Failed "Scientist" Paul Ehrlich Among AGW Alarmists Swiping at Skeptics

There’s a 2004 book by Victor Gold called Liberwocky: What Liberals Say and What They Really Mean. It’s a tongue-and-cheek (but not inaccurate) glossary of buzzwords used and abused by the liberati in all walks of life. E.g.,

“Obscene: Liberal pejorative applied to ‘outrageous’ corporate profits; not, however, applicable to pornographic magazines or motion pictures.”

I think it’s time for a sequel. Consider this piece at the Washington Times about certain climate alarmists scientists hitting back at skeptics in light of the past several months’ AGW scandals and errors:

Climate scientists plot to fight back at skeptics
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By Stephen Dinan

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.

“This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,’“ said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion but wants the scientists to take a slightly different approach.

The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body on the matter, has suffered defections of members after it had to retract claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt over the next 25 years. ..

That news has enraged scientists. Mr. Schneider said Mr. Inhofe is showing “McCarthyesque” behavior in the mold of the Cold War-era senator who was accused of stifling political debate through accusations of communism.

“They’re not going to win short-term battles playing the game against big-monied interests because they can't beat them,” he said.

Just from these examples you can see utter sanctimony, the moral and intellectual superiority dripping from these frauds. Consider at the language they use—which is so typical of the left in any profession:

• It isn’t the alarmists but rather the skeptics who lack civil dialogue and are spinning the truth.
• It isn’t the alarmists but rather the skeptics who are engaged in a “street fight” against “well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
• It isn’t the alarmists but rather the skeptics who are forcing the other side to respond with “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach.”
• It isn’t the alarmists but rather the skeptics who are showing “McCarthyesque” behavior and stifling political debate through false accusations.
• It isn’t the alarmists but rather the skeptics who are concerned with battling unbeatable big-monied interests.

Every one of these charges are absurd, not only because they are wrong, but also because each and every one of them is a perfect characterization of themselves! In other words, this is a textbook example of projection—one of the two official defense mechanisms of the Democrat Party (the other is denial).

It is the alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (and I’ll get to him later) and Schneider (1) who do not engage in civil dialogue and spin truths like a spider at her web, (2) who are well-funded, merciless, and who play by their own rules, (3) who are already outlandishly and agressively partisan, (4) who employ McCarthyesque behavior and stifle political debate everywhere from within the IPCC to the T.V. news networks, and (5) who already are a big-monied interest, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars of largely taxpayer-funded grants.

I’d be crying if it were g*ddamned laughable.

Now, being the Washington Times is a right-leaning paper, I’m willing to give author Stephen Dinan the benefit of the doubt when he describes Paul Ehrlich simply as “a Stanford University researcher.” Because those of us who have been following science alarmists of the past few decades know full well that he is far more than that.

Paul Ehrlich is the quintessential “Intellectual Moron” (as author Daniel Flynn calls it.) Since he came onto the national scene in 1968 with the book The Population Bomb, he has been wrong on virtually everything has predicted about the future state of the world. He’s the Bernie Madoff of science. If he were a mutual fund investment banker, he would have been fired by his employer, have a bounty on his head by every one of his unfortunate clients, and probably his own jail cell.

Examples? 

Let’s start with the book itself. The premise was that at the current growth rate, planet Earth was going to be unsustainably overpopulated over the next couple decades (i.e., basically before the end of the 20th century). In this book and/or its second edition in 1971, Ehlrich purported:

“The battle to feed 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.”

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

“[A] minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century.”

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

[By 1984], “the United States will quite literally be dying of thirst.”

Bzzzt. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. In fact, Food production is well ahead of population growth and obesity now kills literally hundreds of thousands of Americans a year.

“India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” and “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.”

Bzzzt. Wrong again. As Patrick J. Michaels writes:

Obviously Ehrlich was wrong. India adopted high-yielding “Green Revolution” wheat in the early 1970s, followed by similar advances in rice production, at it became a substantial net exporter of food, as it is today. And, even if there were widespread crop failures, the now-diversified Indian economy would have little problem purchasing food on the international market.

Here’s a hum dinger:

[I forecast] “a new Ice Age … with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperate regions.”

Bzzzt. Wrong. Yes, you read that right: a new Ice Age. Forty years later the man is now crying “global warming!”

So it was clear by the mid-1980’s that Ehrlich was 0 for 7 major claims he made in his book.

Moving on. In 1969, Ehrlich stated:

“Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles.

Bzzzt. Wrong. The air in both cities has cleaner than it has been in decades.

“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Bzzzt. Wrong. WTF?

And in 1970, Ehrlich co-founded Earth Day on April 22 (coincidentally—wink wink—Vladimir Lenin’s birthday). At that inaugural event, he stated:

Four billion people—including 65 million Americans—would perish from famine in the 1980s.

“In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

Bzzzt. Wrong and wrong. The 80’s, 90’s and 00’s have come and gone. It’s now 2010 and we’re still waiting for these to happen. The only thing that stinks is Paul Ehlrich’s predictions.

Then Erhlich was about to lose money. In 1976 he claimed:

“Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity … in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.”

Bzzzt. Wrong. In fact, this preceded a $1,000 bet Ehrlich made in 1980 with economist Julian Simon along the same lines—and lost:

In 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a “basket” of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. I appears Ehrlich has no shame. Ehrlich picked five metals—chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten—that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

When that boneheaded prediction didn’t pan out, Ehrlich evidently went over to the other extreme: our friend global warming. He was on this bandwagon as early as 1989 and as welcomed by a fawning mainstream liberal media. Brent Bozell recalls:

Go back to 1989 and 1990. Instead of NBC’s Katie Couric handing the microphone over to Al Gore to lament how Manhattan’s about to go underwater, the same NBC network handed its microphone and camera crew directly to left-wing “Population Bomb” author Paul Ehrlich, awarding him large chunks of air time to imagine America losing the nation’s capital and the entire state of Florida. [Sound familiar?]

