“[N]eo-Malthusians like [Paul] Gilding resemble hypochondriacs who insist that they are at death’s door and see every sniffle as confirmation that the end is near. Rather than launch massive programs to sterilize the population or make everyone vegetarians, we should hand them a tissue and tell them to get over it. Or, as the English philosopher Pete Townsend said, ‘This is no social crisis, just another tricky day for you’.”
– Michael Lynch on Thomas Friedman et al.
Thomas Friedman’s New York Times latest column–The Earth is Full–quotes environmental-entrepreneur Paul Gilding (author: The Great Disruption) about the rampant denial concerning the world crossing of “growth/climate/natural resources/population redlines all at once.”
So just about all of us do not see what is so obvious to these smartest-guys-in-the-environmental room. Really.…
A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.
Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.
Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)
And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change.…