How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

Humanity’s best hope to end the pandemic was mass-scale vaccination, but long before the first vaccines were approved for distribution, large shares of the population were telling pollsters that they would not get inoculated.[23]

Perhaps the most stunning contrast of nuclear-related risk perceptions is seen when comparing France and Germany.

Fatalistic people also underestimate risks in order to avoid the effort required to analyze them and draw practical conclusions, and because they feel totally unable to cope with them.[31]

And if a young man wants to stay in Newfoundland, there are not that many choices beyond becoming a fisherman or a worker on a massive oil-producing platform,

Driving is an order of magnitude more dangerous than flying, and during the time a person is driving the average chance of dying goes up by about 50 percent compared to staying at home or tending a garden (as long as that does not include climbing a tall ladder or working with a large chainsaw).

Many people do not find it difficult to abstain from smoking, consuming alcohol and drugs, and prefer to stay home rather than sharing a cruise ship with 5,000 passengers and 3,000 crew in the midst of a coronavirus or norovirus outbreak. Others

chemoheterotrophs (organisms that cannot internally produce their own nutrition),

For the global population, that translates to an annual intake of about 2.7 billion tons of oxygen a year, an utterly insignificant fraction (0.00023 percent) of the element’s atmospheric presence of about 1.2 quadrillion tons of O2—and the exhaled CO2 is readily used by photosynthesizing plants.

21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere by volume.

why do we let assorted tweets drive public opinion?

This tendency must be condemned and resisted: we will not succeed if our actions are based on myths and misinformation.

Massive forest fires are destructive and harmful in many ways, but they are not going to suffocate us because of a lack of oxygen.

eutrophication,

We are concerned about too much of something without which we could not be alive: the greenhouse effect. This

Water vapor is by far the most

important absorber of outgoing radiation,

The natural trace gas effect has always been dominated by carbon dioxide (CO2), with smaller contributions made by methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and ozone (O3

Arrhenius

but there is no risk of impaired breathing caused by any conceivable decline of atmospheric oxygen consumed by forest fires or by fossil fuel combustion.

All that is to say, we should not worry about oxygen.

However, we must be concerned about the future of the water supply.

But most studies concur that demand-driven freshwater scarcity will have a much greater impact than the shortages induced by climate change.

(there are some 18,000 desalination plants around the world)

My calculations show that in the future—by lowering the share of beef and raising the share of pork, chicken meat, eggs, and dairy products, by more efficient feeding, and by better use of crop residues and food processing by-products—we could match recent global meat output while greatly limiting livestock’s environmental impact, including its share of methane emissions.

At the same time, we also have to reckon with uncomfortable degrees of ignorance, and with persistent uncertainties

indefensibly inadequate building codes in cold-climate countries and the worldwide adoption of SUVs.

Multiply that by the 250 million SUVs on the road in 2020, and you will see how the worldwide embrace of these machines has wiped out, several times over, any decarbonization gains resulting from the slowly spreading ownership (just 10 million in 2020) of electric vehicles.

three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global CO2 emissions.

love to travel to scenic destinations with hardly any thought of the dreaded carbon footprint generated by this global jetting.

In 2015, when about 50,000 people flew to Paris in order to attend yet another conference of the parties at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark”—and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented”—agreement, and yet the Paris accord did not (could not) codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters, and it would, even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2050.[80] Some landmark.

expansion of China’s coal extraction (it more than tripled between 1995 and 2019, to nearly as much as the rest of the world combined) or the just-noted worldwide preference for massive SUVs, and they could not have dissuaded millions of families from purchasing—as soon as their rising incomes allowed—new air conditioners that will work through the hot humid nights of monsoonal Asia and hence will not be energized by solar electricity anytime soon.[81] The combined effect of these demands: between 1992 and 2019, the global emissions of CO2 rose by about 65 percent; those of CH4 by about 25 percent.[82]

IPCC

all too obviously, history does not unfold as a computerized academic exercise with major achievements falling on years ending with zero or five;

list of nine planetary boundaries

acidifying precipitation)

ozone depletion

deforestation),

There are no limits to assembling such models or, as fashionable lingo has it, constructing narratives.

This is a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts.

heuristic

But global warming presents an uncommonly difficult challenge precisely because it is a truly global phenomenon, and because its largest anthropogenic cause is the combustion of fuels that constitute the massive energetic foundations of modern civilization.

As a result, non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in a matter of one to three decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their collective lots by even a fraction of what China has done since 1980.

The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly.

In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians,

Earth are to become uninhabitable soon, climate migration will reshape America and the world, average global income will decline substantially, some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years.

How helpful is it to be told every day that the world is coming to an end in 2050 or even 2030?

Such predictably repetitive prophecies (however well-meant and however passionately presented) do not offer any practical advice about the deployment of the best possible technical solutions, about the most effective ways of legally binding global cooperation, or about tackling the difficult challenge of convincing populations of the need for significant expenditures whose benefits will not be seen for decades to come. And they are, of course, quite unnecessary according

We will still be around during the 2030s, albeit without the unimaginable benefits of speed-of-light intelligence.

And we will still be trying to do the impossible, to make long-range forecasts.

Most assuredly, hydroponic cultivation under constant lights could not be deployed to produce more than 3 billion tons of cereal and leguminous grains, whose high carbohydrate content and relatively high protein and lipid supply are required to