Paul Ehrlich (yes THAT Paul Ehrlich) recently posted a review about Mark Steyn’s book A Disgrace to the Profession on Amazon, and after reading Ehrlich’s review, my irony meter pegged, the needle flew off the scale and embedded itself in the wall of my office, nearly missing our resident member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
You just have to read it, apparently Mr. Ehrlich has no self awareness whatsoever when it comes to evaluating his own massive folly in predicting the future. Here is the screencap:
That is rich. Steyn compiled the critical opinions of dozens of scientists about Mann’s work on The Hockey Stick, and yet Ehrlich, says things like this:
“Mike Mann is admired by all real climate scientists, even those who may have same disagreements with him…”
Well, perhaps he’s right, I assume everybody at his own echo chamber website Real Climate does admire Dr. Mann, the rest of science, eh, not so much. Otherwise, they would have come to his aid and filed amicus briefs in his court battle with Steyn. The thunderous silence of science in support of Mann speaks volumes.
Mann can’t even be bothered to use current data is his slide show, leaving data on display to stop in 2005. What sort of “admired scientist” does that sort of sophistry? The kind that push an agenda and can’t ever let data point to them being wrong, illustrated in Ehrlich’s big list of failures. For example, he said in the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Instead, U.S. population increased:
Gosh, it looks like a hockey stick, doesn’t it?
But, despite that massive failure of his scientific predictive skill, Ehrlich couldn’t help himself and got in another forecast of impending doom in that review:
Unhappily the “triumph” may prove doom for many of our descendents.
Right. OK then.
The egos on these folks must be so large that the department of transportation must set out orange road cones ahead of them when they travel, so that they have a wide lane of their own.
Your best pushback against these people? Buy the book and decide for yourself.
Order it on Amazon here.
Click to order
Note: about 5 minutes after publication, this article was updated to fix some spelling and formatting errors.
As I recall, Ehrlich’s predictions in his ‘Population Bomb’ went through the stage where he predicted catastrophe by a certain date, then when those dates came and went, he pushed the catastrophe back, THEN he tried to spin current non-catastrophic events as evidence of his failed predictions, and NOW says none of it was ever true, but it didn’t matter anyway because it was all about bringing about ‘awareness’.
Of what? That you were totally full of it from the beginning?
Now does this pattern sound familiar, or am I just crazy?
Sounds like the Doomsday Cult. 🙂
I love Ehrlich’s misuse of commas; “… Micheal Mann, one of the true heroes of climate science, outrageous lies.” He just unwittingly described M the Mann as a unrepentant liar! Delicious!
I Nooked Steyn’s book.
Better than nicking it.
Paul Ehrlich desperately needs an editor. Didn’t he at least give a quick glance at the review he wrote? It’s embarrassing.
But, more to the point, I thought people acquired wisdom as they got older. Apparently, however, there’s a certain kind of fixated individual who thinks he knew absolutely everything there was to know back when he was 22 years old, and because his life from that point forward was so luxuriously sheltered from the normal vicissitudes of life, he had no experience through which to learn that he did, indeed, not know everything there was to know. Paul Ehrlich is a case study in that phenomenon.
So is Naom Chomsky. They are 2 peas in a pod.
“It is sad that with humanity facing catastrophic climate disruption as part of an existential threat ”
“…(there is no certainty in science…”
Obviously, Ehrlich has a ‘certainty’ in his science
Alas, Ehrlich reinvents the No True Scotsman fallacy as “all real climate scientists”.
Paul Ehrlich never read the book. Also, he didn’t write a review of the book. He visited the the book’s review page, read OTHER peoples’ responses to Mark Steyn’s work, and talked about that instead from the POV of a CAGW alarmist, populist and kool-aid drinker.
Typical seagull mimicker.
Why not actually read the book and be critical? Here is why. Facts don’t matter to the progressive left. They just want wealth redistribution at all costs and Mark Steyn’s personality as well as his book is more influential than Michael Mann (the ex Nobel Prize winner) to the American voter and lobbyist.
So Ehrlich is speaking in terms that he is most comfortable with,…. politics and propaganda.
Fortunate for me, a nobody. I can objectively ridicule and ostensibly smart man with ease.
I read all 80 and some comments to Ehrlich’s review and every single one of them was critical, especially about his numerous failures at prediction. Some are saying he never had a single prediction come true. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
But not one that’s a little slow; slow clocks are always wrong.
And that’s Ehrlich’s problem. He’s never able to catch up with the world.
