Earth Day 1970:
“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, Ecologist
The Malthusian Formula for Destruction is a stubborn theory. It has proven to have great shelf life as most of us are painfully aware. It has only been renamed as the Inconvenient Truth and such. At any rate, many now argue that maybe Malthus’ predictions aren’t wrong, only premature. Of course, growth has to stop when man runs out of arable land, water, oil, and other vital resources that keeps productivity and growth moving forward. Modern doomsday prophets have only upgraded the theory and added to the list of if/thens. All predictions like these (as listed below) usually lead to embarrassment because those who make them underappreciate the role of the market and human creativity in finding ways for better use of scarce resources and finding substitutes in place of them.
That point is wonderfully illustrated between two professors who engaged in what has been called the Doomsday Bet. The was made between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Ehrlich identified five metals that he predicted would become so scarce in just a decade that the loss of them would end economic growth as they knew it. Simon disagreed, and predicted that the price of those medals would actually decline because by then better efficiency and substitutes would increase. When 1990 rolled around, the prices of those medals had fallen and Ehrlich had to pay up.
Instead of listening to rhetoric, go out and learn the science.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school the world had 4+ billion people on it. Now there are 6+ billion.
ReplyDelete"The surplus population" was a phrase in use in the early 1800s, when there were nowhere near this many people on the planet. Doom has been coming for a long long time.
I even vaguely remember the ice age talk from 30 years ago!
It is going to be interesting to see even in the next 30 years what comes of this latest fad. Already it has switched from "warming" to "climate change."
A personal challenge? I question everything...especially statements of gloom and doom by scientists.
ReplyDeleteHow can someone see data and conclude the earth is cooling and several decades later conclude its warming...from the same data? I suspect a different agenda than science.