Beam me to Planet Gore !
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.
So... why hasn't 0 given them a cabinet position yet?
John Rennie, James Hansen and the pompous cadre of Global Warming acolytes finally drove me away.
Science is a discipline that must be immune from religious adherence or it is not science at all. We must not allow rational thought to perish (see Islam).
Apes evolved from man.
remember science is infallible.
/sarc
The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment
Holdren is a collaborator, I believe. This is what it means to “fix science in her proper place.”
liberal science strikes again! Well, at least they are doing something besides looking at porn.
“The real legacy left behind by Silent Spring is millions of deaths from malaria that could have been prevented if health authorities had continued to use DDT as a method for killing mosquitoes carrying the disease.” - Patricia Ludwig of the American Council on Science & Health