By Ross Pomeroy

Human beings are a panicky species – quick to fear and slow to understand. Over much of our evolutionary history, this ingrained alarm served us well, keeping us alive in a wild world brimming with dangers. But as humans came to dominate the globe and render the Earth more and more harmless (at least to us, mostly), we started to fret about increasingly innocuous things.

In his 2024 book, Fear/Less: Why Your Lifelong Fears Are Probably Groundless, Professor Wojciech Janicki, who’s based at the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Poland, recounted some of the things humans once feared that probably seem silly to us today. His ultimate point? “Even though humans have solved problem after problem, averting the obliteration of the species, it is still widely believed that catastrophe is almost inevitable.” It’s time to consciously allay our fears and deal with threats as challenges rather than reasons for dejection and doomism.

Here are four formerly widespread fears, many of which were dispelled through innovation:

1. Train Travel. As railway travel proliferated in the 19th century, worries spread in media, scientific literature, and popular culture that this futuristic form of transportation could wreak havoc on passengers’ physical and mental health. It was claimed that jarring movements and loud noises at unnaturally-fast speeds of sixty miles per hour resulted in chronic inflammation, impaired vision, and a nauseating host of other physical ailments. Worse, some people could suffer from “railway neurosis”, driving them temporarily or permanently insane. Habituation to train travel, along with improvements to tracks and locomotives, gradually assuaged travelers’ concerns.

2. Electric Wires. Today, electric wires fade into the background of modern life in much of the world, but in the late 1800s, residents of New York City looked up at them with trepidation. Though fewer than 10 percent of households were connected to the grid at the time, the metropolis was one of the first to see rising adoption. In 1889, when Western Union lineman John Feek was electrocuted on the job, the public’s unease turned into mass panic.

In an article recounting the saga in IEEE Xplore, J.P. Sullivan explained Americans’ thinking more than a century ago. “They believed that new technology would improve society, but at the same time worried that they had no control over the pace and direction of this change… The tension between technological enthusiasm and pessimism created a profound anxiety about electricity and the new urban world it was creating.”

We know what happened. Electrical safety improved, and the benefits of electricity grew too large to relinquish.

3. ‘Drowning’ in Horse Manure. In the 1890s, residents, officials, and planners living in London and New York worried that their streets would eventually become impassible and their cities unlivable from a build-up of horse manure. The hundreds of thousands of horses traversing city blocks to move freight and passengers left behind millions of pounds of fresh feces and urine each day. City cleaners would pile and move the gathered loads to designated locations, but sludgy excrement still caked the streets. As the cities’ populations rose, so, too would the mountains of dung!

Worries quickly evaporated when motorcars and electric streetcars arrived on the scene. “A kind of paradox, don’t you think? A car with a combustion engine was a solution, not a problem!” Janicki commented.

4. Global Population Crash. From Paul Ehrlich in the 1968, to Thomas Malthus 170 years prior, to Confucius in the 6th Century BC, esteemed thinkers have fretted over human population growth. Many portended imminent and catastrophic crashes, often through widespread famine. Thus far, on a global scale, they’ve always been wrong. There are roughly 8.1 billion humans living on Earth today, and global poverty continues to fall, albeit not as fast as it could. Eating too many calories is a more common problem than eating too few. Human population growth will likely halt later this century, but not because of mass death – rather, due to higher living standards and voluntary contraception.

This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Audrey Streb
Contributor

A judge dismissed a Pennsylvania county lawsuit alleging climate change-related harm against major oil and gas companies late on Friday.

Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Stephen Corr dismissed the county’s lawsuit against energy companies including Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil and Shell, ruling that the court lacked the jurisdiction to hear the case. The decision is one of several recent dismissals of climate nuisance lawsuits filed by Democratic-leaning cities and states seeking major damages from energy companies.

“Today we join a growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal, in concluding that the claims raised by Bucks County are not judiciable by any court in Pennsylvania,” Corr wrote in the dismissal. (RELATED: Law Firms Stand To Make Killing From Blue Cities’ Climate Lawsuits Against Energy Giants)

Bucks County filed the lawsuit in March 2024 and alleged that numerous companies were aware of the climate impacts of fuel products as they engaged in a campaign to mislead the public. The dismissed lawsuit argued that the companies deceived consumers into thinking that their fossil fuel products were safe, which led to their continued use that then further exacerbated the effects of climate change.

“We agree with the Defendants that Bucks County fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted because Pennsylvania cannot apply its own laws to claims dealing with air in its ambient or interstate aspects, and, therefore, we are compelled to dismiss this lawsuit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction,” the dismissal states. “We join many other state and federal courts in finding that claims raised by Bucks County are solely within the province of federal law.”

Bucks County has seen several flash floods in recent years, and the county sought damages in the suit to cover costs for repairs to flood-damaged infrastructure, among other things.

“A simple reading of the complaint proves that Bucks County is truly seeking redress for harm caused by climate change, a global phenomenon caused by the emission of greenhouse gases in every nation in the world,” the dismissal states. Critics of these lawsuits have noted this point for years.

“Judge Corr’s decision was right because the fossil fuel companies were abiding by the law,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the Director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment for the Heritage Foundation wrote in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Environmentalists are trying to use courts to do climate policy because they can’t get their way through a majority of elected officials in the federal or state legislatures. But the way to channel this problem, if there is one, is through laws. If environmentalists can’t get a law passed, they try to get a crackpot judge to agree with them.”