In May of 1989, Ehrlich claimed, global warming was going to melt the polar ice caps, causing a flood in which “we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles basin...we’ll be in rising waters with no ark in sight.” Ehrlich didn’t give a time frame, but his panicked report clearly suggested doom around the corner. [Sound familiar?]

The panic was necessary to sell an extremely harsh “solution” of “enormous, rapid change.” Ehrlich commanded that to forestall doom, the world needed to cut its energy use in half over 20 years. Industrialization needed to be dragged to a screeching halt, not only in America, but especially in the Third World. Ehrlich felt the next generation of Americans should be denied the Earth-strangling prosperity of their parents, saying the world’s ecosystems “cannot support the spread of the American lifestyle to the Third World or even to the next generation of Americans.” [Sound familiar?]

Ehrlich was back on NBC in January 1990 to sell his “inconvenient truth” line again. This time, he gave a more concrete timeline. Antarctica’s ice sheets were slipping, and then “we’ll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable.” [Sound familiar?]

Twenty years later the same crap gets sold to the same incurious and gullible mainstream media. (But remember, it’s the skeptics of climate alarmism who are the unintelligent ones.)

Finally, in the early 1980’s, evidently concerned with the idea that the reviled Ronald Reagan had the nuclear button at his fingertips, Ehrlich joined equally ideologically radical and environmentally hysterical Carl Sagan peddling the “nuclear winter” scare. The late Michael Crichton, himself an outspoken AGW skeptic, said in a 2003 speech:

[In 1983] five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions.” This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate. …

According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between 0.5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any Ice Age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.

But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold. …

At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…”

Wow. Even as far back as 1983 quack ideologues were using notions like “consensus” and “very large group of scientists” to prove that their crackpot theories were true. Now we know who You-Know-Who got it from.

Thank goodness the world never had to endure any nuclear warfare to test Sagan’s theory, but it was clear that it was full of holes.

There are two things more frightening than the dismal track record this “scientist” has had his entire career. First is what his suggestions are for dealing with all the problems humans have caused the planet:

“Population control is the only answer.”

“Obviously, such measures should be coordinated by a powerful government agency. A federal Bureau of Population and Environment should be set up to determine the optimum population size for the United States and devise measures to establish it.”

“[L]uxury taxes could be placed on layettes, cribs, diapers, diaper services, [and] expensive toys...” and “responsibility prizes” to couples who went at least five years without having children or to men who got vasectomies.

Yes, you read that all right. Ehrlich also recommended unlimited and free access to abortion, and even demanded that the Pope himself enforce this on the world’s Catholics, whose reproductive practices was destroying on the planet.

But not all people were equal. If you were “rich,” you were evidently more expendable in Ehrlich’s eyes. In 1990 Associated Press article, he asserted that 

“... the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people…” [h/t Yael at Boker Tov, Boulder blog].

Ah, now we come to it. It’s not just that the planet has too many people, it’s that we have too many rich people, i.e., capitalists, i.e., Americans.

That’s hard science right there: “According to my scientific calculations, I have come to the conclusion that the planet has too many rich people.” And the lib media eats it up.

You’d think with a record like this, Ehrlich would be a disgraced former professor whose degrees have been rescinded. Not hardly. As Michael Fumento wrote in an Investor’s Business Daily article back in 1997:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the MacArthur Foundation, Volvo, the Sierra Club, the United Nations and many others have bestowed this false prophet with prestigious and lucrative prizes. NBC has used him as an expert, and he is still a professor at Stanford.

In one year—1990—he published a sequel to “Bomb” called “The Population Explosion,” received the MacArthur Foundation’s famous “genius award” with a $345,000 check, and split a Swedish Royal Academy of Science prize worth $120,000.

Clearly, when Ehrlich claimed the planet had too many rich people, he was exempting himself. How convenient.

Thirteen years later, in 2010, this total fraud still holds a position at a major U.S. university and serves as an authoritative media voice in the current man-made global warming climate change scam.

I need about six Tylenols right now.

Now for the second frightening thing about Paul Ehrlich: Guess who co-authored two books and several articles from the 1970’s–1990’s with this failure with the chilling humans-are-cancer worldview? Why, none other than Barack Obama’s hand-picked science czar John Holdren!

Holdren is also neither a fan of humans nor the American concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, having written in his 1977 book Ecoscience:

“[P]opulation-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution.”

Why not? It was only four years earlier that five lawyers in black robes “found” the right to abortion in the Constitution. Why shouldn’t laws enforcing abortions also be found there as well.

And for a year already this monster serves as our president’s science advisor. Do you realize how completely and utterly f**ked up that is?

Welcome to the future, suckers.

P.S. By now, Paul Ehrlich should sound like someone else we know. Ready? Let’s put it all together:

• Wrong on virtually everything he’s ever predicted or calculated.
• Gets lots of money and accolades from left-wing institutions anyway.
• Recommends the most draconian, inhumane, and (in the moral and legal sense) most un-American measures to stave off the aforementioned incorrect predictions.
• Makes several TV appearances and periodical interviews every year.
• Has clout and authority among both national and international scientific policymakers.

Add that all up and who do you come up with?

Did you say Al Gore? Then give yourself a lollipop. You’re right.

G0d help us all.