings, which means more heating and air-conditioning, and thus more demand for heating oil and on coal plants for more electricity. These relationships are really quite simple at the macro level of aggregation, though admittedly I am putting to the side the shift from coal and oil to renewables. We are all organisms, and thus we cannot but consume and use resources; the more organisms, the more food, for instance, is needed. Malthus, an Anglican priest and political economist, was right in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, when the global population of humans stood at 1 billion (1900, a century later, being just 650 million more). If an intelligent design of Creation can indeed be inferred—an inference challenged by Malthus’ theory of over-population wherein geometrical population growth can outstrip arithmetic expansion in resources—self-regulation would presumably be crucial in our species and yet the laggard responses to the Paris Agreement would suggest that we suffer a want of self-discipline on a collective (and individual) level.

From the susceptibility of elected representatives to being beholden to big business, and the insatiable greed etched into the very raison d’etre and being of a company and the manager function, we can infer the very weakness of the human urge to self-limit or voluntarily restrain ourselves relative to an otherwise maximizing, or schizogenic, inbred and culturally-encouraged tendency to resist or ignore soft limits (i.e., those not subject to enforcement). Fortunately, the jury is still out on whether the technological advancements that human reason is capable of (e.g., carbon capture) will rescue our species from its own intractable instinctual urges that are felt so strongly in the moment that our species would even allow itself to deconstruct in the long-term as if this were pre-determined without free-will.   

1. Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in 2023,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Rapier, “Why the World Keeps Setting Global Carbon Emission Records,” Forbes, August 1, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

On the Arrogance of Self-Entitlement during a Pandemic

In the midst of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, libertarians in San Francisco, California objected to wearing face masks. Other people there were simply fed up with wearing masks by late 1918. The libertarians, who objected on the basis of rights, actually prevented the Board of Health from renewing a mandate to wear masks.[1] In early 1919, another spike in influenza cases there led the board to put a mandate in place. So in March of 2020, the failure of mass transits and retail stores to enforce physical distancing and the failures a few months later to enforce mandates on wearing face masks to reduce the spread of the coronavirus can be seen as recklessness (and fecklessness) that could have been prevented by looking back a hundred years. But could the willful disregard of store policies and local law both by customers and store managers have been prevented had business had heeded history? I contend that human nature, which had not changed in such a short time by evolutionary standards, played the heavy, or anchor.
The selfishness of business managers can be regarded as the obstacle to historical progress in dealing with pandemics. As against history and even “organizational learning,” the current profit-motive wins over managers. God forbid that a customer be offended by being confronted by a store employee for not wearing a mask even though mask-wearing was “required” not only by store policy, but also by local law! Of course, a store or business policy barring enforcement of a requirement nullifies it, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Also, allowing customers to break a local law is itself criminal, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Ignoring a company policy and even local law could somehow be justified by the interests of profit-seeking.  
The selfishness and inconsiderateness of customers came with a presumptiveness or sense of entitlement to break not only store policies but local law as well. The mantra by the individual that that individual is above store requirements and the law rings with a shallow arrogance. The presumptuousness of the weak of being self-justified brings with it a bad odor, Nietzsche would say. This pathology was especially prevalent in places such as Arizona in the United States.
According to Jeremy Brown, an expert on the 2020 pandemic, it showed how strident selfishness can be. Such selfishness, joined by the related lack of consideration and empathy for other people, was perhaps greater than expected among American business managers and customers. “I think that the message we’ve seen is that people are selfish to a remarkable degree that I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Brown said.[2] That is, the refusal of retail managers to enforce a company requirement because doing so might turn some customers away, and thus their money, is steeped in short-sighted selfishness that recognizes no business responsibility in society. Similarly, the refusal of customers to wear masks, which put other people at risk, can show us just how much of a force selfishness can have in certain people. “The selfishness of people and their inability to have empathy for others who aren’t like themselves is one of the very, very worrying aspects that the disease has highlighted, Brown suggests. “I think this is a deeply rooted part of American society.”[3]
I submit that it is a gross overgeneralization to gloss American society, as there are many, just as many exist in Europe. In having lived in several of those in America, I was stunned in 2020 by just how much aggressive selfishness and stubborn weakness I witnessed in Arizona by how people reacted to the pandemic. Many bus drivers, for instance, refused to wear masks even though they were required by company policy and the local law. Many retail stores had policies forbidding employees from even approaching customers who were not wearing masks. Many light rail, bus passengers, and store customers went maskless with impunity. Light rail security guards were not allowed even to ask passengers to put masks on, and bus drivers rarely did even though they could have at least informed violators of the company policy mandating the wearing of masks. The local police department managers unilaterally decided not to go after organizations allowing customers or riders to break the law. Apparently some laws, especially if they are important to public health, are not worth enforcing.
In short, in some places more than others, just as the extent and depth of selfishness became more apparent with the coronavirus pandemic, so too did human weakness and the related organizational corruption. That these defects had the gall to defend themselves aggressively rather than recognize themselves are faults is perhaps another stunning realization that was made possible by the coronavirus pandemic. This can easily account for the fact that lessons learned in 1918 were so easily dismissed in 2020.

