“[Facebook is] a powerful way to misinform people, since these groups can’t win in the actual scientific arena, so they only can win in these media environments where they can pay to promote stuff.” (Andrew Dessler, 2020).
“All of the noise right now from the climate change denial machine, the bots & trolls, the calls for fake ‘debates’, etc. Ignore it all….Report, block. Don’t engage.” (Michael Mann, 2019)
Andrew Dessler and Michael Mann are two very emotional climate alarmists in today’s vigorous, unsettled debate. “Hide the Decline” Mann, the leading culprit of the Climategate scandal, triggered “a public-relations disaster for science” by manipulating data and techniques to reach a preordained (alarmist) result. Andy Dessler, who admits to a “very low threshold for outrage,” is the alarmist’s alarmist–a true catastrophist.…
Continue ReadingThis completes our two-part review (Part I here) of the development and worldview of Joanna Szurmak, whose work with Pierre Desrochers is at the forefront of classical-liberal scholarship in sustainable development.
Q. And the shorter pieces led to something bigger—a book, Population Bombed!
… Continue ReadingA. Yes. Since Julian Simon’s influence and inspiration was in our minds, in late 2017 we realized that Simon’s nemesis, Paul Ehrlich, was approaching the 50th anniversary of his bestseller, The Population Bomb (1968). This slim book—really a collection of Ehrlich’s lecture notes that his wife and life-long collaborator Anne Ehrlich stitched together into a narrative—became a manifesto to population-control activists around the world.
Like Simon, we disagreed with both the premises and the arguments of those who Pierre likes to call the “population bombers.” But we had been noticing an upsurge in calls to impose controls on world population in the name of environmental health and climate justice.
“Only a relatively large population able to engage in a complex division of labour in the context of trade, industrialization and urbanization can reap the benefits of the feedback loop between technological innovation, increased economic prosperity, and population growth.”
“The most resilient solution for a cleaner earth and better climate, even with the spectre of anthropogenic climate change, is that of intensive growth thanks to, and not in spite of, a large population.”
– Joanna Szurmak (below)
Q. Joanna, you are a new name in the sustainable development field as co-author (with Pierre Desrochers) of Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change (2018). How did you get to that point?
… Continue ReadingA. I am new in most areas of scholarship familiar to MasterResource readers. If they happen to have an interest in how amorphous hydrogenated carbon can be made to behave like a semiconductor, they will find my publications from the late 1990s.