Environmentalists' Wild Predictions

[underpants]

I read this on my local rag this morning. The part about error in projecting oil and natural resources (second half of the article)are easy to refute and obviously cherry-picked but the first part I am not sure WHERE to find the answer to this. I know Williams is rarely right about anything and was hoping I could get some assistance from the wise members of this forum.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/08/EnvironmentalistsWildPredictions.htm

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.



At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."



In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

[ChazII]

1. Ah the new ice age

In my jr high and high school we were taught about this. (1970-1976)

[hobbit709]

2. An economics professor is no more qualified

to talk about environmental science than I am qualified to talk about astrophysics. Citing outdated predictions based on flawed data as a basis for claiming ALL such data is inaccurate is irresponsible at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

[kristopher]

10. That is absolutely false.

But when they are Ayn Rand disciples, the outcome of their work needs to be looked at and countered.

Here is the "conclusion" of the study he relies on for his claims. The problem with this study, is that it started with a premise that inevitably ordered its conclusions. They said, "OK, we have this list of problems from the UN. We assume we have $50 billion to deal with these problems, how do we get the most bang for our buck?"


This is their conclusion:
The Copenhagen Consensus, a panel of eight world-renowned economists (including three
Nobel laureates), met in 2004 to discuss and prioritize proposals that address ten of the
world’s greatest challenges and advance global welfare (see ranking below). The challenges,
identified by the United Nations, included: civil conflicts; climate change; communicable
diseases; education; financial stability; governance; hunger and malnutrition; migration; trade
reform; and water and sanitation.
Opportunity Rank Challenge .......................Proposal

Very Good... 1 ... Diseases .......................Control of HIV/AIDS
.............2 ....Malnutrition ...................Providing micronutrients
.............3 ....Subsidies and Trade Barriers ...Trade liberalization
.............4 ... Diseases .......................Control of malaria
Good ........5 ....Malnutrition ..................Development of new agricultural technologies
............6 ....Water and Sanitation ..........Small-scale water technology for livelihoods
............7 ....Water and Sanitation ..........Community-managed water supply and sanitation
.............8 ....Water and Sanitation ..........Research on water productivity in food production
............9 ....Government ....................Lowering the cost of starting a new business
Fair .......10 ....Migration ....................Lowering barriers to migration for skilled workers
............11 ....Malnutrition....................Improving infant and child nutrition
............12 ....Malnutrition ...................Reducing the prevalence of low birth weight
............13 ....Diseases .....................Scaled-up basic health services
Bad.........14 ....Migration .....................Guest worker programs for the unskilled
............15 ....Climate .......................Optimal carbon tax
............16 ....Climate .......................The Kyoto Protocol


IF we only had $50 billion they would be right, but we don't and they aren't right.

This list ignores relative scale of risks and totally discounts any costs beyond 50 years in the future.

It is as bogus as they come.

However, that doesn't mean 'economists' as a class are the enemy. Some of the very best work being done on responding to climate change wouldn't be possible without the input of economists working to move the machinery of civilization in a direction that can solve the problem.

[hobbit709]

11. Apples and oranges

I meant that from a scientific standpoint he's not qualified. Whether or not something is economically feasible has no bearing on scientific facts. You can put a dollar cost on anything but that doesn't alter the evidence.

[kristopher]

13. Another person that doesn't know what an economist does.

Seriously, it is a field that goes do far beyond your misconception that you are terribly 'hobbled' by the misunderstanding.

I'm not an economist, but I have great appreciation for what they can do.

[Nihil]

14. Step back from your diety worship for a minute please?

Hobbit's original statement was
> An economics professor is no more qualified to talk about environmental
> science than I am qualified to talk about astrophysics.

That is true and no amount of "you don't know what they really do" handwaving
will change that fact.

Unless that economics professor is also a qualified expert in environmental
science, his opinion is worth exactly the same as any other person who is
unqualified in the area upon which they are pontificating. As such, their
comments outside of their field are (at best) those of an interested amateur
and *not* of a knowledgable authority.

I agree with you that economists will often catch flak for their approach
to real-world issues - some of it justified, much of it not so - but they
are not omniscient gods whose every word is to be treated as gospel.

:shrug:

[kristopher]

15. You must not have read post 10.

*I* think I made it pretty clear that I have no infatuation with economists. What I was reacting to with Hobbit is the blatant anti-intellectualism that seems so pervasive around here. Dismissing someone because they are an economist is my interpretation of the remark. There was no questioning of overall qualifications.

[Nihil]

16. Almost right ... I *mis*-read post 10.

I apologise.

[kristopher]

17. We all do it. No problem. nt

[stuntcat]

3. the impending ice age is cited so often to put down environmentalists

I'm pretty sure an even bigger deal's been made of it the last few years than it was then.