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1. Kristen Rogers, “What the 1918 Flu Pandemic Can Teach Us about Coronavirus,” CNN.com, September 25, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

The Plague, the Spanish Flu, and the Coronavirus: Equivalence and Progress in Infectious Diseases

History forgotten is history to be repeated, for evolution occurs over such vast oceans of time that for our purposes, human biological nature is fixed. Yet history kept fresh can permit progress such that the species is better equipped to combat problems such as pandemics. At the time of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, serious comparisons to the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Black Death of the fourteenth century were lacking in the American media, including by public health officials and government officials even as claims of vague equivalence were made. Such claims, I submit, were erroneous. In fact, they did more harm than good by instilling excessive fear in the population.

Hearing the coronavirus being referred to as a plague on National Public Radio in the United States, I instinctively bristled at the assumed equivalence. A plague is a contagious bacterial disease with a high mortality rate. Coronavirus is a virus rather than a bacterium. The Black Death was a plague pandemic that “devastated Europe from 1347 to 1352 CE, killing an estimated 25-30 million people.”[1]  Paris buried 800 dead each day of the peak, or apex, there. “On average 30% of the population of affected areas [in Europe] was killed, although some historians prefer a figure closer to 50%, and this was probably the case in the worst affected cities.”[2] In 2020, two months after the first recorded death from the coronavirus in Europe, 97,000 people there were dead. The global mortality rate of coronavirus as of March 3, 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), was just 3.4%, which is much closer to the 1% from seasonable flu.[3] Therefore, the coronavirus pandemic was not a plague.

The coronavirus pandemic was also publically likened to the Spanish Flu, which hit the U.S. in 1918. At least both were viruses, unlike the Plague. “The Spanish flu of 1918 lasted only a few months but took an estimated 50 million to 100 million lives around the globe, including 675,000 in the U.S.”[4] Ten days short of two months since the first death from the coronavirus in the U.S., 38,917 people were dead from the disease and less than 5% of the population had been infected. Worldwide, at least 158,000 people had died.[5] Clearly, the two pandemics were not equivalent. The assumed equivalence in the comparisons in 2020 demonstrates not only ignorance, but also a lack of interest in acquiring even a bit of historical knowledge so as to make tolerable comparisons.

In spite of historical knowledge being available and there being advances in knowledge, weaknesses of our species exerts a countervailing wind on the road of progress. The Spanish flu itself may not have been more virulent, however, because medical and public-health knowledge was so significantly less in 1918 than a century later. To put the two eras in perspective, model-T cars were on the road in 1918, whereas electric (and hybrid) cars were being driven and self-driving cars were being tested by 2020.

Parades and “other large public gatherings were common, contributing to the spread” of the Spanish Flu.[6] American governments facing the coronavirus pandemic prohibited or recommended people to maintain a physical distance from each other and stay home as much as possible (e.g. shelter-in-place orders). Retail businesses either shut voluntarily or by government order. Medically, antibiotics “to treat secondary bacterial infections that often accompany the flu had yet to be discovered” by 1918.[7] In addition to antibiotics, physicians in 2020 could put patients struggling to breath on ventilators.

It cannot be assumed, however, that people in 2020 could not have improved their chances of staying healthy by learning more about the 1918 societal protocols. During the Spanish Flu, it was thought “that keeping windows open would deter the spread.”[8] Trolley cars in Cincinnati, Ohio displayed fliers encouraging the practice, “which was utilized nationwide.”[9] In contrast, bus drivers in Phoenix, Arizona kept the bus’s narrow upper windows closed during the coronavirus pandemic a century later. Missing the larger point, the bus company’s management claimed that even open slits were unsafe because passengers could throw small objects out of the buses. Even though medical knowledge was clear that the coronavirus stays airborne relatively long due to its small size among flus and could even be transmitted by normal breathing, the bus company in the desert did not bother to read up on how trolley companied had dealt with the pandemic in 1918. Nor did the passengers figure that physical distancing applied to getting on the bus (i.e., giving deboarding passengers some space). In grocery stores in Phoenix, employees and customers alike overwhelmingly ignored the store policies on keeping at a distance from other people. In spite of the signs and announcements, the managements did not have control over their own employees.

