Versagi Voice

Contact us     Home Page      Ongoing Discussions

Global Warming & All That
 

The world is coming to an end -- again

First of an occasional series
 An Outline of Environmental Pessimism

For all of recorded history, the Jeremiahs of the world have predicted chaos and catastrophe -- if we don't listen to them.
Today, in early 2007, we have Al Gore and the United Nations giving us short deadlines to repent and reform or doom populations to extinction ecological and environmental afflictions beyond human imagination -- well, not beyond the imaginations of Al Gore and the United Nations.

The sampling of predictions tabulated below provides an Outline of Environmental Pessimism through the ages -- with a few optimistic prophecies printed in blue to be fair and balanced. I'll occasionally publish comments about all this by others and by me. For now, a sampling of the extreme positions. -- FJV: April 2007

Paul Erlich, in 1968: "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

Herman Kahn, in 1975: Pessimism is more fashionable in intellectual circles. Re energy, resources, food, pollution, "You can find solutions if you are optimistic."

Source

Message
1798. Malthus, Rev. Thomas. Essay on the Principle of Population Mankind's propensity to beget will soon outstrip the earth's capacity to provide.
1867. Marx, Carl. Capital Poverty is a natural condition and misery is a necessary check on population growth, so Malthus was "a shameful sycophant" of the ruling classes who opposed reforms to create a better life for the poor.
1949. Foursatie, Jean. The Civilization of 1975: The Great Hope of the 20th Century There will be rising prosperity, social security, blossoming education and culture, humanization of work.
1966. Ellul, Jacques. The Technologial Society The USSR will be technically obliged to copy American society and China obliged to turn to Occidental technology within twenty years.
1968. Erlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.
1972. Club of Rome. Limits to Growth Updated in 1994 and 2004, the permanent message is that present economic and cultural practices are unsustainable if we are to avoid worldwide chaos and catastrophe. Club was founded in 1968
Oct. 21, 1972. Maddox, John. The Doomsday Syndrome. Saturday Review Pessimists use "a technique of calculated overdramatization" to make their points. . . . Food production is increasing at a higher rate than population. . . . To the degree that there are problems, "alarms do not provide the best atmosphere for finding solutions."
1974. Neel, Dr. James V. et al. University of Michigan research report Team of researchers found chromosome damage and mercury levels in isolated Amazon tribes in excess of those normally found in urban man
1975. Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful Current economic practices are unsustainable. We are treating natural resources as expendable income instead of capital which must be preserved. Pro ecological and environmental mandated control.
Dec. 1975. Kahn, Herman. The Unthinkable Optimist. The Futurist Pessimism is more fashionable in intellectual circles. Re energy, resources, food, pollution "you can find solutions if you are optimistic."
Dec. 1975. Browne, Congressman George E. Survival 2000: A grim view Mass starvation is almost inevitable by the beginning of the next century. . . . The earth has now entered a cooling trend which may have a massive effect on the great wheat-growing areas.
Aug. 1976. Florman, Samuel C. Another Utopia Gone. Harper's Magazine, The Club of Rome labels global crises -- technical, social, economic, political -- as "problematique humaine."
Feb. 1980. Ellul, Jacques. The Unforeseeable Future. PHP (Japanese monthly magazine) By making linear extrapolations of recent trends, pessimists reach such conclusions as "by the year 2000, the entire surface of the earth will be covered by a layer of cars." . . . Setting unrealistic goals hasn't worked for China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, or the USSR. . . . Politicians expect to decide everything, but they don't have the competence to forecast technology's future. . . . Club of Rome basic premise is valid: Infinite growth is impossible within a limited space. But Club is wrong in many of its details
Sep.4, 1980. Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States. The Global 2000 Report If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be . . . more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. . . . the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.
May 8, 1981. Dubois, Rene. Half-Truths About the Future. Wall Street Journal Global 2000 Report contains "hysterical statement." Compare with Resources, Society and the Future, by the Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies.
Feb. 1994. Kaplan, Robert D. The Coming Anarchy.  Atlantic Monthly "I really believe we are on the verge of a second cold war -- this time against the new demons of population and resource scarcity and environmental destruction. . . . disease, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increased erosion of nation-states and international borders . . . "
Jul. 1994. Gee, Marcus. Surprise! The World Gets Better. Toronto Globe and Mail Re Robert D. Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy: "It is absorbing, fascinating, frightening stuff. It is also dead wrong."
1998. Lomborg, Bjǿrn. the skeptical environmentalist Embarrasses green groups by documenting "their systematic exaggeration of the Earth's environmental problems." . . . Almost single-handedly proved the invalidity of the "hockey stick" graphs, which the doomsayers have stopped using. Al Gore refused to sit on an international panel with Lomborg. See a sample of his counter-evidence to the doomsayers' "Litany of Catastrophes."
Nov. 12, 2002. The Population Bomb Redux (transcription of a filmed, moderated dialogue) "If we had 145 million people in the U.S, [instead of the 250-plus million we have]. . . George Bush would not be trying to invade Iraq to get some control over the second biggest pile of petroleum in the world."
2007. Gore, Al & United Nation Climate Change Repot. The World is Coming to an End -- Again (editorial license in that title) Gore gives us 10 years to act; otherwise it will be "too late" to solve global warming problems. . . . The United Nations report promises extinction of entire countries (continents?) if we don't mend our ways.
Other readings Goals for Global Societies. Ervin Laszlo; Planning Alternative Wolrd Futures. edited by Beres & Targe; The Politics of Natural Disaster. edited by Michael Glantz; Urban Nongrowth: Planning for People. Finkler, Toner, and Popper; Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb. edited by Meek & Weissmans

