By Robert Bradley Jr. – January 15, 2022
“There is a long and sad history of efforts by industries and interest groups to reshape the discussion of climate science and cut through the overwhelming evidence that man-made greenhouse gases is leading us to global catastrophe.”
– John Schwartz, “How riots tie up climate misinformation. ” New York Times, January 13, 2021.
With the election and transfer of power to Biden/Harris, it’s climate alarmism. The gods have given us the Pandemic, the hurricanes that hit the US, and the wildfires in California for a reason – to win an election. And the Powers in the Sky gave us the Capital riot to help reinforce the policy dynamics of the ‘existential threat’.
Return Times‘Schwartz. “For those of us who defend climate change for a living,” he said,
blatant lies about voter fraud that fed the crowd [of January 6, 2021] feels very familiar. A big part of our job is dealing with the misinformation that people and organizations spread to cloud the waters about climate change.
Lie? Deformation? Optimism about the future climate is well founded in settlement science (CO2 fertilization, modest primary warming), as is climate pessimism more speculative (as in the controversial feedback effects to raise initial warming).
Half a century of hype, doom
Critics’ poor record of a high-energy, carbon-based economy inspires skepticism over their dramatic turns to the climate alarm. Some glaring prediction errors by prominent critics have demanded substantial, albeit reluctant, revision.[1]
After stating in the 1970s (with John Holdren) that “whether potential resources can be converted into readily available supply at an economic cost that is socially affordable”, Paul Ehrlich admitted in the 1990s that, “the prices of more raw materials are actually falling rather than rising. ”[2]
Ehrlich’s conclusion in the 1970s that Los Angeles’ smog problem was unsuitable for continued dependence on the internal combustion engine was rectified by his admission in the 1990s of the “success story”. stand out” for more cars and less pollution.[3]
Ehrlich’s Early Concerns About Global Cooling and global warming leads to self-regulation that global warming is the obvious problem.[4]
Paul Ehrlich’s protégé John Holdren, an environmental scientist and energy policy expert at Harvard University, once feared that the potential death toll from global warming could reach one billion. in 2020.[5] However, Holdren recently asserted: “The effects of global climate disruption which may not become the main source of environmental harm to humans in a few decades cannot be of great consolation. “.[6]
Among other signs of retreat or at least mixed sentiments, Ehrlich and Holdren have respectively warned against hasty policy action based on “worst-case prognostications.”[7] and acknowledges that affordable energy is “the lifeblood of industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of other societies”.[8] All these revisions are geared towards energy and climate realism, the battle of many of us.
Some argue that yesterday’s alarmists were actually “whistleblowers” with “critical early warnings… averting… disaster.”[9] But society has been fortunate to change the alarmism.
Fearing the depletion of coal resources, William Stanley Jevons warned Great Britain in 1865, “To allow trade to proceed until civilization is weakened and turned upside down is like killing a goose for its golden eggs. .”[10] As it turned out, the domestic supply of coal did not dry up, but expanded throughout the Jevons’ existence and also before before political problems caused the industry to decline. But the UK has enjoyed a half-century of economic growth that a Coal Supply and Allocation Bureau could have captured.
What if the warnings of Paul Ehrlich or John Holdren had inspired the 1970s policy of oil allocation and elimination of the internal combustion engine? What if power plant construction in the United States was ordered “immediately…except under exceptional circumstances” as recommended by Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman in 1971?[11] What if Holdren and Ehrlich’s dream of 1973—“a big campaign must be launched. . . de-developing the United States” [12]—Is it issued to control energy use? A major decarbonization scheme – all aimed at avoiding catastrophic climate change – poses a similar risk to the UK and EU today.
[1] For a critical review of the energy claims of Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern energetic Malthusians, see Robert Bradley, Julian Simon and the Achievement of Sustainable Energy (Washington: American Legislative Exchange Council, 2000), pp. 126-49. A critical review of Paul Holdren’s energy alarms can be found at http://www.cei.org/pdf/3539.pdf.
[2] Bradley, Julian Simon and the Achievement of Sustainable Energy, pages 130-34.
[3] Led., Tr. 136.
[4] Linked, pp. 144-45.
[5] “As University of California physicist John Holdren put it, it’s possible that carbon dioxide-induced starvation could kill billions of people before 2020.” Paul Ehrlich, Machines of nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 274.
[6] John Holdren, “Memorandum to the President: The Climate-Energy Challenge,” in Donald Kennedy and John Riggs, ed., WE Policy and the Global Environment: Memorandum to the President (Washington: Aspen Institute, 2000), p. 23.
[7] Bradley, Julian Simon and the Achievement of Sustainable Energy, page 118-19.
[8] John Holdren, “Meeting the Energy Challenge,” Science, February 9, 2001, p. 945.
[9] Richard Norgaard, “Optimists, Pessimists, and Science,” BioScience, March 2002, p. 288. Also see Michael Grubb, “Relying on Manna from Heaven?” Science, 294 (2001), pp. 1285-87.
[10] Jevons, William Stanley, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Country and the Depletion of Our Coal Mines (London: Macmillan and Company, 1865), p. 345.
[11] Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How to be a survivor (Rivercity, MA: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 72.
[12] John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecosystem: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; WH Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.
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