![disaster_movie06[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/disaster_movie061.jpg?quality=83)
This is funny and sad at the same time. The funny part is the fact that none of Paul Erhlich’s doom and gloom predictions about the human condition from the 70’s on have even come remotely close to true, the sad part is that the Royal Society, whose motto is Nullius in verba, Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”, is taking the word of this doomer that can’t predict his way out of a paper bag. The focus now? You guessed it: global warming causing “escalating climate disruption”, which is unsupportable when you look at the data. Even the IPCC in their SREX report doesn’t agree with claims of “escalating climate disruption” as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. pointed out. Plus, Nature recently went on record with an editorial saying Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.
These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
(h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard).
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
10 January 2013
Title:Perspective: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
Authors:Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
Journal:Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Throughout our history environmental problems have contributed to collapses of civilizations. A new paper published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B addresses the likelihood that we are facing a global collapse now. The paper concludes that global society can avoid this and recommends that social and natural scientists collaborate on research to develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on our predicament.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s paper provides a comprehensive description of the damaging effects of escalating climate disruption, overpopulation, overconsumption, pole-to-pole distribution of dangerous toxic chemicals, poor technology choices, depletion of resources including water, soils, and biodiversity essential to food production, and other problems currently threatening global environment and society. The problems are not separate, but are complex, interact, and feed on each other.
The authors say serious environmental problems can only be solved and a collapse avoided with unprecedented levels of international cooperation through multiple civil and political organizations. They conclude that if that does not happen, nature will restructure civilization for us.
In a statement on his website, HRH The Prince of Wales has reacted to the paper, agreeing, “We do, in fact, have all the tools, assets and knowledge to avoid the collapse of which this report warns, but only if we act decisively now. If, though, in our evermore interconnected and complex world, we are to succeed, real leadership and vision is required. It is just possible that we can rise to this challenge, but to do so we will need to adjust our world view in a profound and comprehensive way. We have to see ourselves as utterly embedded in Nature and not somehow separate from those precious systems that sustain all life. I have said it before, and I will say it again – our grandchildren’s future depends entirely on whether we seize the initiative and prevaricate no further.”
O H Dahlsveen says:
January 11, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Martin Clark says on January 11, 2013 at 4:26 pm:
“The esteemed Charles really ought to get back to what he is good at, eg raising contented herds of cattle and growing rhubarb.”
= = = = = =
He can talk to the trees too you know – and they are good listeners as they keep stum when he speaks. – Shame he now wants to restrict their CO2 intake —-.
—————————————————————————————————————
Actually Charlie dear chap has reportedly been heard singing as he wanders aimlessly through the forest:
I talk to the trees but they don’t listen to me
I talk to the stars but they never hear me
The breeze hasn’t time to stop and hear what I say
I talk to them all — in vain.
Apologies Charlie – couldn’t resist.
I hesitate to enter a posting that appears to parallel the Ehrlichs, or worst of all HRH, but there are a couple of limitations that I see real trouble getting around; notwithstanding the apparent removal of limitations through ingenuity.
The first is sunlight, which is truly a finite resource. There is sunlight enough to support a population of perhaps eight billion–maybe genetic engineering will get us around this one, but I think not.
The second is even more fundamental. The second law of thermodynamics requires a “reservoir” to dump waste energy, chemical wastes, and so forth, unless we somehow figure out a way to do everything in a reversible manner. A colleague of mine calculates that a sustainable reservoir that can accommodate a modern lifestyle can handle a population of only a few hundred million. Frankly I hope it is ten times that or we will have trouble providing a lot of modern technology.
Finally, there is the statement attributed to Leewenhoek that he couldn’t imagine a comfortable world having a population density greater than that of the Netherlands. It may only be my perspective as a westerner, but a crowded world doesn’t seem ideal.
Silver Ralph says:
January 12, 2013 at 5:59 am
“The signs of economic decline and social collapse are normally first visible in civil strife and civil wars. If you look around the world today, all of the world’s civil strife and wars are being caused by a religion, and not through food shortages, climate disruption or environmental issues.
