And so it is 1990, a scant 9 years away from 1999, for which Paul Lysenko Ehrlich foresaw the US population shrinking to 22.6 million, the rest having perished by starvation and other consequences of overpopulation (The Progressive, Apr. 1970, p.23). Where is the old phony now? Forecasting death, doom and disaster, this time by global warming: "We are going to see massive extinctions . . . we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles basin . . . we'll be in rising waters [due to the melting polar ice caps] with no arc in sight. . . " (NBC, 5/3/89)
CARTOON: Environmental hypochondriacs by H. Payne, Un.Scripps-Howard synd.
Can anybody out-Ehrlich in this? Yes: one Rene Dumont, a French agronomist whose recent lecture in Toronto was reported under the headline Greenhouse effect blamed for one million deaths in the Third World last year. He calls for an outright ban on all cars getting less than 43 miles to the gallon, heavy fines for all forms of energy waste, including Christmas lights, and other such ways to save the planet. "Compromise will end in death. Two billion people living in poverty . . . are hostage to our greed, to our waste of energy." One million of them, it seems, have been killed by "our" [who is he speaking for?] failure to give them the money that could have been achieved by unrealized energy savings.
Not to mention the multi-million dollar losses inflicted on M. Dumont by nol having been born into the Rockefeller family.
Alas, this type of hype has reached the point where even respectable free-market media, such as Reason (Jan 1990) and the Wall St. J. (11/16/89) are being suckered into believing that global warming is a proven thing. The latter, by far the worse, headlined its article "Global Warming: the real news story is not if but when." One R. Engelman writes "The scientific consensus is solid . . . Most valuable would be scientists active in the climate field who are willing to challenge the greenhouse theory in peer-reviewed scientific journals. I am still looking."
Well, stop looking for them in the tabloids and the boob toob, Mr. Engelman . . .
¾pardon me, I forgot: Pulitzer-prize winning journalists like Woodward & Bernstein look nowhere at all; they get things handed on a silver platter by Deep Throat and others who do the work. So here is your silver platter, Mr. Engelman S. Idso, Ariz. State Univ.; H. Elsaeeser, Lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab.; Fred Singer, U. of Virginia (good news: Global Climate Change, of which he is editor, has just been published by Paragon House Publ., New York); R. Bryson, U. of Wisc.; R. Lindzen, M.I.T., V. Ramanathan, U. of Chicago; A. Solow, Woods Hole Inst. Oceanography; W. A. Nierenberg, Scripps Inst. Oceanography; R. Jastrow, NASA; F. Seitz, Rockefeller U.; J.E. Lovelock, F.R.S, England; T. Karl, Ntl. Climate Data Center¾and if that is not enough, perhaps "journalist" Engelman might get off his butt and ask how many of the 450,000 professional meteorologists (worldwide), apart from media monkeys Stephen Schneider and James Hansen, are convinced of significant global warming by human activities.What these geophysicists and climatologists point to is
the near total absence of a significant correlation between CO
2 concentration and temperature in the historical record, both recent and geological; non-industrial sources of CO2; the plausible alternative atmospheric mechanisms that may have a more important and often opposite effect; and the uncertainty whether the (undisputed) rise in CO2 has been accompanied by any global temperature change at all. Here, for example, is the US record of average temperature over the last 70 years (see the global ice caps melting?); for reasons why the reliability of past global averages is in doubt, see AtE Dec 89.
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Vol. 17, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 5 Date: December 01, 2004 03:27 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: The sorry remainders
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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