In addition to the jurisdictional issue, Corr also expressed “concern about the manner in which the commissioners went about hiring counsel and filing this lawsuit,” finding that their conduct “violated the spirit of Pennsylvania’s open government act,” known as the Sunshine Act.

“The court … got it right when it expressed ‘concern about the manner in which the Commissioners went about hiring counsel and filing this lawsuit,’ and found that ‘the conduct of the Commissioners violated the spirit of’ Pennsylvania’s open government act,” counsel for Chevron Corporation Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr. of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP said in a statement to the DCNF.

The county’s legal counsel, DiCello Levitt, was hired on a contingent basis, meaning that the county government essentially paid no upfront costs for the firm’s services, but the firm would secure a certain percentage of any funds recovered in a settlement. Several other Democratic-leaning jurisdictions that have filed similar lawsuits also hired law firms to assist with their climate litigation under similar contractual arrangements.

At a hearing in March, attorneys representing the companies argued that Bucks County lacked legal standing to bring the claims to court.

“It’s not about solving climate change. It’s about Bucks County surviving it,” an attorney for the county Dan Flynn argued, comparing the case to major tobacco company cases in the hearing.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 8 instructing his administration to investigate state-level attempts to sue or otherwise extract massive payouts from energy companies in the name of climate change. Last month, the Trump administration filed lawsuits against Michigan and Hawaii in an attempt to block the states from seeking damages in court against fossil fuel companies for alleged environmental harm, and days later, Puerto Rico dropped one of its similar lawsuits against major oil and gas companies.

Bucks County officials, BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and DiCello Levitt did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment in time for publication.

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Folks, hold onto your hats—two groundbreaking studies dropped this past month, and they’re shaking up everything we thought we knew about carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere. The first, from The University of Manchester, reveals that volcanic CO2 emissions could be three times higher than previously estimated. The second, from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), uncovers a staggering 19,325 previously unknown undersea volcanoes. Together, these findings throw a massive wrench into the narrative that human activity is the sole driver of rising atmospheric CO2. Let’s dive in.

Manchester’s Volcanic CO2 Bombshell might be a game changer. The Manchester team, led by Alexander Riddell, deployed cutting-edge sensors on a helicopter to measure emissions from the Soufrière Hills Volcano in Montserrat. Published in Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads8864, their findings are a wake-up call. Traditional monitoring focused on hot volcanic vents (fumaroles) that spew easily detectable gases like sulfur dioxide (SO2). But cooler, water-rich hydrothermal systems absorb acidic gases, masking significant CO2 output. The new tech revealed that Soufrière Hills emits three times more CO2 than earlier estimates suggested.

Riddell notes, “Volcanoes play a crucial role in the Earth’s carbon cycle,” but he’s quick to downplay the impact, claiming volcanoes contribute less than 5% of global CO2 compared to human activities like fossil fuel burning. Fair enough, but if one volcano’s emissions are underestimated by a factor of three, what about the thousands of others worldwide? The study hints at a broader issue: our volcanic CO2 estimates could be way off, especially for volcanoes with similar hydrothermal systems.

Meanwhile, researchers at SOEST, including Paul Wessel and Scripps’ David Sandwell, used high-resolution radar satellite data to map the ocean floor. Their study, published in Earth and Space Science, identified 19,325 new seamounts—undersea volcanoes—bringing the total to over 43,000 SOEST News. With only a quarter of the seafloor mapped by sonar, most of these underwater giants remain uncharted. These seamounts aren’t just geological curiosities; they’re potential CO2 sources, stirring ocean currents and influencing carbon cycles.

The study emphasizes their role in ocean mixing, where currents around seamounts create “wake vortices” that drive upwelling, pulling carbon-rich deep water to the surface. This process could amplify the ocean’s role in atmospheric CO2 exchange, yet we’ve barely scratched the surface of their emissions. If terrestrial volcanoes are underestimated, what’s the bet that these underwater behemoths are too?

Here’s where it gets spicy. The climate establishment loves to pin the rise in atmospheric CO2—now around 420 ppm—squarely on human emissions. But these two studies, released within weeks of each other, expose massive gaps in our understanding of natural CO2 sources. If volcanic emissions on land are triple what we thought, and we’ve just found 19,000+ new undersea volcanoes, the natural contribution to atmospheric CO2 is likely far higher than the “less than 5%” figure tossed around.

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. The USGS estimates global volcanic CO2 emissions at about 0.26 gigatons per year USGS Volcano Hazards Program, compared to human emissions of ~35 gigatons. But if Manchester’s findings apply broadly, that 0.26 could be closer to 0.78 gigatons or more. Add in unknown contributions from tens of thousands of undersea volcanoes, and the natural CO2 flux starts looking like a serious player. We’re not saying humans don’t contribute—fossil fuels are a big factor—but the certainty of attribution just took a major hit.

These discoveries don’t just challenge climate models; they demand a rethink of how we monitor and predict CO2 trends. Manchester’s sensor tech could revolutionize volcano monitoring, potentially improving eruption forecasts and safety for nearby communities. Meanwhile, SOEST’s seamount catalog opens new avenues for studying Earth’s carbon cycle and ocean dynamics. But until we quantify these natural sources, we’re flying blind on how much CO2 is truly “anthropogenic.”

The climate debate thrives on certainty, but science thrives on doubt. These studies remind us that nature is full of surprises, and our grasp of Earth’s complex systems is shakier than we’d like to admit. It’s time to dial back the dogma and invest in better data—because if we’re underestimating volcanic CO2 by this much, what else are we missing?