If we wish to prevent the collapse of Western civilisation, I would suggest that all fundamentalist creeds are put through a rigorous Reformation and Enlightenment movement, where all of their more bizarre, elitest and agressive tennets are debated, dissected and destroyed one by one. Only then will we stabilise world society.”
==========================================================================
Get a grip SR. Which religion formed the government of Greece? Which religion has caused the civil strife, bordering on, dare we say it, civil war within Greece? Which religion has bankrupted the country and seems to be destroying the very underpinnings of Greek culture? Oh, that would be socialism. The socialism that has bankrupted Greece, and Portugal and Spain and threatens to drag down the rest of the European Union.
And now that we have destroyed your assertion that ALL the world’s civil strife is caused by religion, let’s move on to your solution. Or would that be ‘final solution’? Just who died and made you dictator of the world. Deciding who should believe what? Deciding who has the proper thoughts and who does not? Enlightening people with your own benighted view of the world.
How arrogant of you. To think that your view, and your beliefs, and your rather narrow view of the world and what constitutes enlightened thinking should be forced down the throats of those who would disagree. Because those creeds and tenets that you think need to be changed are held by people. People that, in your world, don’t seem to deserve the right to think, and believe and live as they desire. But, after all, it is you who are enlightened and so we must bow down to you and accept our re-education, because I live in such a destabilized world — of my own making, of course.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Finally, there is the statement attributed to Leewenhoek that he couldn’t imagine a comfortable world having a population density greater than that of the Netherlands. It may only be my perspective as a westerner, but a crowded world doesn’t seem ideal
Hi Kevin, Indeed Leeuwenhoek stated that he could not imagine the whole planet being as densely peopled as Holland, which seemed crowded to him even at that time. He calculated that the maximum carrying capacity of the earth was 13.385 billion people. That was in the 18th century when there were an estimated 500 million peole in the world.
You may be surprised that an updated calculation was made in the 20th century based on improved farming and technology. Roger Revelle (Al Gore’s professor) estimated in 1974 the carrying capacity of the earth was 40-50 billion people.
Here’s a fun calculculation you can do yourself. If you added the current population of China, plus the current population of India, and put them in the contiguous US (not including Alaska and Hawaii) in addition to the current population, the population density would be lower than The Netherlands is today. If you’ve been to The Netherlands you will know there is considerable open space.
I cannot understand why anyone would pay any serious attention to Ehrlich.
Thank you Anthony. Ehrlich and his desire to use education for Newmindedness and his friend and acolyte John Holdren ‘s power to gain implementation in education and science funding have been on my radar screen.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/ is the story I wrote on how Julian Simon won the bet but Ehrlich’s desire to shut down human ingenuity via education and political regulation seems to be prevailing.
If your readers are unfamiliar with his 1989 book New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution, it will certainly make what is going on in CAGW modelling and education far clearer. Of course it may also keep you awake at night.
Off to read the full essay.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
“I hesitate to enter a posting that appears to parallel the Ehrlichs, or worst of all HRH, but there are a couple of limitations that I see real trouble getting around; notwithstanding the apparent removal of limitations through ingenuity.
The first is sunlight, which is truly a finite resource. There is sunlight enough to support a population of perhaps eight billion–maybe genetic engineering will get us around this one, but I think not.”
Chuckles. You think the amount of sunlight limits the world population to 8 billion? Let’s run some numbers.
8 billion people times 2300 calories per day gives 1.84e+013 calories a day. That’s our collective caloric needs.
That’s 6.716e+015 calories a year.
Japanese rice yields are 6 tonnes/hectare and you can harvest 4 times a year, that’s 24 tonnes a hectare (other high productivity countries like South Korea achieve the same).
Some experimental plots have achieved 22 tonnes in one harvest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice
But let’s stick with easily achievable 6 tonnes per harvest.
100g of Basmati Rice contain 262 calories.
So we need 2.56335877863e+012 kg of rice a year to satisfy collective caloric needs. Or
2.56335877863e+09 kg metric tons. Given 4 harvests and 6 tonnes/hectare we would then need
1.06806615776e+08 hectares or
1.06806615776e+06 km^2 of area planted.
