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| Why Hasn't Environmental Doom Materialised? |
| 2012-08-19 |
| A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue -- boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh. This began two generations ago, in 1972, when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong? People are The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now -- aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Lomborg says: Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on. The modelers missed something -- human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Which did not just appear after 1972. Forty years after "The Limits to Growth" imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to "reduce, reuse, and recycle." Lomborg calls recycling "a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost." He says that "we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource" -- forests -- "that was never threatened in the first place." I was surprised to find making old newspapers into cereal-box cardboard in Dallas, Texas started in 1897. Now do you know why it is gray? In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager in the form of a complex futures contract. He bet Paul Ehrlich (whose 1968 book "The Population Bomb" predicted that "hundreds of millions of people" would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agricultural production) that by 1990 the price of any five commodities Ehrlich and his advisers picked would be lower than in 1980. Ehrlich's group picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990. Whadda maroon! But wait, there's more! The bet cost Ehrlich $576.07. But that year he was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize for ecological virtue. One of Ehrlich's advisers, John Holdren, is Barack Obama's science adviser. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #20 no idea how that happened...didn't have multiple tabs open for the Burg |
| Posted by: Frank G 2012-08-19 20:16 |
| #19 oops - wrong thread? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2012-08-19 20:15 |
| #18 "build a fire for a man and he's warm all night. Set a man on fire and he's warm all his life" /never gets old |
| Posted by: Frank G 2012-08-19 20:12 |
| #17 >Aside from the logical fallacies modeling always obeys the first law of computers...garbage in, garbage out. Google "exponential error". Good in, garbage out. Even if the model and the data are all really quite good (and they're not). AGW models are the most expense random number generators in the history of the planet. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2012-08-19 19:58 |
| #16 Without doom and death the Aasvoëls (vultures) have no meat. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2012-08-19 18:25 |
| #15 if a certain predictor class has been wrong every single time in the last 40 years and their current predictions are based on models that don't even predict the present with any accuracy given data of the past then rationality would reject them out of hand. seriously folks, chicken poop bingo gives a better probability of accuracy than these 'experts' have. |
| Posted by: abu do you love 2012-08-19 16:25 |
| #14 Holdren also worked for Romney in MA, so either way the environment wins! |
| Posted by: Iblis 2012-08-19 15:17 |
| #13 RiV, why haven't you committed suicide to help the problem? Now wait a minute here. First they should all become mass murderers, after all, why kill the one when you can kill the many? Do I need a sarc tag? |
| Posted by: AlanC 2012-08-19 14:22 |
| #12 For all the people who believe that the problem with the world is there are too many people: Why are you still alive? If you truly believe that there are too many people, why haven't you committed suicide to help the problem? The real problem for people who believe that there are too many people is that there are too many OTHER people. They of course think that they will be among the few survivors. |
| Posted by: Rambler in Virginia 2012-08-19 13:42 |
| #11 steve S #7- Also, I'd like to nominate Paul Erlich for the Nobel Prize for Being Wrong About Everything. He has sold a lot of books, though. To my way of seeing things, someone like Ehrlich should be tried and hanged for treason. Of course, I'm just a neanderthal, according to the beautiful people. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2012-08-19 13:18 |
| #10 I too read the CoR report. As a computer geek with a Poli Sci degree I agree with Steve S. That model was as bogus as the models relied upon by the gerbil worming fanatics. Aside from the logical fallacies modeling always obeys the first law of computers...garbage in, garbage out. It's very easy to play with the data to get the results you want. These people don't care about the environment or the population, they only care about power; how to get it and how to keep it. Doomsaying is just one of their tools. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2012-08-19 13:13 |
| #9 Conceptually the left cannot believe capitalism can solve the environmental issues; while trying to leverage the environmental issue as reasons to destroy capitalism. Their goals and facts get in the way of their agenda. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2012-08-19 13:03 |
| #8 So well put P2K, dismissing the wisdom of the past because they didn't have our technology is foolish. Most core insights into human behavior and organization are not new....and dismissing the wisdom of the past is often a huge mistake, witness the education debacle for example. |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2012-08-19 12:53 |
| #7 The modelers missed something -- human ingenuity... An important factor, but it was more than that. Being interested in apocalypses and computer modeling, I actually read the Club of Rome report. One intriguing bit was that after predicting doom, they ran the models with different parameters looking for a way to save humanity. No dice. Everything they tried ran to the same outcome. This suggested either our fate was sealed (apparently not!) OR that the model was in an attractor basin and basically 'stuck' on a particular outcome. The map is not the territory, the model is not the thing. Also, I'd like to nominate Paul Erlich for the Nobel Prize for Being Wrong About Everything. He has sold a lot of books, though. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2012-08-19 12:51 |
| #6 re No 5; Yes, leftist politics has a long history of fatal results for non-believers (and some believers). And they have taken over the environmental doom thing as well. |
| Posted by: tipover 2012-08-19 12:11 |
| #5 Because environmental doom was always BS... leftist politics doom has become the real threat? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2012-08-19 10:37 |
| #4 we're so modern, hip, and sophisticated, that simple homilies that address well known human behavior are only for the unwashed, fly over, bible thumping, gun toting rubes. Hardly something new (e.g. The Gods of the Copybook Headings) |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2012-08-19 09:17 |
| #3 Malthus ver. 72. The Malthusians are ever with us. My sister as a late teen went on a great rant to my father about all the typical '60s crap how the middle class suburbia was so terrible. He simply quoted some of the same type of thing from the '20s and said how people always wanted to a) be scared and b) think themselves the saviors of man kind. SSDD. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2012-08-19 09:14 |
| #2 See - chicken little. Yes, but we're so modern, hip, and sophisticated, that simple homilies that address well known human behavior are only for the unwashed, fly over, bible thumping, gun toting rubes. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2012-08-19 08:42 |
| #1 Because it was always bullshit? |
| Posted by: NCMike 2012-08-19 08:29 |