Matt Ridley has just had a tremendous essay published in WIRED magazine, one that everyone should take a few minutes to read, because it sums up the issues of all the end time fears, fallacies, and failures we have collectively experienced in one tidy little package. – Anthony
By Matt Ridley
When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.
Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.
In the 1970s [“and 1980s” was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”
Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.
So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history.
The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals). Let’s visit them each in turn.
Read the entire essay here: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all
Be thankful for all the good things we have, and worry not for the future as described by alarmists.
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Matt Ridley:
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In fact, of course, the link between smoking and lung cancer was found to be ironclad. But the link between modern chemicals and cancer is sketchy at best. Even DDT, which clearly does pose health risks to those unsafely exposed, has never been definitively linked to cancer. In general, cancer incidence and death rates, when corrected for the average age of the population, have been falling now for 20 years.
By the 1970s the focus of chemical concern had shifted to air pollution. Life magazine set the scene in January 1970: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support … the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” Instead, driven partly by regulation and partly by innovation, both of which dramatically cut the pollution coming from car exhaust and smokestacks, ambient air quality improved dramatically in many cities in the developed world over the following few decades. Levels of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, ozone, and volatile organic compounds fell and continue to fall.
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Since 70’s, growing public conscience of cancer dangers and increasing regulations. Result: “corrected” cancer levels are falling. Growing polluiton problem got taken care of.
Rather than proving the predictions were “wrong” this suggests that they were effective in motivating change to do something about it. This was surely where “concerned” climate scientist started out from. The trouble is they did not know when to stop exaggerating.
However, governments’ role in this is has far less benign intentions.
BTW, I love the “solid experimental and [b] theoretical[/b] evidence ” from 1970.
As it becomes obvious that dangerous anthropomorphic “climate change” is a scam, as is “green energy” it will be interesting to watch the political back pedaling.
Budget deficits are not a scam. There is a finite amount of tax payer money to spend on “green energy” scams that do not significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions which is not a problem as the planet’s response to a change in forcing is resist the forcing change (negative) feedback by increasing or decreasing cloud cover in the tropics as opposed to the IPCC’s assumed amplification of forcing change (positive feedback).
I am curious at what point the press will acknowledge that James Hansen and his cohorts are raving fanatics who will say anything to push their dystopia.
http://www.amazon.com/Storms-My-Grandchildren-Catastrophe-Humanity/dp/1608192008
“In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen—the nation’s leading scientist on climate issues—speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama’s solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won’t work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book’s title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen—whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming—is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide.”
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
“On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. ….
….we show that simple regression methods used by several existing papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise.
… We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity.”
….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1oC (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5oC to 5oC and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds….”
Wired was my favorite magazine–I subscribed as soon as the first issue hit the stands. I let my sub laps about 18 months ago, due to the insulting tone of some belligerent articles and editorial sidebars on AGW. It had held out against alarmism up to about three years ago. I suspect it succumbed to pressure from its parent. It is owned by Condé-Nast, which also owns the Atlantic, promoter of a 20-magazine warmist media campaign, and Vanity Fair.
Disasterbaters?
Thanks for the comments, all. I concede that I should have name-checked Norman Borlaug: I have written about him in the past and interviewing him before he died was a high point. A lot got left on the cutting room floor.
As for the non-toxic nature of DDT, I will follow up the links.
Matt
P. Solar:
Your post at August 18, 2012 at 3:13 am confuses “concerns” and apocalyptic predictions.
This thread is about the reasons for and the reactions to apocalyptic predictions.
These apocalyptic predictions are assertions of effects which would destroy civilisation as we know it. They include Malthusian projections of “overpopulation”, ‘peak oil’, and man-made global warming.
Unpleasant effects do not need apocalyptic predictions for them to be addressed; e.g. lack of sewerage and air pollution are reduced by those can afford to reduce them because the reductions make life more pleasant.
And whether or not smoking-induced cancer was a genuine concern does not alter the fact that smoking tobacco would not have destroyed civilisation as we know it.
To date, nobody has managed to inform me of any benefit from environmentalism. Conservation has often protected good things, but environmentalists often oppose conservationism; e.g. environmentalists who oppose roads for normal transportation will advocate despoiling pristine countryside with windfarms and the roads to access them.
Richard
So are we saying we have too many bad scientists or there is a “silent majority” of scientists who should speak up? Who is ever right about what to do regarding things that cannot be completely “proven”? Who is to say what is the right path? (meaning before the availability of hindsight)
Good article, thanks for the link! Matt is such a voice of reason and sanity!
And also good to see that such articles opens other very valid points of discussions:
– how do such apocalyptic visions and grouping form,
– how do such small minorities reach and form an accepted “consensus”
The psychology of the alarmism movement, its links to environmentalism – especially extreme environmentalism has been not enough documented and shown.
ecopocalysm – nicely coined that down.
With the time I came to the conclusion that most skeptics are indeed more “green” and more truly environmentalists then alarmists who would ignore nature and any arguments to implement “their solutions”.
It is a field discussion full of pitfalls, preconceived opinions, holier then you attitude and intolerance – whereas Matt is bringing a lot of sanity and calm, reasonable thinking in it.
The perils of confirmation bias – part 1 by Matt Ridley is at http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-perils-of-confirmation-bias-part-1.aspx
For parts 2 and 3, change the URL appropriately.
For those who are seeking reality!
