Friday, April 27, 2012

45 years later, global alarmist still alarming


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If you've been following this blog for a while, you know there is a special place in our heart for one Paul Ehrlich (pictured). Ehrlich has been making fantastically wrong predictions regarding what will befall the human race since his book The Population Bomb arrived on the scene back in the late 60s.

Seriously, what other emotions but warmth and affection can you have towards someone who was freaking you out as a 2nd-grader reading his predictions of Book of Revelations-sized calamities in our Weekly Reader.

Well, neither time nor a crappy track record has dissuaded Ehrlich from his thinly-disguised call for population reduction and wealth redistribution. Wait, what? Did we say thinly-veiled? There's nothing veiled about his calls for population reduction and wealth distribution.

From The Guardian:

Cut world population and redistribute resources, expert urges

Nuclear disaster or plague likely unless population shrinks and natural resources are reassigned to poor, says Prof Paul Ehrlich .

The world's most renowned population analyst has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor.

Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, goes much further than the Royal Society in London which this morning said that physical numbers were as important as the amount of natural resources consumed.

"The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."

"Most of the predictions [in Population Bomb] have proved correct. At that time I wrote about climate change. We did not know then if it was warming or cooling. We thought it was going to be a problem for the end of this century. Now we know it's warming and a problem for the beginning of the century; we didn't know about the loss of biodiversity. Things have been coming up worse than was predicted. We have the threats now of vast epidemics".
(italics, ours)

What Ehrlich predicted is that we would all pretty much be dead by now.



The warmists' world is in shambles. In the midst of discredting themselves through burying data and outright misleading the public on the issue, the climate change conference at Copenhagen back in 2010 was an epic failure to where now no one pays any effective attention to these global climate conferences.

What this has resulted in, fortunately, is for the warmists to speak freely and admit that needed change for the planet's citizens really isn't about global climate change but power... power over the productive societies of this planet.

Rather than wealth redistribution or population reduction (the actual mechanics of which, Ehrlich never gets into), the planet and specifically the "huddled masses" of this planet would be better served were they not enslaved by the various forms of corrupt and amoral governance be they autocracies, warlord-ships, dictatorships or kleptocracies.

Wealth redistribution will merely consolidate more power into the hands of those already in power in the aforementioned governing styles and unless pro-free market, constitutional forms of government are embraced where the rule of law rather than the rule of power is embraced, Ehrlich's predictions may very well be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sustainability is not about wealth redistribution rather rule of law, freedom of speech and property rights. Any other approach is doomed to failure.

1 comment:

Road Dawg said...

An uncle, RIP, spouted this populatiom explosion nonsense at the dinner table in front of children, myself just out of fifth grade and Bdaddy a couple of years older. I had asked why he didn't have children.
The mood was greatly lightened when I matter of factly stated I would eat his poodles before I starved.

I dont remember if anyone blew milk out their nose, but I was a hit with Mom for the comment.