So that’s a million square kilometers, about twice the size of Germany. Sufficient to produce enough calories for 8 billion people without using new experimental rice breeds. Or other higher yielding plants.
I think sunlight is not what limits us.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
“The second is even more fundamental. The second law of thermodynamics requires a “reservoir” to dump waste energy, chemical wastes, and so forth, unless we somehow figure out a way to do everything in a reversible manner. A colleague of mine calculates that a sustainable reservoir that can accommodate a modern lifestyle can handle a population of only a few hundred million. Frankly I hope it is ten times that or we will have trouble providing a lot of modern technology.”
I have heard this silliness that we are “dumping entropy” into the system before and it’s complete bonkers. Your colleague says 100 million people with a modern lifestyle are unsustainable? Through exactly what? A different word for entropy, as you’re throwing around the 2nd law of thermodynamics, is heat. Now where does the heat go? Hmmm…. Radiative cooling to space maybe?
Before you come to me with “yeah, we’re heating up the planet too much and there’s an energetic imbalance of 0.6 W/m^2” or anything like that please consider that the planet could easily compensate that by warming up a little, see the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, but quite frankly, our energy expenditure again pales completely against the amount of…
…sunlight that constantly heats the planet.
There’s a different usage of “entropy” and that’s in information theory and I think the green jackasses confuse the two or use confusion to plant their idiotic memes. If you have ANY logical reason to assume that the “entropy we dump” is an “environmental problem” I’d like to hear of which exact ill effects you or your colleague speak, because muddled thinking doesn’t get you very far here.
Silver Ralph:
At January 12, 2013 at 8:30 am I asked a question; viz.
At January 12, 2013 at 10:57 am you have responded saying in total
So tarnished Ral, you cannot answer my question so you ask me a daft question instead.
I will answer it.
If there were only 1 million people on this earth they could not run a modern technological society because they would be too few to provide sufficient materials and food.
This is a matter of economics and NOT “common sense”.
Richard
Dirk H.
What other inputs are needed for the yields of which you speak? Yes, the Netherlands has substantial open space. Many cities. Still not open enough for my perspective. Fourty to fifty billion is something to contemplate.
Entropy involves more than just heat. If heat were the only issue we could probably radiate to space quite easily. Chemical processes can’t be done reversibly. It is largely chemical processes my colleague worries about, and his calculation involves the control volume needed to mitigate the long-term problems from current technologies. For example, the minimum energy input needed for recycling comes straight from the second law. I don’t necessarily agree with his numbers, but still it is an interesting perspective.
Unfortunately, the whole argument is proceeding from a false assumption ….that “civilsation” is present …To describe what is occurring on the planet at present as “civilisation” is no where near the truth ….fear, hate, greed and violence are present daily in the life of many populations on this planet and in many of our own daily lives.
The question isn’t whether we are in danger of losing civilisation ….it’s are we in danger of not ever reaching it.
Finished the essay. Wow. I encourage everyone to crosscheck the footnotes to appreciate the extent to which they are citing unsupported sources. Paper seems to be following education’s definition of “research”–anything published by someone with the relevant credential.
As some other poster/s alluded to, how many here see that behind the AGW global fear campaign, there is not so much a mixed bag of deluded scientists and their deceived adherents, but a knowing cabal whose real agenda is nefariously related to domination of the planet’s human species, and who play the tune to which most of the western world governments and their institutions dance to?.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 2:18 pm
“What other inputs are needed for the yields of which you speak?”
Well what does a rice farmer do, plant rice and wait. You can probably find out how much soil and this and that you need but obviously nothing of it is scarce.
“Entropy involves more than just heat. If heat were the only issue we could probably radiate to space quite easily. Chemical processes can’t be done reversibly.”
What gives you that idea? It might be DIFFICULT to undo a certain reaction but consider catalysts and enzymes.
” It is largely chemical processes my colleague worries about, and his calculation involves the control volume needed to mitigate the long-term problems from current technologies. For example, the minimum energy input needed for recycling comes straight from the second law. I don’t necessarily agree with his numbers, but still it is an interesting perspective.”