This is an AP article my grandmother saved from 30 years ago. It warns pretty clearly of what scientists agree on.

(The "Oct 78" is my grandma's note, she's filed this away ever since then but I found it a few months ago.)

[Barrett808]

4. Here ya go: The global cooling mole at RealClimate

The global cooling mole
By John Fleck and William Connolley

To veterans of the Climate Wars, the old 1970s global cooling canard - "How can we believe climate scientists about global warming today when back in the 1970s they told us an ice age was imminent?" - must seem like a never-ending game of Whack-a-mole. One of us (WMC) has devoted years to whacking down the mole (see here, here and here, for example), while the other of us (JF) sees the mole pop up anew in his in box every time he quotes contemporary scientific views regarding climate change in his newspaper stories.

The problem is that the argument has played out in competing anecdotes, without any comprehensive and rigorous picture of what was really going on in the scientific literature at the time. But if the argument is to have any relevance beyond talking points aimed at winning a debate, such a comprehensive understanding is needed. If, indeed, climate scientists predicted a coming ice age, it is worthwhile to take the next step and understand why they thought this, and what relevance it might have to today's science-politics-policy discussions about climate change. If, on the other hand, scientists were not really predicting a coming ice age, then the argument needs to be retired.

The two of us, along with Tom Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, undertook a literature review to try to move beyond the anecdotes and understand what scientists were really saying at the time regarding the various forces shaping climate on time human time scales. The results are currently in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Doyle Rice has written a nice summary in USA Today, and an extended version based on a presentation made by Tom at the AMS meeting in January is on line.

During the period we analyzed, climate science was very different from what you see today. There was far less integration among the various sub-disciplines that make up the enterprise. Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.

We do not expect that this work will stop the mole from popping its head back up in the future. But we do hope that when it does, this analysis will provide a foundation for a more thoughtful discussion about what climate scientists were and were not saying back in the 1970s.

(more)

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/langswitch_lang/bg

[JFreitas]

6. Limits to growth

It's a common idiocy to "quote" the Limits to Growth book without EVER have read it. I am assuming this is the case. Go to your local library and find the book. You will read an intelligent, well-thought, logical, if a little scary, book. NOWHERE in the book will you find a mention of anything running out before the end of the decade or even century. That's actually not what the book is about. Let me quote from an article that Matthew Simmons wrote (Could the Club of Rome have been right?).

http://greatchange.org/othervoices.html

-------------------

After reading The Limits to Growth, I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was
there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book's
concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years
later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil
shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000.

The members of the "Club or Rome" were also not a mysterious, sinister,
anonymous group of doomsayers. Rather, they were a group of 30 thoughtful,
public spirited-intellects from ten different countries. The group included
scientists, economists, educators, and industrialists. They met at the
instigation of Dr. Aurelia Peccei, an Italian industrialist affiliated with
Fiat and Olivetti.

The group all shared a common concern that mankind faced a future
predicament of grave complexity, caused by a series of interrelated problems
that traditional institutions and policy would not be able to cope with the
issues, let alone come to grips with their full context. A core thesis of
their work was that long term exponential growth was easy to overlook. Human
nature leads people to innocently presume growth rates are linear. The book
then postulated that if a continuation of the exponential growth of the
seventies began in the world's population, its industrial output,
agricultural and natural resource consumption and the pollution produced by
all of the above, would result in severe constraints on all known global
resources by 2050 to 2070.

The genesis of this book was a series of early meetings being held by The
Club of Rome in 1968. These meetings culminated in a decision to initiate a
remarkably ambitious undertaking. The task was to examine the complex
problems troubling "men of all nations; poverty in the midst of plenty,
degradation of the environment, loss of faith in institutions, uncontrolled
urban spread, etc."

"Phase One" of the project of the predicament of mankind took shape in 1970.
The group commissioned a team of Economic Modelers at MIT to forecast, in
approximate terms, what pressures the globe would undergo if the current
growth trends continued for another 100 years. This research was financed by
the Volkswagen Foundation.

At the time, the technique of conducting computer based integrated modeling
was quite new. The technique was called "System Dynamics", where various
inter-related elements and positive and negative feedback loops influence
the various ingredients and outputs of the model.

The initial results of this modeling work were sufficiently alarming that
Club of Rome participants decided to publish them, and call the book The
Limits to Growth. The book was published by Potomac Associates, a
non-partisan research and analysis organization seeking to encourage lively
inquiry into critical issues of public policy.

The book painstakingly acknowledged that the model's work was still
"preliminary." Much more detailed analysis was needed to hone in on the
issues this model raised. The decision to publish the results, as rough as
they were, was driven by a desire to quickly get the issues into the public
domain. This would hopefully command critical attention to the work and
spark debate in all societies about the changes needed to avoid the
catastrophic elements that the model indicated would occur by 2070, absent
any changes.