Pat Buchanan's take on all this

Also see: Health & Safety and Environment

Reactions

The media are daily filled with doom-and-gloom speculations. Here -- in support of those who are not congenital pessimists -- we include expressions of reasonable doubt and of optimism.

Vanity Fair, Outdoor, Newsweek, Domino, all magazines that have Eco or Green issues.  NO ONE who is a scientist denies global warming.  If you look at who starved to death since 1970 you will see many people did, just not all over the planet. The flooding has started which is a precursor of the environmental damage. Water wars are on the way and some have begun all ready. What would be the purpose to pretend these things do not exist?  I can not believe it would be because you do not care what happens to the less fortunate as that is who will suffer the most. Picking sensationalist remarks will assist no one except those who are just trying to score points. Points have never aided the world in any century. -- Lori Broesamle

Frank, have you seen the BBC's Great Global Warming Swindle? It can be accessed at: http://www.archive.org/details/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle_Documentary. It's 77 minutes, so grab a cocktail and sit back for some eye opening "the other side of the story" take on things. This to me is a lot more bright and cheerful...but of course doesn't sell papers, get politicians elected or fund research as well as doom and gloom does, nor perpetuates the anti-capitalist/global economy thing that the far left fanatics love to bash. -- Kevin Konczal

But nobody lives there
Mars is experiencing global warming
 NASA scientists report that Mars has warmed up by half-a-degree Celsius since the 1970s, potentially threatening to melt that planet's southern ice cap. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over roughly the same period. Since there is no known life on Mars, the suggestion is that "rapid changes in planetary climates could be due to natural phenomena," according to a report of the NASA finding published in the 29 April 2007 issue of England's Sunday Times.

§ Early Global Warming?
Natural ice, cut from New England ponds was covered in sawdust and shipped as far as to Martinique. However, during "the exceptionally warm winter of 1818," suppliers were forced to hack at Labrador icebergs to supply their customers.

§ Early global warming?
During the century 800-900 A.D., the North Sea herring grounds shifted, forcing the Vikings to travel far for food -- and conquest. No claims yet that man-made global warming caused the herring to leave home twelve hundred years ago.

§ Making ethanol from sugar cane, a la Brazil, is much more environmentally friendly and cost-effective than making it from corn. By going the corn-route, the U.S. is raising corn prices worldwide, hurting, not helping those who must pay the price of "converting food into fuel," suggests Fidel Castro --  and others who usually disagree with the Cuban dictator.