Well of course, if you want to reverse a process that increased the entropy in an information theoretic sense, in other words, mixed some materials better than they were before, and you want to undo that mixing and re-concentrate the materials you need the amount of energy at least that you got from the mixing put back in.
There is a ubiquitious process that does this all the time on Earth BTW, and that process is called life. Life forms build up higher order structures (decreasing the entropy within themselves) while increasing entropy around them.
By your logic, life itself “dumps entropy into the environment”. So maybe your colleague should worry about all those lowly critters with a much higher material turnaround than our tiny civilisation.
Somehow, though, life is actually doing fine…
Dirk H.
As you asked for a specific example,my colleague uses carbon dioxide, which you and I would place much higher limits than he. Here is one of my own. To support a modern technological life-style we all need helium. Presently most of the world’s supply comes from two gas fields in Wyoming. These are such concentrated supplies that very little energy is needed to purify the helium; and the gas fields cover such a small region that they contributes very little to the control volume each person requires. However, once this concentrated supply is exhausted, if there are no replacements, then we will begin using the atmosphere as our supply of helium. This is such a dilute source that the second law will demand a much, much larger energy input to purify it, and the control volume per person will expand. The same is true of every process we require for our life-style. The more technological is our life-style the larger the control volume needed to supply raw materials and energy, and to dump the increased entropy; i.e. chemical wastes, diluted chemicals, mixtures and so forth.
You cannot get away from this:
1) Pollution of water, air, and soil
2) Exploitation of non-renewable resources
3) Extinction of flora and fauna
4) Population growth. In the 1920s there were fewer than two billion human beings in the word. Now more than 7 billion.
These are real problems, and religions and politicians do nothing about them. Man-made climate change is BS and serves only as a red herring to divert us from the real problems.
Kevin Kilty says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:03 pm
“The first is sunlight, which is truly a finite resource. There is sunlight enough to support a population of perhaps eight billion–maybe genetic engineering will get us around this one, but I think not.”
About 170000 trillion watts of sunlight hits earth.
There is 1360 watts per square meter of sunlight in space. After averaging day and night and angles of incidence (as related to a sphere’s surface area being 4 pi r^2 and thus 4 times its cross-section), except for what is reflected by clouds or otherwise lost in the atmosphere, sunlight averages 340 W/m^2 over Earth’s surface (which is 500 million square kilometers, 500 trillion square meters).
Human electrical power generation is about 2 trillion watts on average (and total human power usage, including non-electrical thermal power, just a few terawatts), tiny in comparison. Primarily it is not solar-powered, nor does it necessarily need to be (especially with billions of tons of extractable uranium in seawater, thorium on land, etc., as well as fossil fuels far beyond common false claims). But running out of sunlight is not happening.
When the world’s average cloud cover changes by 0.5%, a small portion of how much it has gone up and down over the decades in http://s7.postimage.org/69qd0llcr/intermediate.gif , even that nominally small variation is an albedo change impacting Earth’s solar energy balance more than the waste heat from every manmade generator on Earth. Yet that magnitude of change is not even very directly noticeable, with different datasets disagreeing on average cloud cover by more than that (for example, http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/ ).
Any hypothetical civilization actually consuming a high fraction of sunlight received by Earth would be vastly beyond today’s capabilities and quite capable of expansion into space, where the sun puts out in total literally trillions of times more power (4E26 W) than is utilized by current civilization. (And any civilization reaching a full Dyson Swarm, in terms of starting to consume a large fraction of that, would be interstellar-capable, and there are billions of stars in the galaxy).
“The second is even more fundamental. The second law of thermodynamics requires a “reservoir” to dump waste energy, chemical wastes, and so forth, unless we somehow figure out a way to do everything in a reversible manner.”
Waste heat from the few terawatts of human power usage is tiny compared to sunlight received by Earth, as previously illustrated. One of the reasons you don’t see new continents or mountain ranges made from the waste of civilization is that its volume and mass is limited in context compared to the hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers of rock in Earth’s crust. As a thought experiment regarding volumes, while I’m not literally implying that people should or would do this, technically setting off some nukes in a desert somewhere would produce enough cubic kilometers of craters to hold human waste, though it is cheaper to utilize more local landfills.
