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Levels of travel in the world are leveling off and I couldn’t be happier. There are several reasons to be positive about the news but first and foremost is that nobody likes to be stuck in traffic or in line at a crowded airport. Also, crowded roads are a significant reason why we have accidents during the winter in Wisconsin (an icy road is a lot easier to handle when you don’t have to worry about a dozen other cars passing, stopping, swerving, or sliding around you).
Read about “Peak Travel” here.
This is one story that surprised me. All my life I have witnessed increasing amounts of traffic, even in the countryside where I grew up. My family’s dairy farm was 11 miles from town. When I first received my driver’s license in the mid 1980s and started driving back and forth from the farm to school for various events (like basketball games), the roads were nearly clear after 10pm. During the 11 mile stretch, I would be lucky to see one car about every other time I made the trip. By the time I was in college (4 or 5 years later) and coming home on break I started to notice the increase in traffic. Now there would be a couple cars on the road at any point in the night. By the time my parents sold the farm in the late 1990s, it was not uncommon to encounter 5 or more cars on that 11 mile stretch of road, no matter what time of night. Five cars might not sound like much, but this is the boondocks we are talking about. What was a very quiet country setting became a little bit more suburban as single houses on 5 acres started sprouting up through the years. I also noticed the increasing trend while working on TV here in Northcentral Wisconsin. When I first started working at WSAW and was driving from Wisconsin Rapids to Wausau in the wee early morning hours, I would only encounter 1 or 2 cars on the freeway from the highway 34 exit to the Kronenwetter/Cedar Creek exit and another couple cars all the way from Rothschild to downtown. Now I drive (or ride bike) only 3 miles and I easily see 10 or more cars in the middle of the night.
Never did I imagine that someday in my lifetime, someone would study the amount of travel, and find that it is levelling off in developed countries. As mentioned in the article this also has a bearing on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) calculations. As is the case with fossil fuel projections, the amount of travel that is factored in to future climate projections is likely way too high (as an aside, it is likely that we will “travel” virtually in a couple of decades, visiting people as realistic 3D holograms, thus cutting the amount travel dramatically). So on the “disastrous AGW” front, not only is population growth lower than expected, fossil fuel use and travel is likely over-accounted for as well. Even if the calculations of future climate are mathematically accurate, they are probably based on an absolute worst case scenario of continued economic growth and energy use.
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My Fossil Fuel Projection
If you want to see the worst and best case scenarios for yourself, you will be happy to know there is a web applet that lets you see how carbon levels might theoretically affect the future climate. Go here to have a little fun with it. To get to the applet just click on the tab at the top that says “applet”. The first image you will see is the official projection of fossil fuel usage and other carbon sources and sinks (left side) and resultant theoretical temperature changes (right side). The green line on the left with the circles (control points) that goes straight up to 2100 is human fossil fuel usage.
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The Resultant Temp Projection
It is an unrealistic worst case scenario. To the left is an image of the chart I created by adjusting the control points on fossil fuel input (and then I clicked “run projection” to see how the temps changed). I expect fossil fuel usage to peak in the next 10 to 20 years and then slowly decline. This has a huge affect on theoretical temperature changes (as you can see from the second image). Neither Peak Oil (related to Peak Travel) or technological progress in energy production is guaranteed, but each day these things seem more likely.
Now I don’t blame previous IPCC working groups for having a bias toward, more population, more fossil fuel usage, more travel, etc. for decades to come because that is what we have all come to expect. Human population and energy usage has always increased. The concept of a steady or even shrinking GDP (on a worldwide basis) is foreign. If the previous IPCC working groups in charge of future scenarios proclaimed that fossil fuel usage, travel, and population would remain steady or decline by 2100, they might have been laughed out of the room or replaced. Increasingly, going forward, it is a likely scenario that should be considered.
As I have mentioned in the past, society at large might have a harder time adjusting to lower GDP than IPCC working groups. We have been trained since birth to accept that more building means more progress. More houses, more freeways, more bridges, more everything (and more travel and more people) is the ultimate sign of “progress”. I think it is time we started changing that vision of progress. We shouldn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. A lower GDP (produced by lower population growth) does not necessarily mean the world is going to end.
Have a nice Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.