Environmentalists' Wild Predictions (Commentary)

[WeaselInYerFoot]

Good article that has a good point about some of us doom and gloomers.


Environmentalists' Wild Predictions
By Walter E. Williams
CNSNews.com Commentary
May 09, 2008

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "... somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

It's not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, there's a 1,000 to 2,500 year supply.

Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? In 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken? Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to manmade global warming?

Here are a few facts: Over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

(Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute. The views expressed are those of the writer.)


I guess one should still take into account that these are individual predictions from single scientists, and not a large portion of them. Unlike this global warming fiasco.

[Pouye]

Good article that has a good point about some of us doom and gloomers.



I guess one should still take into account that these are individual predictions from single scientists, and not a large portion of them. Unlike this global warming fiasco.

We're supposed to have global cooling for the next 20 years or so, say scientists:

http://www.worldclimatereport.co m/index.php/2007/03/16/the-coming-global-cooling/

I don't think anyone really knows squat about the global climate situation. Lots of guesswork and assumptions (including the assumption that humans beings make any difference to global temperatures whatsoever).

Now before someone jumps on me for not caring about the environment, I absolute DO care about the environment. Whether humans are warming the earth or it is just a natural cycle has nothing to do with whether or not pollution should be reduced (and maybe one day virtually eliminated). I am all for reductions in pollution and for "green" things. When I'm in the village (several months out of the year) I live off of solar panels and collect rainwater for all my family's water needs. I live more green than almost any person in the media who complains that people should live more green. I'm not feeling like I'm "saving mother earth" by living as green as can be. It is just being a good steward of what God has given human beings to be stewards of -- that is my motivation. Not fear that I'm making the earth too warm.

Rock

[WeaselInYerFoot]

We're supposed to have global cooling for the next 20 years or so, say scientists:

http://www.worldclimatereport.co m/index.php/2007/03/16/the-coming-global-cooling/

I don't think anyone really knows squat about the global climate situation. Lots of guesswork and assumptions (including the assumption that humans beings make any difference to global temperatures whatsoever).

Now before someone jumps on me for not caring about the environment, I absolute DO care about the environment. Whether humans are warming the earth or it is just a natural cycle has nothing to do with whether or not pollution should be reduced (and maybe one day virtually eliminated). I am all for reductions in pollution and for "green" things. When I'm in the village (several months out of the year) I live off of solar panels and collect rainwater for all my family's water needs. I live more green than almost any person in the media who complains that people should live more green. I'm not feeling like I'm "saving mother earth" by living as green as can be. It is just being a good steward of what God has given human beings to be stewards of -- that is my motivation. Not fear that I'm making the earth too warm.

Rock

Isn't it possible that there could be more politics in global warming than science? Since the government has expressed their concerns for it, it's now an easy way to make a living off of grants. Just tell them that you're going to be researching the correlation between termites and global warming and you have a job for the next couple of years.

[Pouye]

Isn't it possible that there could be more politics in global warming than science? Since the government has expressed their concerns for it, it's now an easy way to make a living off of grants. Just tell them that you're going to be researching the correlation between termites and global warming and you have a job for the next couple of years.

True, true! I've always thought this subject was much more politically driven than anything else.

Rock (an-ice-age-is-coming! :P )

[HotWireD]

If I was a zoologist (not many jobs available) and I requested a grant for studying the squirrel population I would very likely be turned down. If I said the title of my study was to be 'The effects of environmental change on the squirrel population' I suspect i would have a very much better chance of being approved.

If I was a Paleaontologist, 'The effects of global climate change on the decline in reptilian population in the late cretaceous' I would again assume I would have a better chance of getting a grant than just digging up dinosaur remains.

Whether or not climate change is caused by mankind, the scientists know that there is a much higher chance of having a job if they push the idea.

Science, generally, is not so well paid as imagined. Unless you work in military research or the medical fields. There are a lot more jobs available now that climate change is on the agenda.

I have quoted WeaselInYerFoot because he beat me to it in a post above, but I thought the same thing as I started reading this thread.

Isn't it possible that there could be more politics in global warming than science? Since the government has expressed their concerns for it, it's now an easy way to make a living off of grants. Just tell them that you're going to be researching the correlation between termites and global warming and you have a job for the next couple of years.

We do have a food shortage right now, more down to bad management of the resources available and the wasteful societies we have than environmental reasons.

Recent news reports state that we are going into a period of either no temperature change or cooling - the scientists and governments have had to state this or people will start to say "what global warming?" over the next decade and money will not be funnelled into research.