“Finally, there is the statement attributed to Leewenhoek that he couldn’t imagine a comfortable world having a population density greater than that of the Netherlands. It may only be my perspective as a westerner, but a crowded world doesn’t seem ideal.”
The population density of the Netherlands is 405 people per square kilometer. The population density of the world today is 47 people per square kilometer of land area, about 12% as much on average.
Perhaps you’ve lived in cities all of your life, so the world seems crowded to you, but that is a matter of most people choosing to concentrate themselves into the 1.5% or so of land area that is urban.
“Fourty to fifty billion is something to contemplate.”
If you meant forty to fifty billion people, the world’s population is projected to peak at such as around 10 billion later in this century. The exact figure depends on the projection, but the observed demographic transition applies. The world’s population growth rate was once more than 2% per year in the 1960s; in decline downwards since then, it has already dropped below 1.2%.
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/images/worldgr.png
If you thought population was headed for forty to fifty billion, that could speak for the frequency of propaganda not showing the real picture. What will break the ability of media outlets to mislead there is how eventually results of the demographic transition become increasingly blatant. While the drop in fertility rates (average children born per woman) foretells the future without being initially seen by most people, after a lag period median age substantially goes up (the E.U. for instance), and then finally a country starts declining in population (Japan for example).
“What other inputs are needed for the yields of which you speak?”
Among the top inputs for agriculture:
Water: Natural fresh water is enough in most places, but desalinating seawater only costs a few hundred dollars per acre-foot extra now.
Carbon: The atmosphere is kept rich enough in carbon dioxide.
Hydrocarbon fuels for convenient running of farm equipment: Gasoline, diesel fuel, plastics, etc. can be made with the Fischer-Tropsch process from any carbon source (natural gas, biomass, garbage, atmospheric CO2, etc), a hydrogen source, and about any energy source. In practice, fossil fuels are abundant enough to be generally a bit cheaper so far, mostly keeping synthetic fuel displaced out of the market (with a few major exceptions like WWII Germany and Sasol in South Africa today), but either way fuel is produced and available.
Nitrogen for fertilizer, such as via NH3: The Haber process works with about any energy source and about any hydrogen source (albeit mostly using natural gas due to it being cheapest in most regions), while there is practically unlimited nitrogen in the atmosphere. Energy requirements for fertilizer production are actually small in overall context, as only like 5% or so of global natural gas production is used for making fertilizer.
Phosphorus for fertilizer: The amount of phosphorus in and needed by plants is a small fraction of 1% of their mass. Even the average rock (amongst quadrillions of tons in Earth’s crust) is 0.1% phosphorus. It is cheaper to mine higher-grade ores (which are available in lesser but still plentifully huge enough amounts), but the net result is mankind is not running out of phosphorus.
Essentially a typo fix:
I earlier wrote:
“When the world’s average cloud cover changes by 0.5%, a small portion of how much it has gone up and down over the decades in http://s7.postimage.org/69qd0llcr/intermediate.gif , even that nominally small variation is an albedo change impacting Earth’s solar energy balance more than the waste heat from every manmade generator on Earth.”
That’s true, but I meant to write “far more” rather than just “more” as else the sentence effectively understates matters. What I meant to point out was that even such as a 1% cloud cover change impacts Earth’s energy balance by a couple orders of magnitude more than civilization’s waste heat.
For instance, human electrical power generation is only around 1/100000th as much as the 170000 terawatts of sunlight which hits Earth.
The planet as a whole is mainly not the cities most people spend most of their time in: It is the other vast expanses which are below one’s sight around 99% of the time on an intercontinental airline flight.
These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
———-
That’s an odd thing to say because I have gained the impression that the WUWT audience is against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment.
And that includes both government regulation or by externalising costs so implicit costs can produce pricing signals in the free enterprise system.
In fact the whole WUWT message is short termism and my selfish hip pocket nerve is sacred.
Lazy T,
Better to be thought a fool, than to say something that proves it.
