One of the problems with the current “universal consensus” among “climatologists” in re Global Warming, leaving aside the legitimate questions about the science involved and, beyond that, the political conclusion that the “science” is driving, is the track record of “settled science” from a previous generation of scientific chicken littles.
That’s right – the assembled brain trust of scientists from the original “Earth Day” (whose 34th or 35th go-around was last Tuesday), and the “settled science” of their predictions:
1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
15 or 30 or 60 or 120…heck, it’s gonna happen someday…
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
Vague, untestable…settled!
3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
Vague, general, unprovable…settled!
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
Reading an Ehrlich article when I was probably 7-8 years old (in Readers Digest) scared the crap out of me; it gave me nightmares for weeks.
But one of the biggest problems facing the poor of India, Sub-Saharan Africa and China -today is obesity – which brings another meaning to “settled science”.
Oh, yeah – Ehrlich is one of the leading lights of the global warming movement.
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
The eighties was when KFC made it to India, if memory serves.
6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
But while we wait on that mass starvation, we’ll have to deal with a lot of overweight poor people. We humans are men and women of constant sorrow, aren’t we?
7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
Wonder if they ever proposed “Nuremberg Tribunals” for population bomb “denialists”?
8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
What would “Miami Vice” have been like if everything looked like Seattle?
9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
To be fair to the esteemed Mr. Watt, it has been “a matter of time” since the creation of the universe.
10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
But only at Paul Ehrlich lectures.
11.“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
One wonders why the esteemed Mr. Watt thought someone would be waiting around the pump, in that case…
12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
One wonders if the esteemed editors of Newsweek ever pondered that as the “water vapor fell and froze”, it would leave the atmosphere…?
13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
Huh.
Has anyone told these geniuses that Iran is about to get the bomb? Global warming, whether true or manufactured, pales in comparison to the threat of a bunch of suicidal mullahs with a doomsday device.
My brother–who calls himself an environmentalist–laments the fact that all too often, “environmentalist” means “person who cannot do math.” Reading the papers these days on the subjects, it’s apparent that not only did they not master arithmetic and geometry, but they also have some trouble with logic.
Doesn’t crimp their rhetoric, though.
In my mind, the most destructive manufactured consensus in history was the 1984 consensus conference on cholesterol: http://consensus.nih.gov/1984/1984cholesterol047html.htm
In the words of a critic – if there had been a consensus, there’d have been no need for a consensus conference.
jdege: You’re right. A consensus conference kind of defines itself and begs the question: what’s the point?
“the ultimate food-population collision”…………”that there won’t be any more crude oil’
Right!! Yet today we subsidize the burning of our food while at the same time we’re awash in recoverable oil.
As a young child I was fascinated by the WWII stories told by my dad and uncles. However I was scared to death when I saw the then-recent footage from the liberation of Nazi death camps and the furnaces. Of course the Cold War inflicted its share of frightened anxiety with associations left over from the death camps. After that, the fear of global freezing kept me quaking until it was assisted by stories that the Earth was supposed to run out of water by the 70’s.
Mr. Serling and Twilight Zone, aided by the nuns who taught at my school, were able to reinforce these fears quite well and keep the anxiety turned-up with both visual aids and the fear of God.
Is it any wonder that many of my generation a bit jittery? And a little less likely to buy into the latest apocryphal apocalypse?
Holy smokes Joe I’ve lived the same experience!
When I was a child, an older sibling told me that the world would end in 1973, 25 years after the founding of the Israeli state. Being less than ten years old at the time, I believed him and spent a lot of time worrying about the world ending when I was so young. When my Dad found out what was bothering me so much, he reassured me that the world wasn’t going to end, then punished my brother (with hard labor and reduced rations).
Since that time, I’ve tried to take all the end of the world predictions with a grain of salt (which we’re likely running out of).
http://gizmodo.com/7-things-you-had-no-idea-the-world-is-running-out-of-1467868161
You have to give the trash tabloids credit – at least when they predict the world is going to end (with women and minority’s hardest hit, naturally) they do it so far in the future that no one reading it today will be alive then.
The reason they always predict such terrible things is because what they have in mind to avoid this doom is almost as bad. Since “Global Warming” is literally supposed to turn the planet into Hell (c.f. Venus), that can be pretty bad.
A French economist named Thomas Piketty has written a book that is being celebrated in liberal circles these days, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Liberals in the US and elsewhere will be using it to shape policy, wherever you live.
Here is Krugman’s take on the book: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/?insrc=hpss
And here is Clive Crook’s negative assessment: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-20/the-most-important-book-ever-is-all-wrong
In a nutshell, Piketty claims that the gains in equality that we saw between labor and capital in the the mid-twentieth century were due to strong economic growth. This strong growth will not be repeated. Therefore, to stop income inequality from reaching socially disastrous levels, “we” (meaning the governments of the world) need to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom and middle.
The inevitable transfer of wealth within the economy to the wealthiest is the bedrock of Piketty’s book, and it is a trivial truth. Smith wrote about it in Wealth of Nations over two hundred years ago.
If we are in a no-growth economy, the only way that the billions of South Asians, Chinese, and Africans living in poverty can achieve any economic progress is to take wealth from people who already have it. Piketty’s wealth tax would be just the beginning. Economic equality would indeed come at the expense of freedom. The only regime that could enforce an economy planned to manage scarce resources (rather than grow resources) would impact every area of every person’s life. population control, for example, is essential for central economic planning by an oligarchy. Every gain one person made would come at the expense of another person.
When you take nationalism into account, you add the distinct possibility of war as nations battle over exclusive control of economic resources.
Scott: I’m glad not to be alone in this. I’ll up my ante, though, by including an early certainty of eternal damnation.
The nuns told us in first or second grade that we needed to love God more than anything or anyone else. Even our parents. I was quite fond of mine and wasn’t too personally familiar with God at the time, so I was certain that I was beyond redemption. That stuck with me for quite a while. While possibly true, I now know that it won’t be for the first reason. Thanks a lot Sister Mary Paul …
PM: You don’t give the impression that you’ve read the book.