A Modest Proposal for Eliminating Climate Change
by John Lawrence, April 23 2019
Ever since Jonathan Swift suggested in his Modest Proposal, circa 1729, that the impoverished could ease their burdens by selling their children to the rich, the thought has occurred that, when there are too many mouths to feed, some of them have to be done away with. Now with regard to climate change, it is obvious that the carrying capacity of rapacious humans by the earth is much less than the total number of humans now occupying it so it is imperative that some of them have to go in order to bring things back into balance and so that others may thrive. Traditionally, the way Mother Earth has reduced her flock is by means of war, genocide or epidemics such as the flu epidemic of 1918 which killed 50 million people world wide. This on top of the 16 million killed in WW I made for a tidy sum of disposed human beings which forestalled climate change at least for a decade. In other words we would have reached the present level of greenhouse gas emissions a decade ago if all those people had lived.
Many scientists agree that the human carrying capacity of the earth is 9 billion humans. Beyond that Mother Earth cannot sustain herself. Since we are rapidly approaching that limit, something must be done, hence my modest proposal. It is well known that Americans and to be fair Chinese, Europeans and others don't want to get rid of their gas guzzling cars and that the pace of converting to renewables is far too slow. My modest proposal is to let the market do its magic which will inevitably result in runaway global warming with the consequential severe weather, flooding, tornadoes, unbearable heat, wildfires and drought. Gradually a huge segment of the population will succumb to the drastic effects of climate change including crop failure, loss of fisheries, unsustainable lack of drinking water. Severe epidemics will ravage much of the poorer areas of the earth.
As time goes on the human population of the earth will actually be reduced due to the effects of climate change to the point that the earth's carrying capacity won't be so overburdened. This means that less greenhouse gasses will be emitted because there are just fewer humans emitting them especially in the poorer nations of earth. The wealthier nations will be able to mitigate the effects of climate change by rebuilding coastal cities further inland and by other more technological means. So it will actually be the poorer populations that will be dying off albeit by benign neglect and not actual elimination by the methods that someone like Hitler employed. There will also probably be wars as humans in the poorer nations fight for diminishing food resources.
Finally, the earth will come back into balance when the human population has been reduced to 2 or 3 billion people mainly in the richer nations. Even there some of the poor will have been benignly eliminated due to their lack of means to fortify their dwelling spaces with underground bunkers to withstand the super tornadoes that will ravage the earth. After many years with the human population reduced to a manageable size, Mother Earth will reconstitute itself as less greenhouse gasses will be generated. The coral reefs and the fisheries will return. The polar ice caps will become frozen again. The severe weather will attenuate. I hasten to point out that this will all occur as a matter of course and as nature takes its course despite the prevalence of gas guzzling cars among the richer populations and without a drastic disruption of the economies of the richer nations. They will have continued on their same courses without taking drastic measures to reduce climate change. The magic of the marketplace will have finally replaced fossil fuels with renewables and the earth will gradually recover minus about 5 billion humans that were overburdening the carrying capacity of planet earth anyway. Problem solved!
