Environment improving – reject alarmist scenarios



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at: Holdren

Holdren’s a crank


Mosher 2009

Steven M., President of the Population Research Institute, “President Obama's Bizarre "Science Czar": Dr. John R Holdren, Professional Alarmist,” PRI Review: 2009 (v19, n5) September/October, http://www.pop.org/content/president-obamas-bizarre-science-czar--dr-1958



Holdren justifies his proposals — proposals that if enacted would effectively brutalize the entire human population in the name of stopping a global overpopulation catastrophe. “Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century,” he writes breathlessly. “This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny” (p. 944). Yet the eco-catastrophe that he predicted by the year 2000 did not materialize. Instead, as our numbers have grown, so has our prosperity and well being. On the whole, mankind is leading longer, healthier lives than ever before.

Holdren has apparently felt little angst over either his failed predictions of a population apocalypse or his outrageous proposals to counter it, either of which should have been sufficient to disqualify him from being named to advise the President on matters of science and technology. But he has shifted ground. As the perceived “crisis” of population growth has faded — thanks in part to the work of PRI — Holdren began promoting alternative energy, and opposing a missile defense for the U.S.

These days he prefers to talk about another supposed catastrophe that has, like overpopulation a few years ago, seized the imagination of trendy, power-hungry technocrats: global warming. Unless we make dramatic changes in the way we live, Holdren now tells us, we are headed for a climate catastrophe. In a report to the U.N., Holdren predicts a dire future caused by global warming and calls for a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Sea levels could rise as much as 1.3 feet by the year 2010, he reportedly said in 2006, a prediction that is waved off by respectable scientists. Same rhetoric, different subject.

Holden, who was trained in Plasma Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a long history of opining on subjects to which he brings no particular expertise. He wrote on population issues but was not a demographer, He addresses on energy resources but is not a geophysicist. He issues oracular statements on climate change but is not a climatologist.

What Obama’s new Science Czar really is, is a professional doomsayer along the lines of his mentor, Paul Ehrlich. He has prophesied one end-of-the-world scenario after another to advance his scientific career. He has been, one must admit, rather spectacularly successful at this, and now has the ear of the U.S. President. But he has been consistently wrong on the facts. And the fear mongering that he habitually engages in gives science, and scientists, a bad name.


Holdren’s a joker


Bradley 2010

Robert Bradley Jr., Ph.D., political economy, International College, Los Angeles, founder and CEO of Institute for Energy Research, “Halloween Hangover: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen Unretracted,” http://www.masterresource.org/2010/11/halloween-hangover/



In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s ”25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.

Worsening their predicament, the perpetrators will not renounce their specious predictions. They remain the smartest guys in the room–versus all of us commoners, we the hundreds of millions of market-failure-ites.

Here are the Big Three: 1) the dean of modern alarmism, Paul Ehrlich; 2) Al Gore’s influential climate scientist James Hansen; and 3) Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” member John Holdren.

Let’s start with Dr. Holdren.

Holdren’s Billion Deaths

It was Ehrlich who outed his protege on what is perhaps the most outlandish prediction of forthcoming doom of all: one billion potential deaths by 2020. That is about ten years and one in seven of us. Are you scared?

At his confirmation hearings as Obama’s science advisor, Holdren did not disown this prediction–in fact he defended it three times.

Background: Paul Ehrlich fathered the neo-Malthusian movement with his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, and John Holdren was an instant convert. In 1971, mentor-and-disciple wrote:

“We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)”

- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, ‘What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure’, in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology, p. 279

And Dr. Doom senior and junior have been at it ever since, as chronicled in a series of posts at MasterResource.

at: Ehrlich

Ehrlich’s a hack


Bradley 2010

Robert Bradley Jr., Ph.D., political economy, International College, Los Angeles, founder and CEO of Institute for Energy Research, “Halloween Hangover: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen Unretracted,” http://www.masterresource.org/2010/11/halloween-hangover/


In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s ”25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.

Worsening their predicament, the perpetrators will not renounce their specious predictions. They remain the smartest guys in the room–versus all of us commoners, we the hundreds of millions of market-failure-ites.

Here are the Big Three: 1) the dean of modern alarmism, Paul Ehrlich; 2) Al Gore’s influential climate scientist James Hansen; and 3) Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” member John Holdren.