§ They continually say we only have 10 years left, and they've been saying it for 20 years, and it's ridiculous." -- Tom Harris, Natural Resources Stewarding Project, Ottawa

§ Changes in the brightness of the sun are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the "Little Ice Age" of the late 19th century . . . Human emissions of carbon dioxide appear to have little effect on the global climate. -- Tim Patterson, science professor at Carleton University, Ottawa

§ "Biofuels face a great deal of criticism. Food commodities such as corn, canola and soy all yield oil, but they are expensive, require intensive agriculture practices and threaten food supplies." -- Scientific American, June 2007

§ "Human-induced climate and hydrological change is likely to make many parts of the world uninhabitable, or at least uneconomic. Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, Earth Institute at Columbia University

§ Early global warming?
In 1854, the winter being unusually dry, the level of Swiss lakes sank, and revealed [ruins of prehistoric lake-dwellers]. -- Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant.

§ "Biofuels face a great deal of criticism. Food commodities such as corn, canola and soy all yield oil, but they are expensive, require intensive agriculture practices and threaten food supplies." -- Scientific American, June 2007

§ Those who like to scare the world about global warming -- oops, about climate change -- will find a treasure in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American. In total support of the world-is-coming-to-an-end advocates, the journal -- using great text and graphics and layout -- even regionalizes the scares by continent. Anyone who isn't aware that there is authoritative international disagreement about all this will come away from this one-sided report thoroughly frightened.

§ Early global warming?
In 1854, the winter being unusually dry, the level of Swiss lakes sank, and revealed [ruins of prehistoric lake-dwellers]. -- Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant.

§ Why bees are disappearing
Ian Lipkin of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health suspects that a virus is the cause of "colony collapse disorder" for the second year in a row. He suspects the pathogen entered the U.S. on imported bees. Impossible. Everybody knows that global warming is causing the population drop in bees.

§ Real world gets in the way . . . again
"The plan to install solar roofs on houses has been stymied by the high cost of photovoltaic panels, red tape, and a requirement, temporarily suspended, that customers buy additional power at rates that vary according to demand. That would have increase some households' energy bills." -- Environmental study in California

§ Lighting accounts for some 19% of the world's use of electricity. A standard incandescent bulb costs, say, $1 and uses $15 of electricity a year. A low-energy fluorescent bulb costs $5-6 and uses $3 worth of electricity, so the payback for going with energy-efficient bulbs is less than a year. Yet sales of such bulbs is growing substantially only in the developing world, where the cost of electricity is much higher than in the rich world.

§ If solar power is the answer, why isn't it being used throughout Africa?
In pictures taken at night from Space, one can identify lighted Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Except for Egypt and South Africa, the picture of Africa is that of, actually, a Dark Continent. Africa has a few hydroelectric plants and some imported backup generators to generate electricity, not nearly enough to enable development of the continent. Some hope that if the cost for solar generation drops by at least 30%, it might become justifiable to go that route to light up the Dark Continent.

§ There's no connection between global warming and stormy weather, according to an authority who has been issuing Atlantic basin hurricane forecasts for 24 years. Citing hurricane frequency and severity during several 50-year blocks, William M Gray, professor emeritus in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and research fellow at the Independent Institute, ties hurricanes to naturally occurring variations in the flow of warm and cold salty water in the Atlantic Ocean. Gray suggests that greenhouse gas theorists tend to be "climate modelers with little observational experience. Many of the modelers are not fully aware of how the real atmosphere and ocean function. They rely more on theory than on observation." -- Wall Street Journal 25 July 007

Yes there is, insist a couple of atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado. Greg Holland and Peter Webster maintain that the number of Atlantic hurricanes "tracks the increase in sea surface temperature related to climate change." Not surprisingly, Holland's and Webster's conclusions are presented in that strongly biased scholarly publication, ScientificAmerican.com..

§ "Environmentalism -- unlike scientific ecology -- does not belong to the natural sciences and can be classified as ideology. . . . Environmentalists' argumentation is based not on simple empirical measurements or laboratory experiments but on sophisticated model experiments working with a range of ill-founded assumptions that are usually hidden and not sufficiently understood." -- Václav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic

§ Among some recent recreational reading, I perused books dealing with Babylonia, Early Israel, and Aztec & Maya history. Each of them, in speculating about the reasons for mass migrations and wars includes the impact of climate change. Formerly fruitful land becomes barren. Rivers dry up or flood. Average temperatures rise or fall for years at a time or permanently. Drastic change in regional flora and fauna. All this thousands of years ago, before Exxon and GM began to poison the earth and contribute to global warming.

