Monday, June 27, 2005

This Paul's No Apostle

MaxedOutMama's posted a wonderful reminder of the idiocy animating the environmental movement, collecting quotes and claims by Paul Ehrlich, an early and influential member of the enviro-fret union. First gaining notoriety in 1968 by predicting overpopulation, famine and mass starvation within a decade, he's published dozens of books and articles with myriad gloom and doom forecasts on life expectancy, population, food, farming, oil, etc., earning widespread praise and prestigious awards.

Ehrlich's sole blemish: he's never been right. Repeating the mistakes of Thomas Malthus, Ehrlich's estimates consistently understate technological change that "did more with less." He never properly modeled the scarcity safeguards implicit in market supply and demand. In combination, his approach employed a relatively static model, with finite resources and infinitely increasing needs. These omissions led Ehrlich to the same dead end as philosopher John Rawls: whether considering the economy or resources, the "pie" isn't fixed--it gets bigger.

Ehrlich's most notorious forecast was tested and falsified the old fashioned way--in a wager with economist Julian Simon:
In 1980, Mr Simon challenged the popular (and still widely held) view that there were limits to growth; in particular that the earth’s natural resources were becoming so scarce that they would become ever costlier. He offered to bet that the prices of raw materials would actually fall. Paul Ehrlich, a fierce critic of further growth, took up the bet. The two men agreed to check the prices of five metals—copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten—in ten years’ time. In 1990, as Mr Simon had predicted, all had fallen in price, even without allowing for inflation. Mr Ehrlich paid up in settlement of the modest, but much-publicised, bet, grumbling that it was “a matter of marginal environmental importance”.
Since the '60s, as John Tierney observed, "Naturalists gradually replaced economists as the chief doomsayers." As M_O_M documents, citing Thomas Bray, today's naturalists are obsessed with global warming. However their methodology owes much to Paul Ehrlich: doubtful evidence, flawed logic, and models less accurate than a coin toss, which misstates warming causation without evidence of harm, yet still supposedly justifies unworkable and enormously expensive solutions to low probability problems:
[T]heir advertised error margin is roughly 100 times smaller than the error margin of any conceivable calculation that someone may want to do today or in the near future. A computer model can, of course, calculate certain numbers quite accurately - but when we make a contact with reality, we must also include the errors and uncertainties of the model itself - the model uncertainties which are large. The scientific significance of the [predicted] number . . . is zero.
Climate change isn't science: it's a modern cargo cult. As Bray observes, "the weatherman, armed with incredibly powerful computers, has difficulty predicting tomorrow's rain. Why should anybody be confident that computer models can predict the temperature a century from now?"

Fortunately, Kyoto's not coming to America: the Senate denounced the treaty 95-0 under Clinton and, debating Bush's energy bill this week, voted it off the island again, 60-38. But enviro-chicken littles are un-deterred because, as M_O_M notes, they "don't have to be right. In fact, you can be completely wrong over a matter of decades. All that matters is your devotion to doom."

Some members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- source of the flawed "Hockey Stick" model -- are wagering that novelist Michael Crichton's more accurate than the IPCC itself. I'll bet that bet's safer than Social Security.

1 comment:

MaxedOutMama said...

I hurt myself laughing, particularly about the wager. Magnificent job. A cargo cult is precisely what this is.