SCIENTISTS AND OTHERS

John D. Isaacs is a name that will constantly be met in any serious reading on ocean energy or any other aspects of oceanography, of which he is professor; he is with the Scripps Inst. of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., and Director of California's Institute of Marine Resources.

We have met Dr Isaacs before [Oct 79] in his characterization of the work of some researchers who "colonize" problems as sources of a profitable existence: "Much effort is spent in cultivation and refurbishment of the problem, so that it continues to appear fresh, important and worthy down through the fiscal years."

Holdren and Ehrlich's bending of facts to fit prejudice was again exposed last month in an exchange of letters in Science (19 Dec 80).

J.L. Simon's paper "Resources, population, environment: an oversupply of false bad news" in Science, 27 June 80 (which we recommended in our Good Reading column at the time) stung them visibly, as shown in their venomous letter, consisting mostly of empty and insulting rhetoric, with the usual trick of falsely imputing opinions to their victim, ("Even if one were to accept the maximization of the mass of human protoplasm sustainable on earth as a goal superordinate to all others..."). But occasionally they did throw out a "fact." For example, they answer Simon's statement that the long-run cost of electricity clearly has been downward with "The fact is that real electricity prices bottomed in 1971 and were already up 18% from that low point in 1972, long before OPEC's actions."

By now readers surely know scholars like Ehrlich or Holdren; when they come with "facts," check their fiction. The figure at the bottom of the column below, taken from Simon's reply, is virtually identical with the one we published in Nov. 1977, which is not surprising, since both were plotted from the same (US Bureau of the Census) data. If you look carefully at these points, you will get a glimpse of Ehrlich and Holdren: Not only is their "fact" grotesquely false, but look at the rest of the story they have brushed under the carpet!

Holdren is the critic who accused Dr Inhaber of slanting his data on risks of power sources, and Ehrlich is the energy scholar who reported that nuclear discharges into rivers made oysters glow in the dark.