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False alarms and climate change
ROB
BRADLEY
Houton Chronicle
Monday, March 31, 2008
Dire predictions about the future of prosperous capitalist living
remain trendy, despite decades of well-documented exaggeration.
Al Gore claims a consensus in regard to his "planetary emergency"
of global climate change from fossil-fuel burning. The science
is "settled," the editorial page of Science magazine
claimed last year. And note the title of a recent conference at
the Baker Institute at Rice University: "Beyond Science:
The Economics and Politics of Responding to Climate Change."
But as columnist George F. Will has observed in reference to
climate science, "People only insist that a debate stop when
they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues."
Alarmism as an intellectual movement began in 1798 when Thomas
Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with
population growth, resulting in human misery and subsistence living.
That was followed in the 1860s by the "coal panic" in
England, brought on by an economist who forecast the imminent
decline of the British coal industry. But coal, like agriculture,
proved far more abundant than expected, and the alarms faded away.
(Article continues below)
Malthusianism turned into neo-Malthusianism in the '60s with
Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" scare. That was followed
in 1972 by the Club of Rome's influential Limits to Growth, predicting
that the world would soon run short of mineral resources. But
just as Ehrlich's predicted food riots in U.S. cities did not
materialize (the problem turned out to be obesity), so too have
the Club of Rome's calculated shortage dates for various minerals
proven to be highly exaggerated.
At about the same time, a miniscare over global cooling emerged,
in response to falling temperatures between the 1940s and 1970s,
which were blamed on rising sulfur dioxide emissions from coal
plants.
But a feared return of a Little Ice Age soon gave way to rising
temperatures and a more urgent alarm: global warming from man-made
greenhouse emissions. In the mid-1980s, John Holdren predicted
that climate-related catastrophes might kill as many as 1 billion
people before the year 2020. But the Harvard University professor
(and Baker conference speaker) has more recently stated: "That
the impacts of global climate disruption may not become the dominant
sources of environmental harm to humans for yet a few more decades
cannot be a great consolation."
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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