The Earth is not getting sicker, it's getting healthier

The Star [South Chicago] ^ | 8/14/5 | Michael Bowers

[SmithL]

A recent letter writer to The Star complained that our air and water are getting dirtier, our resources are diminishing, and our land is being spoiled. This refrain is ubiquitous on the Left. As Time magazine put it offhandedly five years ago: "Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape."

Trouble for Time is, everyone does not know the planet is in bad shape. In fact, Time's statement is completely false. Earth is not getting dirtier. It's getting cleaner. Earth is not in peril. It is thriving.

Take the bald eagle. In 1973, when Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the bird was near extinction. But it has been lifted out of danger by the new law, by the DDT ban and by restoration projects. Now we have 5,000 breeding pairs.

Or consider the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Environmentalists reported that it killed 250,000 birds. What they didn't report is that every single day in the United Kingdom, cats kill 150,000 more birds. And every single day in the United States, collisions with plate glass kill 250,000 more.

These figures come from "The Skeptical Environmentalist," a book by a Danish statistician by the name of Bjorn Lomborg. He's a former member of Greenpeace. He dropped out when he caught on that most of the gloom we hear from the experts (he calls it "the litany") is just plain wrong.

Recently, I put on dark glasses and quietly visited my local library to borrow this iconoclastic work. (One fellow seemed to be giving me a suspicious look, but it might have been my imagination.)

I learned:

We are not running out of food. Just the opposite. Since 1960, calorie consumption in the Third World has risen 38 percent. Since 1949, the percentage of malnourished people worldwide has dropped from 45 percent to 18 percent. In constant dollars, food costs a third of what it did in 1957.

The air is not getting dirtier. Just the opposite. Sulfur dioxide is down 80 percent in the United States since 1962, and carbon monoxide is down 75 percent since 1970. In London, the air is cleaner than it has been since 1585.

The Kyoto Protocol would cost the world's nations as much as $107 trillion by the end of the century. I can't comprehend such a number. But I can comprehend this: Paying the bill for Kyoto means average income in the First World would be $73,000 a year in 2100, instead of what it should be: $110,000.

What would we get for our money? We would slow down global warming by six years. The temperature that would be reached in 2094 instead would be reached in 2100.

And how much cooler would the earth be? Here's your answer: 15-hundredths of 1 degree.

In other words, your grandchildren each would pay $37,000 per year so that the temperature on a Sunday morning like this one would be 80.00 degrees instead of 80.15 degrees.

I can't think of a word sufficient to describe such a waste of money. Can you?

There is much more in "The Skeptical Environmentalist." The evidence is relentless. Page after page, chart after chart, Lomborg shows how badly we have all been duped since 1962, when Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring."

Naturally, Lomborg's book has been savaged by establishment scientists, most notably those at Scientific American magazine and within the Danish government. But his facts have withstood the assault.

One of the savagers is the scientist Stephen Schneider, who in the 1970s was predicting that Earth soon was due for another Ice Age. Now Schneider is arguing the exact opposite, scaring us to death about global warming.

This flip-flop alone should make you doubt Schneider's credibility. But there's more: an astonishing statement he made in an interview with Discover magazine in 1989:

"We are not just scientists, but human beings as well," Schneider said. "And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place. … To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination.

"That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have. …

"Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

"I hope that means being both."

Yes, Schneider hopes scientists are both effective and honest. But he cannot assure it. I think the message is all too clear.

One of those who recognize the phony alarmism is Michael Crichton, a Chicago native, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the author of several novels, including "Jurassic Park" and "State of Fear."

In a remarkable speech two years ago in San Francisco, Crichton called environmentalism "the religion of choice for urban atheists."

You see, facts don't matter anymore. Fundamentalists of the Left cling to their belief that Earth is dying just as fervently as fundamentalists of the Right cling to their belief that Earth was created by God in seven days.

As Huckleberry Finn said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Michael Bowers is a copy editor and page designer for The Star. His column appears every other Sunday. Send e-mail to mbowers@starnewspapers.com.

[SmithL]

I like the line about environmentalism being the religion of choice for urban atheists.

[Dallas59]

Glo-Bull Warming..A way to redistribute wealth without calling it Socialism.

[ncountylee]

your grandchildren each would pay $37,000 per year so that the temperature on a Sunday morning like this one would be 80.00 degrees instead of 80.15 degrees.

Facts are to a liberal as salt is to a garden snail.

[RadioAstronomer]

by the DDT ban

Refuted bull crap.

[KJacob]

bump

[IronJack]

This is one of the Left's most enduring myths, defying all rationality as it emerges nightly from its crypt to stalk the countryside. It is as phony as the claim that Democrats are the party of the "little man," or that liberals are friends of minorities.

These myths have taken on lives of their own, since none is borne out by the facts.

[flashbunny]

"Take the bald eagle. In 1973, when Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the bird was near extinction. But it has been lifted out of danger by the new law, by the DDT ban and by restoration projects. Now we have 5,000 breeding pairs."

Indeed it is bullshit. Their is no causal link between DDT and bird deaths. In fact, it kills insects that bear diseases (think west nile) that kill birds.

The Bald Eagle population was coming back before the DDT Ban - and counting programs become more agressive after the ban, so there were more pople able to find more birds.

[marblehead17]

ping

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[satchmodog9]

Ha

[SmithL]

CORRECTION FROM THE AUTHOR:

In my last column I wrote that Kyoto would slow down global warming by 15-hundredths of 1 degree. However, this afternoon I realized that I was talking in Fahrenheit degrees, when I should have been talking in Celsius degrees.

Therefore I should have said that Kyoto would slow down global warming by 29-hundredths of 1 degree.

Also, the following statement is slightly off:

"In other words, your grandchildren each would pay $37,000 per year so that the temperature on a Sunday morning like this one would be 80.00 degrees instead of 80.15 degrees."

It should have said:

"In other words, your grandchildren each would pay $37,000 per year so that the temperature on a Sunday morning like this one would be 80.00 degrees instead of 80.29 degrees."