That the prophets of doom and gloom are consistently wrong seems to faze comparatively few. Paul Ehrlich, a butterfly specialist, wrote a blockbuster of a book in the late 1960's entitled The Population Bomb, in which he stated that Earth had reached carrying capacity, that in the 1970's and 1980's "...hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
A funny thing happened on the way to the morgue. Paul's bomb fizzled.
30 years ago, the panic turned to Global Cooling:
Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
By today, some predicted that the equator would be glaciated.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the ice-box.
The stubborn refusal of facts to conform with the doomsday prophecies regularly issued by respected scientists should, in a sane world, prompt folks of average intellectual capacity to suggest that the fear-mongers simply sit down and shut up.
Of course, this does not occur because fear can be such a profitable enterprise. If anything, the promulgation of fear has accelerated. Today's headline from The Independent (though it might just as easily emanate from The New York Times) screams The planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse'. This would be horrifying - were it not for the fact that we have been routinely subjected to identical warnings for the past half-century.
The greatest difference that has occurred over that time has involved the transition from the specific to the vague. Ehrlich was specific; he stated very clearly that the Earth had too many people on it, that its capacity had already been exceeded, and that within two decades hundreds of millions would starve to death. He was also very specific in noting that there was nothing that could be done to stop it from happening.
Other scientists in the 1970's were equally specific: Global Cooling was underway, and nothing could be done to prevent glaciation of the equator. Hundreds of millions would starve to death.
Then came Global Warming, which we were told once again was All Your Fault. The planet was overheating because of carbon dioxide emissions, and hundreds of millions were all gonna die.
Finally, somebody wised up. You can blame anything on the nebulous concept of "Climate Change". You can make a case for regulating everything, if you package it in the banner of "Save The Planet". You can scare people into submission without ever actually elucidating exactly what the supposed "problem" is.
It's the perfect scam.
I'm sure that there must be a position in the Obama cabinet for Mr. Holdren's buddy Paul Erlich.
Posted by: Bobkat49 | July 12, 2009 at 09:11 PM
BK,
Few have caught that little relationship. I was wondering if anybody would.
Posted by: Max | July 13, 2009 at 02:30 PM