Indur Goklany

Independent Researcher · Policy Analysis

The standard climate change narrative is that increased fossil fuel use has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations which has warmed the globe and increased the intensities and frequencies of extreme weather events, reduced crop yields, and increased hunger. Warming, under this narrative, also reduces economic productivity, increases pover...

Terrestrial biodiversity loss and climate change, driven mainly by loss of habitat to agriculture and fossil fuel (FF) use, respectively, are considered among the world's greatest environmental threats. However, FF‐dependent technologies are currently essential for manufacturing synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (SNFs) and synthetic pesticides (SPs) c...

Terrestrial biodiversity loss, substantially from habitat lost to agriculture, and climate change, mainly from fossil fuel use, are among the world’s greatest environmental threats. However, fossil fuel dependent technologies are essential for manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides that are critical to increasing agricultural productivit...

1. Global ecosystem productivity has increased at least 14% since 1982, mainly from indirect effects of FF usage 2. FF are responsible for at least 63% of global food production If there . were no fossil fuels: 3. We would need at least an additional 2.7 billion hectares or 21% of global land area just to meet human needs (a gross underestimate) 4...

Long-term trends for human population, longevity, and GDP, and other measures of human wellbeing show a characteristic “hockey stick” shape, with the blade tracking fossil fuel usage. Affordable and reliable energy, available virtually around the clock each day of the year, made possible major advances in public health, safety, mobility (physical a...

1. This paper addresses the question of whether, and how much, increased carbon dioxide concentrations have benefited the biosphere and humanity by stimulating plant growth, warming the planet and increasing rainfall. 2. Empirical data confirms that the biosphere’s productivity has increased by about 14% since 1982, in large part as a result of ris...

This paper is a commentary on the opening four sentences of the pontifical academies’ joint declaration, Climate Change and the Common Good: A Statement of The Problem and the Demand for Transformative Solutions, echoes of which resonate in the recent papal encyclical. The paper finds that the premise behind the academies’ call for deep decarboniza...

For most of its existence, mankind’s wellbeing was dictated by disease, the elements and other natural factors, and the occasional conflict. Virtually everything it needed — food, fuel, clothing, medicine, transport, mechanical power — was the direct or indirect product of living nature.Good harvests reduced hunger, improved health, and increased l...

This paper challenges claims that global warming outranks other threats facing humanity through the foreseeable future (assumed to be 2085–2100). World Health Organization and British government-sponsored global impact studies indicate that, relative to other factors, global warming's impact on key determinants of human and environmental well-being...

Global Warming Does Not Currently Rank Among the Top Public Health Threats • The World Health Organization (WHO) attributes only 0.2% of all global deaths and 0.4% of the global burden of disease. • This estimate, however, does not account for the health outcomes that are the major contributors to the long-known phenomenon of excess winter mortalit...

Some advocates of drastic greenhouse gas controls claim that the costs of global warming are underestimated and that a proper accounting of the full costs raises the specter of economic and political instability, conflict and mass migration as weak governments in developing countries with low adaptive capacity are buffeted by floods, droughts, fami...

Climate change, some claim, is this century's most important environmental challenge. Mortality estimates for the year 2000 from the World Health Organization (WHO) indicate, however, that a dozen other risk factors contribute more to global mortality and global burden of disease. Moreover, the state-of-the-art British-sponsored fast track assessme...

Concerns about population growth historically revolved around the notion that there may be insufficient arable land, minerals or energy to meet the needs of an exponentially increasing population. Today they are compounded by fears that as wealth increases, so would consumption of natural resources, and that new technologies would enable further ex...

The state-of-the-art British-sponsored fasttrack assessment of the global impacts of climate change, a major input to the much-heralded Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, indicates that through the year 2100, the contribution of climate change to human health and environmental threats will generally be overshadowed by factors not rela...

Greater economic growth could lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously enhancing various aspects of human well-being and the capacity to adapt to climate change. This begs the question as to whether and, if so, for how long would a richer-but-warmer world be better for well-being than poorer-but-cooler worlds. To shed light on...

Determinants of adaptive and mitigative capacities (e.g., availability of technological options, and access to economic resources, social capital and human capital) largely overlap. Several factors underlying or related to these determinants are themselves indicators of sustainable development (e.g., per capita income; and various public health, ed...

