Global Energy, GWP and Population Growth: what happened in 1972?

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7. Ok, time to get serious

Sleep and a few minutes of free time bring clarity. Who knew.

With all three factors bound together, what you're really only looking at is the post-war babyboom peak. But with the three not shared evenly across the globe, the reason they all converge on 1972 is interesting. You can load the data into gapminder and watch the transitions. Unfortunately they don't include energy growth.

The low population/high GDP nations started the post-war transition sooner. Peak natural pop. growth for the US was 62?? or 63??. In the the early 70's, the US was an outlier for total energy use and boomers(apologetic hand wave) had hit peak startup for setting up households. The EU and Japan had lagged a bit, but by the late 60's their pop. and GDP growth had begun to stabilize as well.

The post-war recovery for high population/low energy nations started later and peak population growth for them was about the same time. India was at 2.4 in 1976, China peaked at about 2.7 in 1971.

It just occurred to me that I'm replying to your last line by saying that 1972 wasn't a peak year for civilization, it was the peak year for recovery from de-civilization.