Anthony Watts, proprietor of WUWT has posted “A stunning ‘hockey stick’ – How access to energy brought humanity forward”. The charts show the dramatic reduction in global poverty since the invention and use of the steam engine. Fossil fuels have “powered” this improvement in the human condition. I am reblogging Watts’ posting.
cbdakota
People send me stuff.
I got an email today that contained a blog post about another subject unrelated to climate or energy, but it had this graph in it that caught my eye:
The invention of the steam engine (which used coal and wood at first, with oil and natural gas coming later) seems to be the catalyst for change in the human race. Now that’s a hockey stick we can all get behind!
Wikipedia has a similar graph:
Data extracted from Angus Maddison’s “World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2003 AD”
And then there’s this one, going all the way back to 500 B.C.
Source: Victor V. Claar, “The Urgency of Poverty and the Hope of Genuinely Fair Trade,” Journal of Markets & Morality 16, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 274. GDP figures from J. Bradford DeLong, “Estimates of World GDP, One Million B.C.—Present.”
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Climate Change Sanity 