In grocery stores in Phoenix, employees and customers alike overwhelmingly ignored the store policies on keeping at a distance from other people. In spite of the signs and announcements, the managements did not have control over their own employees.

Arizona at the time had one of the worst public education systems in the U.S.; even bad judgment could be traced back to this factor. Perhaps it is too idealistic to assume that everyone can be educated enough to reason his or her way to better secure even self-interested self-preservation. Even with historical knowledge and advances thereof available, human nature presents a limit as to how much actual progress can be made against infectious diseases.

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[1] Marak Cartwright, “Black Death,” Ancient History Encyclopedia (accessed on April 18, 2020).

[2] Ibid.ev

[3] Tedros Ghebreyesus, press briefing of March 3, 2020. As Director-General, he headed the World Health Organization at the time.

[4] Aaron Kassraie, “Spanish Flu: How America Fought a Pandemic a Century Ago,” AARP (accessed April 18, 2020).

[5] Ben Westcott et al, “Global Coronavirus Death Toll Passes 158,000,” CNN.com, April 18, 2020.

[6] Aaron Kassraie, “Spanish Flu: How America Fought a Pandemic a Century Ago,”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

Oceans Arising on Edifices of Arrogance

A study published in late November 2012 in the journal Science estimates that the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland had raised global sea levels by 11.1 millimeters (0.43 inch) since 1992. That represents one-fifth of the total sea-level rise increase in that period. Other contributors include the expansion of the sea water from warming, and the melting of glaciers, as for instance on mountains. In the 1990s, melting of the polar ice sheets in the Antarctica and Greenland was responsible for about 10 percent of the global sea-level rise, but by 2012 the effect had risen to 30 percent.[1] The study does not, however, uncover the underlying cause, or association, lying in a complexity in human nature itself. Our species has vaunted to the top of the food chain and leveraged a brain capable of engineering technological advances that would have seemed magical even just in the nineteenth century, and yet we seem hard-wired to accelerate our course to a self-destructive extinction. This lack of balance is reflected in the increasing extremes in the global climate. In this essay, I begin with the study and steadily work toward uncovering the underlying, subterranean culprit.

In Greenland, melted ice, or water, headed to the Atlantic Ocean. NYT

The study can be interpreted as essentially “firming up” what had been left to guesswork hitherto. “It allows us to make some firm conclusions,” Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds said. “It wasn’t clear if Antarctica was gaining or losing ice. Now we can say with confidence it is losing ice.”[2] This is significant because there are hundreds of feet of sea-level rise in the combined ice of Greenland and the Antarctica, and even that sort of rise could occur in even just two centuries. Unlike ice in the sea melting, water from land-ice is added to the sea and thus is particularly salient in the rise in sea-level.

Although correlation is not necessary causation, global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011, having jumped 3% from the previous year. The international goal of limiting the ultimate warming of the planet to 3.6 degrees (F) was all but disregarded at the time as unrealistic, according to researchers at the Global Carbon Project. Slowly falling emissions in some of the developed economies, including the U.S., were more than matched by continued growth in developing countries like China and India. Coal was growing fastest, with related emissions jumping more than 5 percent in 2011 from the previous year.[3]

Moreover, the level of carbon dioxide, the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, had increased 41% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, the temperature of the planet increased about 1.5 degrees (F) since 1850. The New York Times reports that scientists expected at the time of the release of the 2011 figures that further “increases in carbon dioxide” would “likely . . . have a profound effect on climate, . . . leading to higher seas and greater coastal flooding, more intense weather disasters like droughts and heat waves, and an extreme acidification of the ocean.”[4] The volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2013 was 396 parts per million, 2.9 ppm higher than in 2012; this represents the largest year-to-year increase since 1984, when reliable global records began.[5] As a result, "(c)oncentrations of nearly all the major greenhouse gases reached historic highs in 2013, reflecting ever-rising emissions from automobiles and smokestacks but also, scientists believe, a diminishing ability of the world's oceans and plant life to soak up the excess carbon put into the atmosphere by humans."[6] Accordingly, climatologists were predicting more accelerated ice-melt.

To be sure, distinguishing a causal connection from the sort of cycle that was responsible for Greenland being green in Mediaeval times has been the fulcrum of much controversy and debate; it is not as though scientists can treat one earth by increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while leaving another earth as a control-group and measure the differing climatic consequences. As the philosopher David Hume argued in the late eighteenth century, we actually know much less about cause and effect than we think we do. The human brain naturally that’s a strong positive correlation accompanied by a logical rationale as good enough to pronounce a causal relationship.

