STARK RAVING MAD

"The Great Climate Flip-flop" by William H. Calvin in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1998, pp 47-64, repeats the new myth that global warming will cause a new ice age. Calvin warns, "'Climate change' is popularly understood to mean greenhouse warming, which, it is predicted, will cause flooding, severe windstorms, and killer heat waves. But warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling - a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.'' The climate record shows that current temperatures are a little below the mean for the past 3,000 years and that temperatures during those three millennia have often been higher - sometimes by more than two degrees Centigrade. No climate catastrophe is recorded in the history of those periods. Now the merchants of fear want the public to believe that global warming will cause global cooling - hedging their bets on the future direction of temperatures.
"No Middle Way on the Environment'' by Paul R. Ehrlich, Gretchen C. Daily, Scott C. Daily, Norman Myers, and James Salzman in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1997, pp 98-104, opens with a comparison drawn by the authors between themselves and Copernicus and Pasteur. The authors use this comparison to intone that there is no middle ground between themselves and technologists. The technologists, they say, are completely wrong about the expansion of resources in proportion to human endeavors. After having been wrong about virtually every demographic and resource prediction that he has published during his entire career, one would think that Ehrlich would crawl back into his tenured hole and stop predicting.

As pointed out in "The Population Explosion Fizzles'' by Ben Wattenberg in The Sunday Oregonian, December 7, 1997, Ehrlich's landmark predictions in The Population Bomb turned out to be 100 percent wrong even though he appeared 25 times on the Johnny Carson show to sell his ideas. The world-wide fertility rate, 5 children per woman in 1950, has now fallen to 2.8 and is still falling sharply. Europe and America are already below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Meanwhile, Julian Simon's ultimate resources have been churning out new knowledge and productivity and thereby forcing down the real cost of most commodities. Even the amount of farmland in production world-wide has actually decreased steadily for the past 20 years, as productivity has increased. (See Access to Energy 23-7, March 1996.) Having learned nothing from his mistakes, including the famous commodity price bet he lost to Julian Simon, Ehrlich continues to write this nonsense, and mindless magazine editors continue to publish it.

•	Trend Followers
•	UNPRINCIPLED OPPORTUNISM
•	CONSENSUAL LIES
•	CLIMATE ENGINEERING
•	LOSS OF AN IRREPLACEABLE RESOURCE
•	AMERICAN RESOURCES
•	DEMON HALOGENS
•	HEALTH HAZARDS
•	*STARK RAVING MAD*
•	GOOD READING

Vol. 25, No. 7

Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
Volume: Issues
Issue/No.: Vol. 25, No. 7

Date: March 01, 1998 05:22 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.)
Title: Trend Followers