Most readers of WUWT care for the environment much more than the money hungry enviro crowd, whose primary concerns are political power and grant payola. We see that; fools don’t.
“””””…..LazyTeenager says:
January 12, 2013 at 4:59 pm
These facts seem to make no dent in the doomers thinking, which seems to believe we are as ill equipped as the Mayans to manage ourselves, our resources, and our environment. One wonders about their sanity.
———-
That’s an odd thing to say because I have gained the impression that the WUWT audience is against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment……”””””
Well Lazy, I think you would find a plurality of WUWT audience are not “against any attempt to manage ourselves, our resources or our environment.”
But that is NOT what the AGWMMGWCC crowd is interested in.
They want to manage OTHERS and OTHER’s resources, and OTHER’S environment.
We’re not interested in slavery by a self appointed elite.
“””””…..Nigel S says:
January 12, 2013 at 2:18 am
george e smith says: January 11, 2013 at 10:37 pm
‘Churchill Ghandi (sic) clash over India; which was many years later. ‘
Churchill / Gandhi was many years earlier not later, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated on 30th January,1948……..”””””
I’ll take your version Nigel.
I wasn’t aware Churchill was Prime Minister in 1930.
“””””…..george e. smith says:
January 12, 2013 at 5:34 pm
“””””…..Nigel S says:
January 12, 2013 at 2:18 am
george e smith says: January 11, 2013 at 10:37 pm
‘Churchill Ghandi (sic) clash over India; which was many years later. ‘…..”””””
I went back and listened to the Churchill “End of the beginning” speech again; and he made no comment relating to India, or Gandhi; his comment re “liquidation” related to the possibility that the allies might lose the war.
The sunlight converted to biomass is the limiting value. The number “About 170000 trillion watts of sunlight hits earth” is immaterial as a very large portion of this gets degraded to heat at 288K or colder, and can’t be used for anything–it’s radiated back out to space as longwave IR. How much is convertible to biomass? That’s the important question.
I realize that, but Dirk H. was telling me that the Netherlands wasn’t very crowed and if their population density were applied to the Earth it would amount to forty or fifty billion people. I think that seems like a lot…apparently others do not. Moreover, the ten billion limit is if present trends hold up. I hope they do.
No. To undo mixing requires that you put in what the second law demands as a minimum of energy or more–T(Delta S). This will easily exceed what energy you got from the mixing process in the first place because you probably mixed in a non-reversible way, and didn’t bother to harvest the energy gained in the first place. This is the issue that my friend frets about, and that I think is worth a detailed, thoughtful examination.
To you both…I farmed for 14 years, so I know something about inputs. You cannot take six tons of biomass per acre, per year, without replenishing raw materials. I was always adding sulfur, nitrogen, organic material, and phosphorus back to the soil. If you are going to do that in a sustainable way, then you are going to need some additional land that can take care of run-off, wastes, provide nutrients back to the farm ground, and so forth. Sustainable is not well defined, however neither is it silliness. Perhaps you can meet the caloric needs of the present population with an area twice the size of Germany, but that does not necessarily mean the nutritional needs, nor does it count the needs of the region that supplies sustainable inputs of raw materials, and waste processing for your two times Germany. My point is that we also need to include industrial processes into this thinking, not just agriculture.
HRH Charles said: “I have said it before, and I will say it again – our grandchildren’s future depends entirely on whether we seize the initiative and prevaricate no further.”
Jeremy wrote (here) January 11, 2013 at 5:53 pm: “I think HRH means “procrastinate” not “prevaricate” – someone needs to remind HRH of the Queens English. HRH would make Mrs. Malaprop proud.
I found that British and Australian publications regularly misused “prevaricate”. I have written to The Economist on more than one occasion pointing out that they had (again) misused the word. I asked them what dictionary I could look at to find this definition, but they sent nothing back to me. It’s more than just the Queen’s English…..
IanM
“Throughout our history environmental problems have contributed to collapses of civilizations. A new paper published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B addresses the likelihood that we are facing a global collapse now.”
The collapse that we face is of bloated graduate programs, bloated government programs, unneeded government agencies, and a bunch of socialist organizations that call themselves NGOs.