Individual SS - Chapter 1 Nitpick Flashcards
How old is the Earth?
about 4 billion years old
Who said “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.” ?
-G. K. Chesterton (1933)
How old is the human race?
about 4 million years old
How old is environmental change on Earth?
about 4 billion years old
In environmental history, why does the twentieth century qualify as a peculiar century?
The screeching acceleration acceleration of so many processes that being ecological change.
What is an example of local concerns becoming global?
Air pollution
Mediterranean lead smelting in Roman times even polluted the air in the ____.
Arctic
Changes in scale can lead to ______.
Changes in condition
Air pollution has grown so comprehensive and large-scale that it affects the ____.
Fundamentals of global atmospheric chemistry.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s Germany acquired which areas/countries?
Austria, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia.
In what year did Hitler try to conquer Poland?
September 1939
How long was the war that ruined Hitler?
6 years
At what temperature will the water in the tropical Atlantic begin to promote hurricanes?
26° Celsius
What brought total collapse in some oceanic fisheries?
Incremental increases in fishing effort
What is economic activity?
Most of the things people do that change environments
What is the GDP?
Gross domestic product; the total value of goods and services brought to market or otherwise officially noted.
What was the world’s annual GDP five hundred years ago?
About $240 billion (slightly more than Poland’s or Pakistan’s today, slightly smaller than Taiwan’s or Turkey’s.)
The world economy had grown extremely slowly over the millennia up to what year?
1500
By 1820, what was the world’s GDP?
$695 billion (more than Canada’s or Spain’s, less than Brazil’s in 1990s terms.)
By 1900, what was the world’s GPD?
$1.98 trillion (less than 1990s Japan’s.)
Between what two time periods did one spectacular growth spurt in the history of the world economy occur?
1870-1913
By 1950, what was the world’s GDP?
$5.37 trillion (as large as the United States’s economy in 1991.)
By 1992, what was the world’s GDP?
$28 trillion
The world’s economy in the late twentieth century was about how much larger than that of 1500?
120 times larger
The fastest growth came in what years?
1950-1973
Most of economic expansion was driven by what?
World population growth
While the world economy has grown 120-food since 1500, average income for individuals has only grown ____
9-fold
How much more income per capita do we have than our forebears had in 1900?
Four times
What is the income of an average Mozabican today?
Well under half the global average of 1500
What is the social price?
People enslaved, exploited, or killed so that “creative destruction” could make way for economic growth
When did humans first invent agriculture?
8,000 B.C.
What was the global population during the time agriculture was first invented?
Between 2 and 20 million
When agriculture was invented, population grew faster, between ________ as fast as before.
10 and 1,000 times as fast
By A.D. 1, the globe supported how many people?
around 200 or 300 million people (roughly equivalent to today’s Indonesia or United States.)
By 1500, world population had reached how many people?
400 or 500 million people
At what rate did population grow prior to the 1500s?
0.1 percent per year
How long did it take for the world population to double between A.D. 1 and 1500?
A millennia and a half
When did the world population reach 700 million people?
around 1730
When did the world population reach one billion?
1820
In the period since 1950, population has increased at roughly what pace?
10,000 times the pace that prevailed before the invention of agriculture
What would have happened if twentieth-century population growth had I regained since the invention of agriculture?
The earth would be encased in a squiggling mass of human flesh, thousands of light-years in danger, expanding outward with a radical velocity many times greater than the speed of light.
European demographics determine about how many hominids have been born in the past 4 million years?
80 billion
All together, all the hominids ever born have lived how many years?
About 2.16 trillion years
The twentieth century accounts for only how much of human history?
0.000025 percent (100 out of 4 million years)
Out of the total of every hominid lives ever lived, what percent of those years were lived after 1750?
28 percent
Out of the total of every hominid lives ever lived, what percent of those years were lived after 1900?
20 percent
Out of the total of every hominid lives ever lived, what percent of those years were lived after 1950?
13 percent
The twentieth century has hosted how much of all human years?
About a fifth
Before the Industrial Revolution began, what sources of power did we have?
Muscle power of our bodies, some domesticated animals, wind and water.
What was the chemical energy stored in wood and other biomass used for?
Heat
What new source of power did the Industrial Revolution introduce?
Fossil fuels
Physicists agree that the total quantity of energy in the universe is _____.
Constant
Ultimately, what is our source main source of energy?
Nuclear energy (the sun)
What are the four types of energy?
Mechanical (kinetic), chemical, heat (or thermal), and radiant.
What do converters do?
They change energy from one form to another, making it easier to store, transport, and use for work.
What is the efficiency of human beings?
18 percent
For every 100 calories I eat as food (chemical energy), only about how many are converted into chemical energy?
18
The calories that aren’t turned into mechanical energy are often lost for what?
Practical purposes, mostly as heat.
What is the efficiency of a horse?
10 percent
Before the Industrial Revolution, what were the only important converters?
Biological ones
How did the first human societies use their muscle power?
Chemical energy stored in plants and animal flesh
For mechanical energy, our ancestors depended on their own bodies in what one might call the _______.
“somatic energy regime.”
Shifting agriculture probably increased energy availability by how much?
10-fold
How were oxen good sources of energy?
Oxen could plow heavy soils, opening up new food possibilities.
During the Industrial Revolution in Europe (c. what year?), more than what percent of the mechanical energy used was supplied by human muscle?
70 percent
How could an energy surplus make someone powerful? (ex. A pharaoh)
If applied judiciously, in war or irrigation for instance, surplus might create a windfall of increasing returns.
What was the most efficient way by which the ambitious and powerful could become richer and more powerful?