Summary Several British-sponsored state-of-the-art assessments of the global impacts of climate change on various climate-sensitive threats (namely, malaria, hunger, water stress, coastal flooding, habitat loss, carbon sink capacity, and coastal wetlands) using the major scenarios developed by the IPCC indicate that through 2085 to 2100, i.e., the...

Fundamentals of the climate science dispute and common misunderstandings of some issues raised about Part 1 of the Dual Critique of the Stern Review [Vol. 7, No. 4] are discussed. One consideration is that a distinct anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal has not yet been identified within natural climate variations. The slight warming that has occurr...

The Stern Review, described as the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change, was published on 30 October 2006. The twin papers from a combined team of scientists and economists present a critique in two parts of the Stern Review. Part I focuses on scientific issues and their treatment in the Review. It forms the...

Dependence of damage estimates upon assumptions of economic growth and technological development Greater economic growth could, by increasing emissions, lead to greater damages from climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth and advancing technological development and human capital, economic growth would also increase a society's adapt...

An evaluation of analyses sponsored by the predecessor to the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) of the global impacts of climate change under various mitigation scenarios (including CO2 stabilization at 550 and 750 ppm) coupled with an examination of the relative costs associated with different schemes to either mitiga...

Sir David A. King's claim that “Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism” “Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism” (“Climate change

if present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways tha...

A rationale for mitigating global warming (GW) is that warming might exacerbate many of today's urgent problems — hunger, malaria, water shortage, coastal flooding, and habitat conversion — which could be particularly problematic for developing countries. Recent assessments of the global impacts of climate change indicate that into the 2080s, excep...

Prudent use of innovations could avoid sacrificing the present for the future, or vice versa.

In their Report “Soil fertility and biodiversity in organic farming,” P. Mader et al. (31 May, p. 1694) downplay two factors in their discussion of the relative merits of organic and conventional farming. First, because organic farming yields (per unit of land) were 20% lower than those from

Initially, industrialization --characterized by enormous increases in the use of fossil fuels, technological change, agricultural productivity, urbanization, population, mobility, trade and consumption of material goods --may have made people wealthier, but the quality of life suffered in other respects. Crowding, unsanitary conditions and pollutio...

Globally and in the United States, agriculture is the major user not only of water but also of land. This paper compares trends in aggregate and per capita water and land use by the agricultural sector in the United States and the world during the 20 century. It finds that although cropland use per capita has been declining in both areas since the...

The precautionary principle has sometimes been used to justify banning new technologies, such as genetically modified crops, that haven't been proved to be "safe" from an environmental or public health perspective. Such a ban would reduce some environmental and public health risks, while increasing or prolonging others associated with existing tech...

The precautionary principle (PP) has sometimes been invoked to justify a ban on GM crops. This justification, however, takes credit for reducing potential public health and environmental risks that might result from a ban but ignores any blame for risks that the ban might generate or prolong. Contributing to such one-sided accounting is the fact th...

The precautionary principle has been invoked to justify a policy of aggressive greenhouse gas (GHG) emission controls that would go beyond "no regrets" actions to reduce global warming. However, this justification is based upon selectively applying the principle to the potential public health and environmental consequences of global warming but not...

The precautionary principle has often been invoked to justify a ban on genetically modified (GM) crops. However, this justification is based upon a selective application of the principle to the potential public health and environmental benefits of such a ban, while ignoring a ban's potential downside. This is due principally to the fact that the pr...

This paper examines the validity of the assertion that anthropogenic climate change is the overriding environmental concern facing the globe today. Examination of recent trends for some climate-sensitive indicators (e.g., global food security; U.S. deaths due to storms and floods; global death rates due to infectious and parasitic diseases; and bio...

The ongoing debate on the merits of "federalization" of air pollution control has so far proceeded virtually unencumbered by any examination of empirical data on air quality or emissions before and after federalization. This paper attempts to bring such data to this debate. Specifically, it develops and analyzes trends in the traditional air pollut...

Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment provides a surprising projection of a much greener planet, based on long-range analysis of trends in the efficient use of energy, materials, and land. The authors argue that we will decarbonize the global energy system and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We will dematerialize the eco...

Long-term trends for cropland harvested, air emissions and deaths due to water-related diseases (selected as indicators of land, air and water pollution, respectively) are analyzed primarily for the US from the early 1900s onward. Due to technological change, the increases in these indicators are generally less than those for population (P), afflue...

