The World According to Bill

Humans have had a remarkably successful voyage aboard planet earth for several thousand years as evidenced by our growing population. Many of us have an unspoken optimism that things will continue pretty much as they are now, despite the periodic insults that we throw at our sailing orb. For example, it is not yet clear how our descendants will survive the ongoing climate changes that are occurring as result of the increasing air pollution that humans of our generation have caused and continue. Despite the overwhelming evidence of climate change, some choose to believe that nothing untoward will happen. Their optimism is based on our past success.

Since we’ve successfully fed, clothed and housed the majority of humans for many generations, most people have an unspoken belief that whatever calamities befall us we will be able to fix, allowing humans to continue breeding and producing an escalating standard of living (for many, not all). After all, the success of large populations on many parts of the earth is based on the evolution of our brains that has gotten us to where we are today: an unparalleled standard of living that permits even more births and increased survival rates. The evidence for this view is the ballooning of our population.

The data is irrefutable: in 1804 the world’s population topped 2 billion. It took us about 160 more years (until 1960) before that number reached 3 billion. In succeeding years, we added another billion every 13 years until October 2011 when we pushed past 7 billion living souls. Now, just more than eleven years later we should reach 8 billion. This ballooning of the human population on earth should shock us all when we look at the numbers and speculate on the changes that must occur to accommodate that many humans.

Since science continues to expand and offer more discoveries, many believe that human population growth will continue unabated, but that science will find a way to feed us all. But not everyone sees through rose-colored glasses on this topic. In fact, some scientists have turned this view upside down with the news that early humans became nearly extinct about 70,000 years ago.

Let’s take a quick ride into this topic. The bearers of this heretical news are renowned genetics experts who have been studying the diversity of DNA from samples taken around the world. Their studies indicate that growth of human population has not been a steady upward progress; rather, DNA diversity has indicated that human stocks were suddenly hampered about 70,000 years ago when the earth’s population suddenly took a disastrous dip, leaving just a few thousand breeding adults to re-populate the entire world. The cause of this disaster was a super volcano in southeast Asia. It has become known as Toba, a super volcano that makes other disasters seem like child’s play.

The super volcano Toba, named after the lake that fills its crater, erupted four times, the last being 75,000 years ago in southeast Asia. It was the strongest known explosion ever, affecting the entire planet with smoke and dust that blotted out the sun around much of the earth. Mankind was nearly annihilated.

James A. Michener in his opus, “The Source” describes a small group of humans living along the southern coast of South Africa who were survivors of a human die -off. According to Michener, that they survived at all was based on their good luck in living in protected caves along a shore line in South Africa where the ocean provided a reliable source of food that was unaffected by air pollution. How much of Michener’s text was based on his imagination is unknown, but those who study volcanoes have struck a similar chord in listing the effects of Toba.

The point of this history is that the belief in the invincibility of the human stock is misguided. Although we have survived wars, pandemics, depressions, and other calamities, we have generally squeaked by with only a limited dent in the continuing upward sweep of the human population. But now we have climate change. Some scientists say this may be the big one, the mistake that causes a major and irreversible decline in the stock of humans. Maybe they will be wrong and we will only lose a few hundred million humans as the fires rage, the temperature rises, our oceans expand, and the food chain is interrupted by widespread drought. Here’s a question: Shall we take the chance that science is wrong or should we fix our ongoing air pollution that is causing climate change like that caused by Toba? It is up to us.