While many readers concocted various "imaginary" assumptions, the book's
conclusions were quite simple. The first conclusion was a view that if
present growth trends continued unchanged, a limit to the growth that our
planet has enjoyed would be reached sometime within the next 100 years. This
would then result in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population
and industrial capacity.

The second key conclusion was that these growth trends could be altered.
Moreover, if proper alterations were made, the world could establish a
condition of "ecological stability" that would be sustainable far into the
future.

The third conclusion was a view that the world could embark on this second
path, but the sooner this effort started, the greater the chance would be of
achieving this "ecologically stable" success.

The book, in its entirety, is beautifully written. It takes only a few hours
to read. I would highly recommend it to anyone. It is an interesting mixture
of simple, tried and true economic laws, combined with a terrific dose of
logic. Without a doubt, there are some serious doomsday elements laid out
which our world would face if the conclusions of this modeling work were
ignored, and key trends continue to rise at exponential vs. linear rates.
But, the book essentially lays out an optimistic outlook on how easily these
limits to growth can be altered if a real effort to accomplish this is made
at an early stage, rather than attempting such changes too late.

The most amazing aspect of the book is how accurate many of the basic trend
extrapolation worries which ultimately give raise to the limits this book
expresses still are, some 30 years later. In fact, for a work that has been
derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own
forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was
nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely
invalidated. To the contrary, the chilling warnings of how powerful
exponential growth rate can be are right on track. The thesis that it is
easy to misjudge this type of growth has also been proven by the volumes of
misguided criticism that the report engendered.

The world is now 30 years into this 100-year view. It did grow as fast as
the book warned. The gap between rich and poor never narrowed. Instead, the
gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" grew by a significant measure.
It is interesting to contemplate how horrified the book's authors would be
today, given the population trends that happened post 1972. The current
strain on many of our precious resources is already becoming serious. It
would have been far worse by 2000, given the rate of expansion which
happened to the world's poor population, had these people also begun to
significantly improve their standard of living at the same time. An
accidental safety valve for many potentially scarce resources turned out to
be the widening of the rich/poor gap.

(snip a part about how close to the mark the books forecasts for 2000 were)

(...)

THE BOOK AND ITS CONTROVERSY

Why did this book become so controversial and why do so many articulate and
seemingly knowledgeable people still lash out at its content as being wrong,
when in fact, all the major conclusions are precisely on track? So far, not
a single observed trend has emerged to allay the worries and concerns laid
out by the Club of Rome. Why was the book greeted with such a firestorm of
criticism, instead of invoking the thoughtful debate which the authors so
hoped would occur?

I can only surmise at some answers, as I had never followed the debate over
the course of so
many years.

My guess at the answer lies in two areas: First, it is a natural part of
human nature to ignore the impact of events whose consequences fall far into
the future. The here and now dominates the way most people naturally think.
If a seer wandered into a town predicting a massive flood a decade from now,
and the next summer turned out to be particularly dry and arid, it is human
nature to belittle the seer as being wrong, ignoring the fact that his
prediction was still nine years hence. This human nature phenomenon used to
be cartooned in an advertisement run by New England Life. The ad showed two
gentlemen at a prestigious men's club, with brandy in hand. One asks, "Why
would anyone want to buy life insurance?" As this question is raised, a
massive bull moose trophy had already fallen from the club's wall and was
only inches away from crashing onto the questioner's head! We are brought up
to think that cause and effect has immediacy to it. Human nature is not good
at coping with time-delayed reactions, particularly when the delay is
possibly decades away.

The authors of The Limits to Growth deal with this phenomenon of short-term
focus through a
graph depicted in Exhibit 8.


Exhibit 8

<>

It shows the relationship between "time" and "space". In the lower left-hand
corner, family represents the closest limit for space, while "one week"
being the closest limit for time. The furthest right hand quadrants
represent the world for space and 100 years for time. The author's
contention is that almost everyone is preoccupied by short limits in both
space and time (e.g. what will I eat today?) Few ever think about what could
happen to the entire world in far distant periods of time. It was the upper
right hand corner of space and time that the authors addressed. It seems
clear that few readers of the book focused on this global view and lengthy
time. Instead, they read into the book a different message, letting
imagination drift back to the lower left corner of this graph.

A major event then fueled further confusion about the real issues of the
book. The Limits to Growth ended up being published shortly before the world
experienced the Oil Shock of 1973. In the ensuing panic that the 1973 Oil
Crisis brought forth, the "100-year" message that the authors of this book
tried to warn about (so that meaningful changes in population growth and
industrial consumption might begin in order to avoid the dangers implied by
this work far into the future) got blurred into an immediate panic that a
tiny blip in oil supplies was possibly the arrival of such shortages, some
100 years earlier than this "mysterious" or even clandestine Club of Rome
was trying to discuss.