Let’s start with Dr. Holdren. Holdren’s Billion Deaths It was Ehrlich who outed his protege on what is perhaps the most outlandish prediction of forthcoming doom of all: one billion potential deaths by 2020. That is about ten years and one in seven of us. Are you scared? At his confirmation hearings as Obama’s science advisor, Holdren did not disown this prediction–in fact he defended it three times. Background: Paul Ehrlich fathered the neo-Malthusian movement with his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, and John Holdren was an instant convert. In 1971, mentor-and-disciple wrote: “We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)” - John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, ‘What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure’, in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology, p. 279 And Dr. Doom senior and junior have been at it ever since, as chronicled in a series of posts at MasterResource. James Hansen: Six Years to Too Late In the face of believed-to-be certain doom, NASA scientist James Hansen said in mid-2006: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” - James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006. It is known that a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels is not going to happen domestically on internationally. So can we give up the futile climate crusade, Dr. Hansen, based on your belief? Can we replace mitigation with adaptation and think about unleashing that incredible bread machine called Capitalism to best address real and imagined challenges to come? A North Carolina Left environmental group, NC WARN, embraces Hansen’s prediction in end-of-the-world terms: NASA’s James Hansen and the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, R.K. Pachauri, warn that global emissions must start downward by 2015 or the climate crisis will move beyond humanity’s control. Such inspired Ken Green to note: “Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.” Again, with the window closing, can we ‘get real’ and try freedom over statism?

Paul Ehrlich: The World Ended Yesterday (oops!)

Where does one begin with Paul Ehrlich, the arch enemy and intellectual loser to the late Julian Simon? MasterResource has extensively examined Ehrlich’s oeuvre , but here are just two of the more outlandish of his predictions.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

- Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, (New York: Ballentine Books, 1968), p. 13.

We can be reasonably sure . . . that within the next quarter of a century [by 2000] mankind will be looking elsewhere than in oil wells for its main source of energy.”

- Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Rivercity, Mass.: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 49.

And then there was Ehrlich’s prediction from 1970 that Julian Simon jumped all over to get Sir Paul to enter into his ill-fated bet on the future of mineral resource prices as a measure of scarcity: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ (cited above).

Conclusion

So Halloween is every day with the fear mongers. But the sunshine of reality intervenes time and again to demonstrate that Julian Simon is right and the neo-Malthusians wrong. Big Government know-it-all’s–the coercionists–rant and rave even today about how the public ignores the forewarned peril. But humility and mid-course corrections are called for. Only then will the Howlin’ Wolfs (with apologies to Chester Burnett) receive the respect that they long for.

at: Hansen

Hansen’s an alarmist and it’s too late to solve


Bradley 2010

Robert Bradley Jr., Ph.D., political economy, International College, Los Angeles, founder and CEO of Institute for Energy Research, “Halloween Hangover: Ehrlich, Holdren, Hansen Unretracted,” http://www.masterresource.org/2010/11/halloween-hangover/


In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s ”25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.

Worsening their predicament, the perpetrators will not renounce their specious predictions. They remain the smartest guys in the room–versus all of us commoners, we the hundreds of millions of market-failure-ites.

Here are the Big Three: 1) the dean of modern alarmism, Paul Ehrlich; 2) Al Gore’s influential climate scientist James Hansen; and 3) Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” member John Holdren.

Let’s start with Dr. Holdren.

Holdren’s Billion Deaths

It was Ehrlich who outed his protege on what is perhaps the most outlandish prediction of forthcoming doom of all: one billion potential deaths by 2020. That is about ten years and one in seven of us. Are you scared?

At his confirmation hearings as Obama’s science advisor, Holdren did not disown this prediction–in fact he defended it three times.

Background: Paul Ehrlich fathered the neo-Malthusian movement with his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, and John Holdren was an instant convert. In 1971, mentor-and-disciple wrote:

“We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)”

- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, ‘What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure’, in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology, p. 279

And Dr. Doom senior and junior have been at it ever since, as chronicled in a series of posts at MasterResource.

James Hansen: Six Years to Too Late

In the face of believed-to-be certain doom, NASA scientist James Hansen said in mid-2006:

We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.



It is known that a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels is not going to happen domestically on internationally. So can we give up the futile climate crusade, Dr. Hansen, based on your belief? Can we replace mitigation with adaptation and think about unleashing that incredible bread machine called Capitalism to best address real and imagined challenges to come?

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