I remember in the early seventies the dire warnings of the next ice age just around the corner. All the climateological data over the past hundreds of years pointed to this 'fact' apparently. I wonder how come now all the evidence points towards global warming for the past hundreds of years now.

If the scientists stated that 'all the climateological evidence since the seventies points towards global warming' I could understand, but for them to state that the very same evidence and data accrued by scientists that once pointed to an ice age now points towards global warming makes me a likkle cynical about their agenda.

'Jobs for the boys' me suspects?

I wonder if I could get a grant for "The effects of global climate change on the demographics of criminality and the cause of crime". Ten years as a university professor would suit me just fine.

<Mr Cynical today>

[Les_Is_More]

Isn't it possible that there could be more politics in global warming than science? Since the government has expressed their concerns for it, it's now an easy way to make a living off of grants. Just tell them that you're going to be researching the correlation between termites and global warming and you have a job for the next couple of years.

You're absolutely right about that! I believe they hype global warming so that the government can grab even more power and influence in our lives. In my wonderful, earthy, green, liberal state(Oregon), our wonderful governor(now turned scientist) is proposing a "black box" odometer in everyone's car. The purpose is to tax individuals on what kind of car they drive and how many miles they drive. They say it's to encourage people to drive less, but we all know the REAL reason. All of this is due to "Global Warming."

[rossid]

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23991257-25717,00.html


Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change
Article from: Herald Sun (Australia)

Andrew Bolt

July 09, 2008 12:00am

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".

"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this -- and must -- but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Rudd and Garnaut want to scare you into backing their plan to force people who produce everything from petrol to coal-fired electricity, from steel to soft drinks, to pay for licences to emit carbon dioxide -- the gas they think is heating the world to hell.

The cost of those licences, totalling in the billions, will then be passed on to you through higher bills for petrol, power, food, housing, air travel and anything else that uses lots of gassy power. In some countries they're even planning to tax farting cows, so there's no end to the ways you can be stung.

Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and -- hey presto -- the world's temperature will then fall, just like it's actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth.

But you'll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd's mad plan -- one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions.

The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases by 2030.

Indeed, so fast are the world's emissions growing -- by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants -- that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That's how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter.

And that's why Rudd's claim that we'll be ruined if we don't cut Australia's gases is a lie. To be blunt.

Ask Rudd's guru. Garnaut on Friday admitted any cuts we make will be useless unless they inspire other countries to do the same -- especially China and India: "Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels."

So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.

A year ago China released its own global warming strategy -- its own Garnaut report -- which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.

Said Ma Kai, head of China's powerful State Council: "China does not commit to any quantified emissions-reduction commitments . . . our efforts to fight climate change must not come at the expense of economic growth."

In fact, we had to get used to more gas from China, not less: "It is quite inevitable that during this (industrialisation) stage, China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be quite high."

Last month, India likewise issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change, and also rejected Rudd-style cuts.

The plan's authors, the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.

"It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people."

The plan's only real promise was in fact a threat: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries."

Gee, thanks. That, of course, means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1.02 tonnes) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now 20 tonnes). Given it has one billion people, that's a promise to gas the world like it's never been gassed before.

So is this our death warrant? Should this news have you seeing apocalyptic visions, too?

Well, no. What makes the Indian report so interesting is that unlike our Ross Garnaut, who just accepted the word of those scientists wailing we faced doom, the Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.

Their conclusion? They couldn't actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: "No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established."

In fact, they couldn't find much change in the climate at all.

Yes, India's surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: "The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . ."

It even dismissed the panic Al Gore helped to whip up about melting Himalayan glaciers: "While recession of some glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is, accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends, or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses."

Nor was that the only sign that India's Council on Climate Change had kept its cool while our Rudd and Garnaut lost theirs.

For example, the Indians rightly insisted nuclear power had to be part of any real plan to cut emissions. Rudd and Garnaut won't even discuss it.

The Indians also pointed out that no feasible technology to trap and bury the gasses of coal-fired power stations had yet been developed "and there are serious questions about the cost as well (as) permanence of the CO2 storage repositories".

Rudd and Garnaut, however, keep offering this dream to make us think our power stations can survive their emissions trading scheme, when state governments warn they may not.

In every case the Indians are pragmatic where Rudd and Garnaut are having delusions -- delusions about an apocalypse, about cutting gases without going nuclear, about saving power stations they'll instead drive broke.

And there's that delusion on which their whole plan is built -- that India and China will follow our sacrifice by cutting their throats, too.

So psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?

Pray that their next patients will be two men whose own delusions threaten to drive our whole economy over the edge as well.