Just imagine if the environmental movement had been around in 1800 and warned us then not to dig coal mines and build steam engines because they feared that global temperatures would rise by a degree or two and sea level rise by a few inches over the next 200 years.
If they had had their way, we would all still be living short, brutish lives.
@Retired Engineer
“..Doom sells. As simple as that. No news outlet can survive printing just good news…”
I seem to recall an experiment carried out by a small local magazine editor in New Zealand. He tried printing only good news. After the first month he lost nearly a quarter of his circulation….
Gillard and AWU/ALP soon down i flames and disgrace!
watergate was easier to handle than all the implications from this scandal. Its gona rock the fundations of Aussi gouvernment.
http://www.skynews.com.au/topstories/article.aspx?id=785198&vId=3467493&cId=Top%20Stories
Another take on the same story (more at eadavison.com)
A century’s worth of screaming headlines from the world’s leading news media illustrates their preference for excitement over accuracy:
ICE 1895, New York Times
Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.
FIRE 1922, Associated Press
…the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the waters too hot.
ICE 1923, Chicago Tribune
Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.
FIRE 1930, New York Times
Alpine glaciers are in full retreat.
ICE 1974, New York Times
And unless government officials reacted to the coming [cooling] catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result.
FIRE 2009, Time Magazine (Entire issue on AGW)
Be Worried, Be Very Worried.
Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.
It scarcely needs be said that…
IPCC forecasts small temperature rise by 2100
… would scarcely make an inside page.
Greg Rehmke says:
August 17, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Great that someone mentioned the Wired article that led to Bjorn Lomborg’s research….
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
Greg, thanks for that link too! Great!
Excellent article. I love it and particularly the sentence – it says it all:
“Doomslaying was a thankless task, but it had to be done, like taking out the garbage: it had to be carted to the dump today even if there’d be another big pile of it tomorrow. ”
cafeproz:
At August 18, 2012 at 4:24 am you ask:
Taking your questions in turn.
Q1. So are we saying we have too many bad scientists or there is a “silent majority” of scientists who should speak up?
A1.
Scientists conduct research as impartially as possible in attempt to obtain the closest approximation to ‘truth’. They do this by formulating hypotheses, testing the hypotheses against empirical data, and amending or rejecting the hypotheses in the light of all the available data.
Scientists have a duty to not “speak up”. This would negate their impartiality. A scientist informs of the results of his/her research as dispassionately as possible. People who “speak up” are advocates, not scientists. Many problems now exist because some who claim to be scientists have become advocates.
Q2. Who is ever right about what to do regarding things that cannot be completely “proven”?
A2.
Nobody is ever completely right about anything. And few things can be completely “proven”. Science does not “prove” anything: it disproves hypotheses.
Q3. Who is to say what is the right path? (meaning before the availability of hindsight)
A3.
People decide “the right path”. They often appoint other people (e.g. politicians) to decide “the right path” for them. And some people decide “the right path” for others by grabbing that power to themselves (e.g. warlords).
I am amazed you felt the need to ask about such obvious things. But I hope these answers have helped.
Richard
Should be required reading for every high school science teacher in the country.
Like others say, fear is control. Look how small groups — cults, mob-syndicates, gangs, teams, even some families, use it. Now countries and world-wide organizations employ it. Always seeking to beat us down, turn us into scared, dependent children. Most children are easy to dominate.
Love the title. Wonderful play on words. Apocalypse snot is certainly the end product of the “team”.
Thanks for the interesting read and comments. The article and mention of ozone sparked a related memory I thought I would share.
http://www.create.ab.ca/stampede-of-the-lemmings/
This essay is along the same lines. It addresses the psychology of apocalyptic predictions.
It’s good.
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_apocalyptic-daze.html
Apocalyptic pap sells. Unfortunately the buyers seem to have the biggest mouths and attract legions of unthinking easily deceived followers with one hand in your pocket. Hello CAGW!
Darn, I was really looking forward to that final rapture thingy…
Mr Ridley,
I note your comment above and await your list of references to the evidence that convinced you that DDT is non-toxic.
Here is a link to a rather interesting blog post on the topic made by someone who appears to be a genuine historian :
https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/greshams-law-ddt-disinformation-crowds-out-facts/
I suspect the facts [1] [2] are stranger than the fictions being offered by both the pro-DDT [3] and anti-DDT [4] crowds. It is interesting that this environmental issue again seems to reduce down to a contrast of values rather than science. Some people appear to value birds more than humans, whilst others believe we are obliged to act only in our own species’ best interests.
Thank you for your fine work on climate heresy and rational optimism. I merely wish you do not throw the osprey babies out with the toxic bath water. We ought to judge these things on a case-by-case basis.
– – – – – –
[ 1 ] http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/PHS/PHS.asp?id=79&tid=20
[ 2 ] http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc83.htm#SectionNumber:6.2
[ 3 ] http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html
[ 4 ] http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/DDT_and_Birds.html
Gun control, be it from the NRA right or Brady left, is just another form of control, not unlike the fearsome good-cop bad-cop third degree. And look at their eager customers, the preparers for apocalypse. They write of running for the hills when the SHTF and dismiss my warning that then is too late. It is already too late, legions like me are already in place and ready.
Good people ought to be armed as they will, with wits and Guns and the Truth. Bless the Bitter Clingers.
Doug Huffman:
At August 18, 2012 at 2:35 am I wrote:
Your post demonstrates that the sentence I quote here was incomplete. Clearly, I should have added;
“And some people choose to use this thread as an opportunity to promote completely irrelevant bollocks.”
Richard