The New Scientist? (30 years after losing the bet to Julian Simon, Paul Ehrlich is at it again)

I enjoy my subscription to The New Scientist in large part for seeing to what lengths they are willing to go to support global warming orthodoxy. This week's issue, for example, describes a hitherto unobserved and completely unexplained phenomenon involving sudden changes in the temperature of the stratosphere associated with agitation of the wind speed and direction of the ionosphere:

No process known to atmospheric physics would allow a specific local phenomenon like the stratwarm to propagate all the way from the stratosphere above the North Pole to the ionosphere above the equator...Some speculate that this trend is a product of climate change

Just last week we read the following :

"Global population growth has slowed significantly, but it hasn't stopped. By 2050 there may be about 35 per cent more people on Earth than there are today. We are already seeing increasing shortages of food, water and other resources and growing numbers of hungry people.... Nowadays it is understood that the key population-related issue is the destructive pressure human activity is exerting on our life-support systems, posing a growing threat to the sustainability of civilisation... Yet many people still assume that humanity will easily manage to support more than 9 billion people in 2050 and beyond. Such confidence ignores some grim possibilities."

The really surprising thing about this tirade is the name of the authors: Paul and Anne Ehrlich...you know, the guy who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, which begins :

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death..."

and goes on to state

"... nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation."

a prediction that, in the event, fell rather wide of the mark. Who would believe that he's still at it? He sorta reminds me of Monty Python's Black Knight...I'll never give up!

Anyway, the article that inspired me to respond with this essay is a review by Michael Brooks, also in this week's issue, of Don't Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson. Mr. Brooks makes the following astounding statements:

If you want to get a message across to the public, don't obsess about facts. Just look at Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Olson says. The film contained more than a few factual errors, but it also had a profound influence on the world's attitude to climate change. Perhaps compromising on accuracy is a necessary evil...is this really the right way for scientists to go? With climate change, perhaps the end justifies the means... given Gore's success and the prevalence of scientific illiteracy, it remains an interesting path to consider.

Let me get this straight: It's OK to lie.

In an entirely unrelated matter, various artists and other celebrities are rushing to the defense of somebody who drugged and raped a 13 year-old girl.

As someone who was taught to love and revere science since his earliest childhood, I don't know which of these two positions is more revolting. Shakespeare, as usual, has the final word:

O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason.

For those who don’t remember or don’t know,

Economist Julian L. Simon and Stanford University Professor, Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. Ehrlich ultimately lost the bet, and all five commodities that were selected as the basis for the wager have continued to trend downward until 2002, when metal prices generally began to increase and at least the price of copper , tin , and nickel increased.

Ehrlich was the author of a popular book, The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon, a libertarian, was highly skeptical of such claims.

Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.

The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was.

In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” — a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with — Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.” You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted — copper, tin, whatever — and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager...

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon...

Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.

As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon’s favor.

Thanks for posting that background.

From the article,
“As someone who was taught to love and revere science since his earliest childhood, “

... it sounds like Scientism to me.

I like the approach where both men “put their money where their mouth is”. That’s what Intrade is all about. As we see the loser in this particular debate has less credibility, it doesn’t stop him from plugging away. Eventually someone will ask him to put his money where his mouth is, again. This process helps advance the process of science.

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