§  "Every year, up to 30,000 species disappear due to human activity alone. At this rate, we could lose half of Earth's species in this century." -- The New Republic, 24 Sep 2007.

REALLY? Who counts those 30,000 species? How do they count them? Another, false, statistical scare from a publication which contains excellent writing but is also known for publishing questionable information. A recent example was false testimony by a, non-existent?, Iraq War veteran.

§ Let's see, now.
 Scare-mongers assured us that global warming caused Katrina and that hurricanes henceforth will be more numerous and more deadly than ever before. What followed, though, has been two successive seasons with fewer and milder hurricanes than predicted. Oh, well. -- 12 Dec 07

§ About global warming -- "climate change" if you prefer -- the challenges continue to come to what some critics call "Gore's mythical consensus." A piece in Investor's Business Daily* quotes sources like the Danish Meteorological Institute and Canada's National Research Council, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research, in Germany, all of which contend it is what happens on the sun, not in "tailpipes and smokestacks", which affects the earth. Excerpts:

□ Data going back "centuries" show "global temperatures tracked solar cycles."

□ The long-tracked 11-year cycle in solar activity, sunspots in particular, seems "disturbingly quiet" and this "lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century."

□ A 17th century Maunder Minimum corresponded with a "period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715." Frigid winters and cold summers led to massive crop failures and famine in Northern Europe.

□ The sun "has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for a 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

□ "Try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

* "The Sun Also Sets" -- 07 Feb 2008 posting

Coal, gas, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, biofuels, nuclear --
All right already!
Finally, an almost unbiased look at energy options. Except that he tells you why he prefers nuclear, veteran journalist William Tucker provides an objective overview of energy options in a lecture to a Hillsdale College conference. Highlights from a report in the college's publication, Imprimis.

§ "Perhaps ethanol just isn't as bio-friendly as it looks. . . . Some say the production process uses almost as much energy as it produces." -- The Economist

Nothing is perfect
 There are about 13,000 facilities around the world that convert seawater into drinkable water, half of them in the Middle East. Oceans offer an unending raw material for strategically located new desalination plants. Desalination, though, uses a lot of energy and can cost several times as much as treating groundwater or river water, and now the technology exists to begin lowering the cost. To overcome objections from environmentalists worried about greenhouse gases generated by desalination plants, developers are locating, for example, near wind farms. And some lessons provided by conventional industries, like evaporative techniques used in sugar refining, are being used. -- 02 Jul 08

The global warming debate gets personal.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus -- whom Al Gore refuses to debate -- insists that global warming is being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding require selling the public on global warming. -- 09 Jul 08

Global Warming Preview
"Around 7000BC, temperatures rose worldwide and in Central America many grassland areas gave way either to desert or to tropical jungle. Animals were fewer and hunting became more difficult, so people turned to more intensive food cultivation." -- Aztec & Maya Illustrated Encyclopedia

Global Warming Before Christ
Discovery of artifacts in Africa has led to reports which include: "About 100 million years ago, [the Sahara desert] was forested and occupied by dinosaurs and enormous crocodiles. . . .By 50,000 years ago, people moved in. . . . The lakes dried up in the last Ice Age. . . . The rains and lakes of a fecund Sahara returned some 12,000 years ago, and remained, except for one 1,000-year interval, until about 4,500 years ago. Geologists have long known that the region's basins retained mineral residue of former lakes . . . "

Then the Sahara again became desert, as it is today -- caused by man-made global warming, you know.

"France sticks with nuclear power," is the headline on an International Herald Tribune piece. Currently, nuclear power supplies 77% of France's electricity, according to the newspaper, which adds, " . . . in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas." There have been minor accidents, like leaking pipes, but not enough to change French policy or to prevent erecting new nuclear plants.

France generates its 77% of electricity with "58 operating nuclear reactors." The U.S.'s 104 nuclear plants, generate less than 20% of our electrical power.