This article proposes three broad interrelated strategies - stimulating technological change, sustainable economic growth and free, unsubsidized trade - to enhance future adaptability to global (including climate) change and some principles for developing the social, legal and economic frameworks necessary to effect these strategies. The proposals...

The workshop focused on methodologies to assess the impacts of climate change on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their socioeconomic consequences. It did not deal in any detail with the other components (i.e., models designed to estimate changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or in climatic factors) of an integrated assess...

In this paper, the authors deal with the development of emission factors whose ultimate use will be in compiling emission inventories for such special case area-wide analyses. They discuss an idealized methodology for deriving such emission factors in the absence of real world constraints. They then identify the practical difficulties in implementi...

An examination of trends of nationwide anthropogenic emissions of particulate matter (PM), sulfur oxides (SO/sub x), volatile organic compounds (VOC) and nitrogen oxides (NO/sub x/) shows that between 1940 and 1980 PM emissions decreased by about two-thirds; SO/sub x/ emissions increased by a third; NO/sub x/ emissions increased over twofold; and t...

Emission inventories are essential if atmospheric transport models are to be used to devise and test acidic deposition control strategies, and to gain an understanding of the historical and future trends of sulfate and acidic deposition and pH in the US. This paper notes that while much effort has been spent on SO2 and NOx inventories, our understa...

This study is based on a review of 160 permits issued under the offset and Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) programs by Federal, state and local offices. These permits were selected to represent a cross section of the sources that have applied for permits under the two programs. The selection of these permits was based on source catego...

This paper is directed toward all users and compilers of emission inventories. It outlines numerous reasons why a point source inventory, even one that could be based entirely on stack tests, should not be expected to be completely accurate. It points out that even the best inventories can have errors of several percent in emission rates and cautio...

The purpose of this paper is the investigation of the role of entropy in the conformon, based on a model Hamiltonian approach. There are three stages of our considerations. (1) Quadratic terms are introduced into the potential energy terms of harmonic oscillators in the presence of an electron, leading to an increase in entropy and thus to an incre...

An adequate theoretical explanation of the semiconductive properties of biological substances has been lacking for a long time. The electrical conductivity of some of these substances show (i) high values, inexplicable on the basis of usual semiconductor theories and (ii) compensation rule behavior. This paper provides a semiquantitative theory for...

The precautionary principle has been invoked to justify a worldwide ban on DDT. However, this justification is based upon a selective application of the principle so that such a ban gets credit for any potential public health and environmental risks it might reduce but no discredit for any risks it might generate for human mortality or morbidity (d...

This paper examines whether future generations would be made worse off if present generations do not control global warming. It compares present and future welfare per capita, controlling for the costs of climate change, using estimates from the recently released Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. The paper finds that, through 2200 at...

Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events such as the 2003 European heat wave and the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be. Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The larg...

This paper provides annual and seasonal estimates of acidic and total primary sulfates for the 48 contiguous states. These estimates are based upon applying the emission factors on the 1980 NEDS inventory. The paper describes the methodology for allocation of seasonal emissions, the emissions inventory estimates for acidic and total primary sulfate...

● The fact that (a) the determinants of the capacity to mitigate or adapt to climate change (e.g., access to economic resources, social and human capital, and technological prowess) largely overlap, (b) many factors underlying or related to these determinants are themselves indicators of sustainable development (e.g., per capita income; and various...

This technical overview of the state implementation plan development process is based on the revised SIPs submitted in 1979 in response to the requirements of the 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments. Evaluates the adequacy of the emission inventory and ambient air monitoring, and meteorological data bases. Gathered information on SIP development processe...

An evaluation of analyses sponsored by the predecessor to the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) of the global impacts of climate change under various mitigation scenarios (including CO2 stabilisation at 550 and 750 ppm) coupled with an examination of the relative costs associated with different schemes to either mitiga...

Abstract Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events such as the 2003 European heat wave and the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be. Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s....

Summary The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has sponsored several state-of-the-art assessments of future impacts of climate change on various climate-sensitive threats such as malaria, hunger, water shortage, coastal flooding, habitat loss, lowered carbon-sink capacity, and diminished coastal wetlands. The results, bas...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, 1973. Bibliography: leaves 68-70. Microfilm. s