The future looks grim. Great scientific minds from famous universities are predicting doom. Complex global models, running on the most powerful computers on the planet, tell us that unless we make drastic changes in our lifestyle, we face catastrophe. The science is rock-solid, the conclusions inescapable. Even twenty five years from now it will be too late. We must act now to save the planet!
Global warming, right? Wrong!
I’m describing a nearly forgotten 1972 report and book called ‘The Limits to Growth’. Using what was then called a supercomputer (less powerful than the microprocessor that operates my expensive coffeemaker), a group of scientists at MIT calculated that a combination of over-population, collapsing food supplies, pollution and resource depletion would cause a global collapse by the early 21st century. Paul Ehrlich, just four years earlier in his famous ‘The Population Bomb’, had predicted a similar catastrophe, and suggested we might need programs of compulsory sterilization to keep humans from breeding. He and John Holdren — know that name? — in Scientific American — the premier science magazine of the time — presented a scenario where US population would drop to 20 million by the year 2000. Land and sea would be poisoned, global starvation rampant, essential resources depleted. The models were grim; if we avoided the population bomb, the resource shortage would wipe us out. If we dodged that, pollution would kill us, or we’d starve. Our only hope of salvation? An immediate program of drastic population control, and abrupt cessation of economic growth.
Didn’t happen. These Stanford and Cornell and MIT professors were all completely, foolishly wrong. We now have 300 million people in the US, and we still export food. The global per-capita death rate from starvation is far below 1970’s. While the developing world is certainly polluting itself, the developed world is far cleaner than it was back then. Most resources remain abundant. Ehrlich and Holdren’s folly was beautifully demonstrated by libertarian economist Julian Simon. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $1000 that the prices of five metals, metals Simon allowed Ehrlich to choose, would go down. If global shortages developed over the decade, as Ehrlich and his friends predicted, the prices would instead sky-rocket. Holdren chose the metals for Ehrlich. Ehrlich accepted the bet, bragging he felt bad about taking Simon’s money. In 1990, after the prices declined by over 50%, Ehrlich wrote Simon a cheque.
Fast forward to 2010…the usual suspects are still here, but we have a new ‘crisis’. James Hansen, the Cassandra in this latest episode of ‘the Sky is Falling’, predicted in 1988 that in ‘twenty or thirty years’ the West Side Highway, outside his office at NASA Goddard in Manhattan, would be under water due to rising sea levels. Check Google Earth — it’s high and dry. In the El Niño summer of 1998, when global temperatures reached a modern maximum, the end was supposed to be upon us. Instead, it got cooler. Katrina was supposed to usher in a new era of more frequent and more powerful hurricanes that would devastate our Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Where have they gone? As Kevin Trenberth, one of the latest generation of global warming Jeremiahs, complained plaintively in the ClimateGate emails a few months ago: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.â€
What can we learn from this? First, the environmental movement never learns, because no one ever holds them responsible for their bogus prophesies. Ehrlich and Hansen and their cohorts have made foolish and errant predictions over and over and over again, and yet they still have an audience. Holdren, who has been wrong more consistently, about more things, than perhaps any pseudo-scientist in history, is now science adviser to President Obama.
Second: none of this is really about the planet. It’s about political power. As the years have gone by and each successive prophesy of doom has failed, the bogeyman has morphed repeatedly. First it was pollution, then overpopulation, then resource depletion. And now it’s anthropogenic global warming. But the proffered solution is always the same: give government complete control over the economy and over the most personal choices each of us can make — how many children we have, how often and how far we travel, where we live. Ask yourself; if every decade the nature of the ‘crisis’ changes, but the solution they offer is always the same, doesn’t it seem possible the ‘crises’ are manufactured — mere pretexts to impose a ‘solution’ chosen long in advance?
Atmospheric carbon dioxide may indeed be a problem. There’s some evidence for global warming, particularly at the poles. Sea levels are rising steadily but very slowly; they may in the future rise faster. Certainly, it would be wise to take measured steps to lessen carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, and to investigate ways we can live with the consequences of more CO2. One possible solution most of us could agree on is to rebuild the US nuclear power industry, and gradually phase out coal burning power plants. We can certainly fund research into alternative energy, though given how long we’ve worked on that area without a major breakthrough, we shouldn’t pin our hopes on it. But we need to recognize that the world is not going to reduce its CO2 emissions any time soon. It’s out of our hands. China and India will not dampen down the blazing speed of their economic growth, and even draconian restrictions on carbon use in the developed world won’t offset the gigatons of carbon dioxide the developing world will be releasing.
A quarter century from now, atmospheric CO2 will be over 450 ppm, and there isn’t a whole lot we can do about that. The planet will probably be warmer, but nobody really knows by how much. What we can control is whether the US will still have a dynamic, vibrant economy, or whether we voluntarily commit suicide in a quixotic attempt to forestall the inevitable. We need to resist attempts to ensnarl our liberty in a clinging web of carbon rationing, taxes, and regulations. We need to resist giving the government power over how often we take airplane flights, how big a car we can drive and how fast, and where we choose to live.
The road to totalitarian hell is paved with good intentions of ‘saving the earth’. That is a road we don’t need to take.
Statistics: Posted by RWP — Tue Jan 12, 2010 6:59 pm