“Sadly, in Paul Sabin’s account, the main villain turns out to be the morally upstanding Simon who, fifteen years after his death, is blamed for creating policy logjams and fueling uncivil discourse. In the meantime, Paul Ehrlich keeps issuing ‘important warnings’ such as a recent prediction that humans might soon have to resort to cannibalism to survive the ecological apocalypse.”
The background and story of the famous bet between catastrophist biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and optimist economist Julian L. Simon was first told in some detail over twenty-five years ago by journalist John Tierney in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. The bet, ostensibly on the future prices of five commercially important metals – copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten – provided a platform upon which two opposing worldviews, that of Ehrlich’s depletionist catastrophism and Julian’s optimistic resourceship, confronted each other.…
Continue Reading… Continue Reading“America has a short list of truly shameful ‘days,’—among them the Dred Scott decision, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, and Abu Ghraib—most of them symbolic of a larger national moral failure. I hope I am wrong, but I fear that today will join that list.”
“If all that [climate-policy-related] deregulation comes to pass, then I predict future generations will look back on today with particular scorn and shame.”
“A single executive order might therefore seem unremarkable. But today’s action is significant…. At stake are the global economy, entire ecosystems, and the lives of millions—most of them not yet living. Those future generations will judge the authors of today’s policy harshly.”
– Nathan Richardson, “Trump’s Climate Executive Order Discards American Values.” Resources for the Future, March 28, 2017.
“I realized that the premature consensus on human-caused climate change was harming scientific progress because of the questions that don’t get asked and the investigations that aren’t made. We therefore lack the kinds of information to more broadly understand climate variability and societal vulnerabilities.”
“Scientists who demonize their opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics of enforcing a premature theory for political purposes.”
“Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again.”
“Groupthink” … “sausage making” … “bullying” … “substantial uncertainties” … “premature consensus” … These terms were used by the scholarly Judith Curry in her important, the-future-will-note Congressional testimony last week against the neo-Malthusian, nature-is-optimal natural-science community.
And what has she endured by leaving the “consensus”? Among other things, she has been labeled “serial climate disinformer” … “anti-science” … “denier.”…
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