Industrial Revolution and global warming
The Industrial Revolution, beginning in the mid-18th century, marked a significant shift in production methods, transitioning from manual labor to mechanization, primarily in England. This period saw the rise of power-driven machines, which greatly increased productivity and resource consumption, coinciding with a rapid population growth. The revolution is often divided into phases, each characterized by advancements in various industries, including textiles and transportation. While the initial phases of industrialization led to increased carbon and sulfur emissions, their impact on global temperatures was complex. During 1750-1850, despite notable industrial activity, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained stable, which suggests that other factors, such as volcanic eruptions and pollution, may have contributed to temporary cooling effects. As industrialization progressed, particularly post-World War II, the environmental consequences, including greenhouse gas emissions, became more pronounced. Understanding the interplay between early industrial pollution and climate patterns is crucial, especially as it highlights how historical emissions may have obscured the effects of greenhouse gases until more recent decades. This context is important for grasping the relationship between industrial growth and contemporary global warming challenges.
Industrial Revolution and global warming
The Industrial Revolution involved a shift from human and animal power to reliance on coal for manufacturing and transportation, and it was marked by an escalating rate of population increase. The early industrial period saw global cooling rather than warming.
Background
The Industrial Revolution began around the middle of the eighteenth century in England. Increasingly sophisticated power-driven machines augmented and replaced human and animal labor, greatly increasing individual worker productivity. This led to an overall increase in per capita resource consumption at a time when population was also beginning to increase at an exponential rate.
Some economic historians speak of three or four separate Industrial Revolutions. The first, roughly 1750–1850, centered on mechanization of the textile and metallurgical industries. Mechanization of transportation in the form of railroads and steamships dominated the second phase. The United States overtook Britain as the world’s leading consumer of fossil fuels, and Japan became the first non-Western nation to embrace industrialization. The post–World War II era of globalization and rapid growth in information technology has been called a third Industrial Revolution. Finally, some economists call for a fourth Industrial Revolution that would drastically reduce depletion of nonrenewable resources.
Of the revolutions that convulsed Europe and North America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution arguably had the most profound effect on the mass of people who experienced it. Most of its environmental effects, however, were either local or indirect. Compared with the first half of the eighteenth century and the latter half of the nineteenth, temperatures were cooler. Industrial carbon and sulfur emissions, smoke, and deforestation probably contributed, but their importance relative to other factors is uncertain.
The Process of Industrialization
The roots of Europe’s industrialization must be sought in population fluxes and changing agricultural practices of the preceding centuries. Plague caused Europe’s population to crash in the mid-fourteenth century. By 1700, the population again reached carrying capacity, supporting urban growth and creating pressure to improve agricultural productivity. Rapid rural population growth also allowed colonial expansion, which in turn provided a source of raw materials for industry.
By 1719, when Isaac Watt patented the first steam engine, London and other English cities mainly used coal for domestic heating. Pithead steam engines used to pump water from coal mines greatly increased production capabilities. Not long afterward, a series of innovations in the textile industry set the stage for massive movement from cottage-based industries to factories relying on external power sources. Other key inventions included improvements in iron founding, mechanization of tool machining, gas lighting, efficient papermaking and printing, and Portland cement, as well as the birth of the chemical industry.
Energy Consumption
Prior to about 1790, the mechanized textile industry in Britain relied upon water power. After 1790, coal-fired steam engines powered most factories. The use of coal to produce gas for illumination and cooking began in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Steamships started to replace sail for river and coastal traffic by 1820, while the first passenger railroad opened in 1828.
In the United States, consumption of fossil fuels was negligible before the Civil War. The textile industry used water power, and heating and transportation relied on wood from seemingly limitless forests.
The carbon dioxide (CO2) content of the Earth’s atmosphere remained nearly constant from 1700 to 1850, which correlates with a lack of observable greenhouse effect in temperature measurements from this period. Explanations for this stability in the face of greater fossil fuel use include sequestration in oceanic carbonates and an increased level of photosynthesis. In any event, although the rate of increase in fossil fuel consumption was impressive, the absolute numbers are low. The 45 million metric tons of coal consumed in 1850 are dwarfed by nearly 8 billion metric tons of coal consumed worldwide in 2022.
Other Environmental Effects
Historically, industrialization stimulated population growth. In early eighteenth-century Britain, improved food production and better control of epidemic disease reduced infant mortality. Employment in cities and the opportunity to emigrate to colonies meant that these children married early and produced large families. While the population of the world as a whole roughly doubled between 1750 and 1860, that of Great Britain went from 7,500,000 to 23,130,000, and that of the United States went from 1,500,000 to 31,400,000. While the effects of immigration dominate US statistics, the bulk of it was from the British Isles. Industrialization played a significant part in creating the expanding resource base making such growth possible. Although per capita resource consumption among the working poor did not begin to rise significantly until after 1850, the rise in numbers meant it took more energy and raw materials to support the population.
Contemporary accounts of early industrial cities paint a vivid picture of belching smokestacks and sulfurous fumes. Pollution controls were nonexistent. This large volume of pollutants tended to offset any greenhouse effect due to CO2. Pouring quantities of soot and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere produces atmospheric cooling. Although sulfur dioxide (SO2) is a greenhouse gas (GHG), it rapidly combines with water to form sulfuric acid, which reflects sunlight. Soot particles also reflect solar radiation. Both can serve as nuclei for cloud formation, increasing planetary albedo and producing additional cooling. Thus, a single pulse of sulfur and particulate matter, injected into the atmosphere, has the potential to set up a climatic feedback loop.
Particulate matter remains in the atmosphere less than a year, and sulfuric acid no more than three or four years, whereas CO2 builds up over decades. Consequently, the dirtier and more polluting an industry, the less its energy consumption will contribute to global warming in the short term. This helps explain why there is no global warming effect due to industrialization in the early nineteenth century.
The period 1750–1850 also saw at least two massive volcanic eruptions that contributed to global cooling: Laki in Iceland in 1783–1784 and Mount Tambora in the East Indies, which precipitated 1816s “year without a summer.” Neither eruption set up a feedback loop which would account for the generally depressed temperature levels recorded in Europe and confirmed by Greenland ice cores and North American tree ring data for the entire period 1780–1850.
Context
Comparison of industrialization rates, temperature profiles, and CO2 levels in the period 1750–1850 with more recent trends suggests an insight into why global temperatures have not responded in a linear fashion to increases in atmospheric CO2 levels, but instead show a marked acceleration in the 1980s, when acid rain became an environmental issue of grave concern, and western countries began aggressively curbing sulfur emissions from coal-fired electrical plants. Once the natural SO2 pulse from Mount Pinatubo cleared the atmosphere, the Earth experienced the full effect of GHGs unmitigated by pollution. The importance of SO2 pollution in counteracting greenhouse warming has also been recognized by British scientists studying drought cycles in the Amazon basin.
Key Concepts
carrying capacity: the number of people the environment can supportclimate feedback loops: self-reinforcing and self-negating processes that accelerate or retard climatic trendsfossil fuels: combustible products of ancient photosynthesis, such as coalplanetary albedo: the reflectiveness of the Earth’s surface, including cloud cover, to sunlight
Bibliography
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