Mark Steyn: What planet are the eco-cultists on?

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 12/6/05 | Mark Steyn

[knews_hound]

Thanks

[John Lenin]

Wrong Again

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. -- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 -- Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion -- Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century -- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it. -- Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. -- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

[DustyMoment]

LOLOL!!!!

[MortMan]

Nice assembly of nonsensical predictions, but I failed to detect a point. Care to elucidate?

[Pusterfuss]

And they keep making these dire predictions, on and on.

[Pokey78]

Thanks!

Steyn ping!

[wolfcreek]

It's about 20 degrees here in Central Texas, I wish this warming would come on already.

[goldstategop]

Coalition of the emitting.

The Western Left has regressed since the days of Karl Marx. He wouldn't recognize his descendents. For he believed the key to ending human alienation and the absence of self-mastery produced by capitalism was to speed up the growth of technology and science. Over the long run, it would remove the soulessness of human existence and bring man to fulfillment of his true nature qua man. My alienation ceases when I cease oppressing others and experience my own happiness and my love. But that's not the message of the Left today: they seem to embrace alienation, oppression and hate as the highest good. If it means getting rid of the benefits of civilization, so much the better. Where Marx wanted a better life for all, today's Left seems content to seek an existence rooted in the lowest common denominator. Where the Left once spoke of a world uplifted by the faith of man and his works, today it depicts humanity as the essential negation of the natural world. Nature is greater than Man. Truly, Marx today would not recognize his children.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

[RobFromGa]

Despite signing on to Kyoto, European greenhouse gas emissions have increased since 2001, whereas America's emissions have fallen by nearly one per cent, despite the Toxic Texan's best efforts to destroy the planet.

Steyn bump...

[RobFromGa]

I've mentioned before the environmentalists' ceaseless fretting for the prospect of every species but their own. By the end of this century, the demographically doomed French, Italians and Spaniards will be so shrivelled in number they may have too few environmentalists to man their local Greenpeace office. Is that part of the plan? To create a habitable environment with no humans left to inhabit it?

Thanks for the ping, Pokey!

[goldstategop]

Its not Marxism; it neo-Ludditism and Utopianism. It does not even correspond to a scientific outlook on the world. The eco-Left are for lack of a better term, a modern cargo cult. Their beliefs are not empirically falsifiable. And this worship of Nature is just as irrational as the worship of heavenly deities that repelled the 19th Century's leading thinkers. For their beliefs are quite simply an anthromorphic projection of human qualities, not onto gods but onto Nature.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

[metesky]

I love Steyn bump.

[moonhawk]

You're kidding, right?

[MortMan]

No, just low on caffeine - still. Short nights and early mornings...

Ugh.

[You Dirty Rats]

After that, they'd be reduced to huddling round the nearest fire-breathing imam for warmth.

That's why Osama bin Loser needs all those fire-breathing imams around -- to keep his cave warm during The Brutal Afghan Winter.

[George Smiley]

"hallucinogenic worldview".

That's priceless- I'll remember it.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

"Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."

It's also known as a tautology. All observations confirm the Global Warming Hypothesis with probability 1.0.

[joebuck]

"Or, as the Canadian Press reported: "Montreal - tens of thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures Saturday to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming."

This sentence epitomises modern liberalism on just about every level. ("Who you gonna belive, your lying eyes or my good intentions?)

[prairiebreeze]

Steyn-induced chuckles in the morning. Thanks for the ping!

[aculeus]

Bump.