Regardless of whether our use of fossil fuels is a contributing factor in the melting of the ice-sheets, that the sea-level was rising even in 2011 and so much of humanity lives within fifty miles of a sea-coast suggests that major dislocations will undoubtedly be necessary within one or two hundred years, and perhaps even sooner given the record-high level of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere in 2013. As much as a third of Florida could be underwater again—whether it eventuates as a result of a natural climatic cycle or carbon dioxide emissions, or both. That the acceleration in the ice-sheet melting reported in 2012 was five times that which scientists had supposed earlier suggests that the data in from the following year may result in even more dramatic headlines. That the C02 and methane (from leaks in wells and distribution as well as from permafrost melt) levels were not only increasing, but doing so at unprecedented rates, suggests that we humans have literally outdone ourselves. It seems a fantasy to expect prudent measures that would obviate beforehand even just some of the anticipated damage. Even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Government could have given Louisiana a financial incentive to rebuild the city further inland, above sea-level. That would have been an easy decision compared with what to do about Manhattan, and yet the unquestioned, knee-jerk response was to rebuild on site.

Accordingly, even the study on ice-melt reported in late 2012 and the report in 2014 of the record increase in C02 in the atmosphere were unlikely to affect public policy significantly, at least in the United States. Enabling such negligence, Andrew Shepherd of Leeds said in 2012: “The signals suggest there is no immediate threat.”[7] Meanwhile, the carbon emissions were actually increasing from the previous year. This represents two degrees of separation from a reduction. The emissions targets in the UNFCCC agreement signed in 1992 had included stabilisations at 1990 levels for some countries and reductions for others by the year 2000.   In other words, we as a species seem pretty clueless, even as we promote ourselves being of the highest and most developed species. 

We are, it can be said, a species of today. The stock markets demonstrate this innate propensity clearly enough. For a complex organism not known for quick evolutionary adaption to a changing environment, it is dangerous to be so “hard-wired” for today when our artifacts collectively can shift a planetary equilibrium beyond its natural cycle. It is not a given that we will be able to rely on our prowess at technological development to make up for our convenient habit of looking on and even making a situation worse. I have personally felt this in momentary lapses of my new-found better diet when I eat one after another chocolate cookie after having fallen with one. My mind succumbs to the fallacy that in having lapsed, might as well open the flood-gates. The next morning, I make myself go running, as if the presumed cause-effect relation might prevent any future lapses. Nietzsche may have been right in suggesting that thoughts are really instinctual urges and reasoning is their tussling for dominance.

As Mark Twain observed, speaking through an angel in The Mysterious Stranger, “Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result—such as it is.”[8] Yet so conceited is that mind, and in other matters too. In spite of having a moral sense, and perhaps because of our knowing right from wrong, our “paltry race [is] always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn’t got.”[8] From an angel’s point of view, homo sapiens—arrogantly self-named here as the “wise man” species—can only be “dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all around”[10] as to be met with utter indifference from the angelic perches so different—the pathos of distance being hollow rather than filled with empathy or even sympathy.[10] Twain’s angel does not mince words. Humans “have nothing in common with me—there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sign, and extinction.”[12] It is not merely the staying power of the moneyed commercial caste that moves us as a species to our own extinction; all of us are complicit.

We have built our mammoth edifices and modern conveniences on such a scale, and we use them as if we were junkies on a drug-fix that we have outstripped our own capacity as a species even to mop up after ourselves. This vulnerability becomes truly dangerous now that we are capable of having a significant impact on the planetary ecosystem, including its atmosphere. Even so, we continue to single our species out as “Made in the Image of God,” and as we preach our moral sense, ignorant of the probability that a more intentionally cruel and self-destructive race has never roamed on the land or swam in the sea. Our reckless conceit, it would seem to all outward appearances, is in such denial of its own existence that we naturally assume we cannot be wrong—that we affirm with such factuality, “I know what I know.” If only the ice on this towering edifice would melt from global warming; if only we could be so lucky.

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1. Gautam Naik, “Polar Ice Melt Is Accelerating,” The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2012.

2. Ibid.

3. Justin Gillis and John Broder, “With Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Record High, Worries on How to Slow Warming,” The New York Times, December 3, 2012.

4. Ibid.

5. Reuters, “Greenhouse Gas Levels in Atmosphere Surged to New High in 2013, World Meteorological Organization Reports,” The Huffington Post, September 9, 2014.

6. Joby Warrick, "CO2 Levels in Atmosphere Rising at Dramatically Faster Rate, U.N. Report Warns," The Washington Post, September 9, 2014.
7. Gillis and Broder, “Carbon Emissions at Record High.”

8. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger in The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (New American Library: New York, 1962), p. 212.

9. Ibid., p. 192.

10. Ibid., p. 172.

11. Ibid., p. 176.

12. Ibid., p. 211.