Northern Ireland has doubts
The Environment Minister Sammy Wilson has angered green campaigners by describing their view on climate change as a "hysterical pseudo-religion". In an article in the News Letter, Mr Wilson said he believed it occurred naturally and was not man-made. "Resources should be used to adapt to the consequences of climate change, rather than King Canute-style vainly trying to stop it," said the minister.

Peter Doran of the Green Party said it was a "deeply irresponsible message."

Mr. Wilson said he refuses to "blindly accept" the need to make significant changes to the economy to stop climate change. "The tactic used by the "green gang" is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact," he said. -- BBC News

§ Imagine using a handkerchief-size solar panel to charge your cell phone.
 That may be one practical application of a solar cell which uses light-sensitive dye instead of silicon as its base component. The development comes from a company, G24i, founded in England by an American. That company and its competitors see "flexible solar cells woven into camera bags and laptop cases, so the devices can be recharged on the go -- albeit very slowly." -- The Economist.

§ France is reported to be asking the European Union to give carmakers "far more time" to adapt to new limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The hope is to ease the pressure on those manufacturers, especially in Germany, which make heavier cars.

§ Boston (MA) - Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature - and not the direct result of man's contributions. -- 30 Oct 08

§ "The environmentalists, a leading British scientist charges, may be the most insidious of all plunderers of our planet. Using 'a technique of calculated overdramatization,' they have deflected attention from the genuine ecological issues we face and blinded us to solutions that exists now." -- book report re The Doomsday Syndrome, published in "Saturday Review" of 21 October 1972. -- Nov 2008

§  "I do not know of any environmental group in any country that does not view its government as an adversary." -- Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway

§  The reasoned case for or against ethanol as a transportation fuel offers insight which escapes those who are wont to assign derogatory labels to their opponents. Consider the thoughtful, if conflicting, positions:

Feelings aside, it is obvious that there can be thoughtful arguments to suggest that using to plants instead of oil as a fuel is not automatically the right thing to do. Realistic choices arise, like drill for oil or threaten forests. It is understandable that different countries will make different choices, with no choice being without doubt the superior one.

Efforts to support global climate-change falls: Poll
PARIS - There is both growing public reluctance to make personal sacrifices and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the major international efforts now underway to battle climate change, according to findings of a poll of 12,000 citizens in 11 countries, including Canada.

Results of the poll were released this week in advance of the start of a major international conference in Poland where delegates are considering steps toward a new international climate-change treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. -- November 27, 2008: Peter O'Neil, Europe Correspondent, Canwest News Service

"As the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, an economist, anti-totalitarian and climate change sceptic, prepares to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union next year, climate alarmists are doing their best to traduce him. The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent's report, claiming he behaves like a "rejected genius", and asserts there is "palpable fear" he will "embarrass" the EU.

"But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy - whether in the parliamentary offices of the world's largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.

As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about

§ Let's see: Earth had global cooling, ice ages, before the Industrial Revolution. Centuries ago, the Green Crescent went dry and brown. Forests have become deserts. Now, faced with increasing evidence that the earth is cooling, climate control alarmists are claiming that man-made global warming is causing global cooling. Very scientific, what?

New Ice Age to last 100,000 years
The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years. -- http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-earth_ice_age-0

Dead Last . . .
is where global warming ranked among 20 issues researched by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The tabulation below presents the priority Americans currently put on six of the twenty.
The Economy . . . 85%
Terrorism . . . 76%
Health Insurance . . . 52%		 Helping the Poor . . . 50%
Immigration . . 41%
Global Warming . . . 30%

Go Green!?
 Sterling Heights, Michigan, is among those cities which will go green by using a federal grant to buy hybrid vehicles. Skeptics will want to mark the date. Then on each anniversary check on the status of the project. Will  operating and maintenance costs prove excessive? Will the units prove reliable in the kind of service to which they will be put? It has repeatedly happened that highly touted solar installations of all sorts, for example, prove functionally troublesome and not cost-justified the first year ("Breaking-in," you know) and are quietly dismantled three or four years later. Universities, community colleges, prestigious and progressive architectural/engineering firms have had such experiences since the early days of solar enthusiasm.

And, first-year blues have already affected a handful of wind farms around the world.