My other guess is that some of the worst and most vocal critics of this book
were people who most passionately embraced the concept of immediate
shortages facing the world through the 1970's. After all, by 1980 there were
many prominent energy analysts who stridently embraced the idea that $50 to
$100 oil was almost inevitable. When these high prices then failed to
materialize, and as the gap between slipping demand and rising supply
created an oil "bubble", this enabled oil prices to stay within a $15 to $20
per barrel range for the better part of two decades, the embarrassment of
being wrong turned the whole group of energy experts into angry critics of
The Limits to Growth and passionate believers that prices would stay low
forever. It must have been easy to shift part of the blame for why they had
been so wrong to the stupidity of The Club of Rome. This is my equivalent of
blaming the bartender for a hangover!

Sadly, the dialogue and increased in-depth analysis that The Club of Rome so
hoped would begin as a result of their publication never occurred in the
face of growing criticism. Phase One of the "predicament of mankind"
accidentally became the final chapter of this thesis. As the discredit of
this work grew, few even took time to measure the pace of change. Even fewer
remembered the real message of the book.

The Club of Rome still exists. It did not "wither away," although its own
web site acknowledges that most people assume it ceased to function after
the death of its charismatic founder, Aurelio Peccei, in 1984. It ended up
commissioning more than a dozen other reports, since Limits was first
published; though, none ever attracted the widespread attention of The
Limits of Growth.

Membership to The Club of Rome is still limited to one hundred members.
Meetings are still held at the invitation of its members. Its most recent
report was published in 1995 and dealt with the world's unemployment
dilemma. "Interim" reports on the problems of governability or the lack
thereof and on the global warming problem were presented at its last "annual
meeting" held in Puerto Rico in 1996.

So the Club is intact, but the passionate concerns spelled out by The Limits
to Growth have clearly cooled. Lost in time is whether the issues raised in
1972, creating such intense debate when finally published, were actually
correct and lurk as an unseen but smoldering ember.

(...)

In the book's chapter defining the deceptive powers of exponential growth
and the apparent suddenness with which it approaches a fixed limit, the
authors describe the French Riddle of the Lily Pond. In this riddle, the
lily pond has a potentially virulent lily that apparently will double in
size each day. If the lily grows unchecked it will cover the entire pond in
30 days, choking off all other forms of life in the water by the time it
covers the entire pond. If a skeptic waited until 50% of the pond was
covered before taking any remedial action to save the pond, when would he
act? The answer: on the 29th day of the month! But by then, would be too
late.

The world can debate when corrective action needs to begin, if exponential
growth suddenly shows all the classic signs of pending overshoot. But
everyone should agree that waiting until the proverbial 29th day is a
classic and unrepentable blunder of the first order.

[depakid]

12. Note also that there's an updated edition

with new data and more powerful modeling:

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update



http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193149858X

It's pretty well the basic primer on overshoot and collapse.

[underpants]

7. Excellent Barret thanks

:hi:

[Barrett808]

5. Funny, there's no mention of economists' wild predictions

I'll stack environmental predictions against economic predictions any day of the week.

[phantom power]

8. Heh. "Dow 36000" anybody?

[hunter]

9. Mother Nature doesn't read.

She doesn't give a rat's ass about the predictions of economists, environmentalists, or anyone else.

You can stand on her railroad tracks waving your arms and spewing noisy gibberish as loud as you can, and she'll run her freight train right over you without a care.

It's amazing how people who know they can manipulate the thoughts of gullible people will begin to believe that power somehow extends beyond that -- that if they simply believe in something strongly enough, and convince enough people that it is so, then physical reality will comply.

We've reached the same point in our culture that so many other dying cultures reached, where we believe some sort of divine magic will carry us past the falls. We are putting up our stone heads, building our bamboo airfields, doing our ghost dances, installing our wind generators, drilling in very deep water for oil... anything but face the fact that our resource intensive fossil fuel economy is beginning to circle the drain.

Our technology has become more sophisticated but the underlying human animal doesn't change. Until we figure out how to break this cycle no specific technology will reverse this decline -- not solar, not wind, not nuclear...

[Viking12]

18. Nigel Calder is a global warming denier....

It's funny that he was so wrong in 1969 but the deniers cite his unsupportable "Galatic Cosmic Rays" theory of global warming like a bible verse.

Reid Bryson is another global warming denier that was out spoken about an impnding ice age.

[Kolesar]

19. Fuel efficiency regulations in the 1970s forestalled the oil shortages

For about 40 years beyond then.