Slavery
How were big domesticated animals viewed as in preindustrial times?
Something of a luxury
Slavery was widespread, especially in societies ______.
Short on draft animals
What caused the supply of food to vary season to season and year to year in preindustrial societies?
Weather vagaries and crop pests
For rulers, what did the stock of human and domestic animal populations serve as?
An energy store, a flywheel in the society’s energy system.
For ordinary people, what purpose did livestock serve for them?
A store of energy
How many watts of power can the human body muster?
1,000 watts of power
What was the most amount of watts of energy that any society could devote to a given task?
A few million watts
What are some examples of a task that a society could devote itself to?
Ditch digging, dam building, or fighting.
How did the Industrial Revolution first affect human muscle power?
It first augmented and then quickly outstripped human muscle power.
The Industrial Revolution replaced the somatic energy regime with what?
The “exosomatic energy regime”.
The “exosomatic energy regime” might be better called the what?
Fossil fuel age
Which three societies most notably benefitted from sails, windmills and watermills?
Persia, China, and Europe.
What did sails, windmills and watermills do for societies?
They added slightly to the somatic energy supply of agrarian societies.
What did steam engines do in the eighteenth century?
Tapped hundreds of millions of years’ worth of photosynthesis, burning coal to convert to chemical into mechanical energy.
What was coal mainly used as?
A fuel for heating
Who wrote this book?
J.R. McNeill
Why were the first steam engines notoriously inefficient?
They lost more than 99 percent of their energy
Improvements by 1800 allowed what in a single engine?
Efficiency of about 5 percent and a capacity of 20 kilowatts of power in a single engine, the equivalent of 200 men.
By 1900, engineers had learned how to handle a high-pressure steam, and engines became ____ times as powerful as those of 1800.
30 times
What made steam engines more efficient than watermills and windmills?
They could be put anywhere, even on ships and railroad locomotives.
What was the world coal production in 1800?
about 10 million tons
World coal production shot up by how much by 1900?
80- or 100-fold
What was a positive feedback loop caused by the improvements of steam engines in 1900?
It allowed transport of coal on a massive scale, providing the fuel for yet more steam engines.
Who proved in 1859 that oil could be drilled through deep rock?
An American, Edwin Drake
Who found out how to refine crude oil in the 1850s?
A Scot, James Young
So from 1900 forward, _______ provided larger quantities of energy.
Biomass, coal, and oil.
In terms of usable energy, ____ overshadowed _____ from the 1890s forward.
Fossil fuels overshadowed biomass
What furthered the transition into the oil age?
Internal combustion engines
Where were internal combustion engines maintain developed?
In Germany after 1880
How did internal combustion engines further the transition into the oil age?
They weighed less than coal-fired steam engines, they were much more efficient, especially at small scales.
On larger scales, internal combustion engines could _________ than steam engines.
Deliver much more power
Lenin famously defined communism as what?
Electrification plus Soviet power
Electricity is also good at providing what?
Light and heat
The worldwide energy harvest increased about how much in the nineteenth century, and under the impact of what?
Threefold; steam and coal.
The worldwide energy harvest increased by another what in the twentieth century?
Thirteenfold
What were causes of the worldwide energy harvest increase in the twentieth century?
Oil, natural gas (after 1950), and, less importantly, nuclear power.
We have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before what year?
1900
The world in the twentieth century used ______ times as much energy as in the thousand years before what year?
10 times as much energy as in the thousand years before 1900 A.D.
In the 100 centuries between the dawn of agriculture and 1900, people used only about how much as energy as in the twentieth century?
Two-thirds
Per-capita energy use grew by how much in the twentieth century?
Four- or fivefold
In the 1900s the average global citizen deployed about how many “energy slaves”?
20
20 “energy saves” means what?
20 human equivalents working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
What were two downsides to the energy intensification in the twentieth century?
Fossil fuel combustion generates pollution, and fossil fuel use has sharply increased the inequalities in wealth and power among different parts of the world.
What is generated by biomass burning?
Pollution
The requisite technologies and corresponding social and political structures developed first and most thoroughly in ____ and ____.
Europe and North America
Until 1950 or so, what did other parts of the world depend on for mechanical energy and heat?
Muscle power and biomass
Inequality in energy use peaked when?
The 1960s
Predictions of dearth have been proved wrong since what year?
1860s
By how much did the world economy grow in the twentieth century?
14-fold
By how much did the world population grow in the twentieth century?
4-fold
How much did energy use grow in the nineteenth century?
5-fold
By how much did the world economy grow in the twentieth century?
14-fold
By how much did the world population grow in the twentieth century?
4-fold
How much did energy use grow in the nineteenth century?
5-fold
Why has this expansion of the economy and world population happened in the nineteenth and twentieth century?
Human ingenuity. Part of the answer is luck.
What was one factor that checked our numbers that was lifted in the eighteenth century?
Disease load
When did the Little Ice Age start?
1550
When did the little Ice Age end?
1850
What were some things that allowed our numbers to grow after the eighteenth century?
The ending of the little Ice Age and the domestication of some of our killer diseases (quite intentionally).
What was another factor of the explosion growth of modern times?
Human ingenuity. We gained access to new forms of energy and enhancing labor productivity.
What are two things that helped ratchet up the pace of economic activity?
Social and business organization
What was a downside to the surges in population, production, and energy use?
They affected different regions, maroons, classes, and social groups quite unevenly.
What was the preferred policy solution after 1950?
Faster economic growth and rising living standards.
Freshwater use, timber use, minerals use, industrial output, solid waste, air pollution and water pollution all boomed after what year?
1900