Ehrlich believes that Malthus (18th century philosopher) hasn’t been debunked by history. So he keeps on assuming that people cannot adapt and cannot become more efficient. But we do.
Time and again he’s proven wrong.
But he can’t catch up because he’s tied to an 18th century mindset.
Hmm…slow clocks aren’t always wrong. They just need to build up to an almost 24-hour lag to get the time right once.
A clock set 10 (or other) minutes behind the real time is never right as is a clock that is set ahead.
catcracking, it’s just a question of patience. No clock is precise, so eventually it shows the right time. But the better the clock, the rarer event it is.
Paul Ehrlich is probably obsessed with his supposed legacy, just like Obama.
Well, being an intellectually sad individual, notorious for getting things wrong, is not the sort of legacy most sane people would seek.
Yet, he still keeps on advertising the fact that his opinion is worth absolutely zip?
It’s always biologists and social scientists who write ‘limits to growth’ nonsense. They fail to account for the overwhelming factor of human ingenuity that confounds the helpless petri-dish limits envisioned by dystopian linear thinkers. Malthus’s forecast that major cities would be buried in horse manure many metres deep failed spectacularly because of spectacular human ingenuity. These ‘disciplines’ that somehow feel competent to speculate on the future of mankind are totally unschooled and unskilled to engage in this. Biology is essentially dealing with ‘static’ organisms that have limitations and social scientists of the ceteris paribus kind are clearly defining themselves as linear disciplines. We will only be free from this ideologue evil stuff when the population reaches its 8-9B – we are already 80-90% there – and poverty is further reduced and economic wellbeing expanded to cut these unhappy people off.
Biologists and social scientists (and, climateers) exhibit a complete failure of imagination. I recall one commenter opining that we must immediately begin to develop sustainable energy sources that can see us through 1,000 years! I don’t think humanity has had a sustainable energy source since we first discovered fire. Yet we’ve lasted the past 20,000-30,000 years. How does that commenter know we won’t be mining energy sources from the moon, Mars, asteroids, or comets within the next 1,000 years? As a philosopher said; our children live in the future which we cannot visit, not even in our dreams.
Borrowed from Rosa Korie’s websites:
‘Sustainability’ and ‘Smart Growth’ and ‘High Density Urban Mixed-use Development’ (watch out for these terms in your local governments) – They are policies adopted in your local governments from “officials” that were never elected.
In 1992 The UN called it Agenda 21 because it is the Agenda for the 21st century.
According to UN’s Maurice Strong, in 1992, the ‘affluent middle class American lifestyle is unsustainable.’ That includes single family homes, private vehicles, appliances, air conditioning, & meat eating. They are a threat to the planet, according to Strong
Yes. A good example is Moore’s law for semiconductors, which holds that the number of transistors on an IC doubles every 18 months or so. For the past 20 years or so people have been predicting the end of Moore’s law, but the semiconductor industry actually plans on it. Not only do the engineers keep coming up with new ways of making smaller features, they keep developing new kinds of transistors that can be packed tighter and tighter.
The biggest barriers to human prosperity are political ones. Nearly ever famine for the past 200 years or so has been politically induced, not naturally.
Just an fyi.
A horse named “Kenjisstorm” is gonna run at Del Mar in about 20 minutes.
Right now the odds are 10-1.
Go Kenji !!
Finished third, #$%&
Nearly missing a win, eh? ;o)
Mark Steyn noted that he was surprised by the negative comments on Mann from the scientific community. When I read the book, I was astounded by the frank comments of many of Mann’s fellow scientists (although I admit that calling Mann a scientist, based on his behavior, could be considered an affront to true scientists.) However, I am not surprised that well respected scientists would object to the way that Mann cherry picked data by using a statistical selection algorithm which was never meant to be used to select a subset of data and then weighting certain data sets far more than others solely because they aligned more closely with his conclusion.
Conclusions are supposed to be developed based on objectively evaluating the data – all the data – not a tiny sub-set. Mann, selected a miniscule sub-set of data which would reduce past warming and enhance recent warming. Then for years he kept his data and algorithms hidden from view except to his chosen team. This is the sort of statistical smoke and mirrors that occurs in DC, but it is certainly not science.
Ehrlich, by putting himself on Mann’s side and calling those who question Mann’s methods propagandists has put himself on the side of the Inquisition forcing Galileo to deny the heliocentric nature of the solar system.
“This is the sort of statistical smoke and mirrors that occurs in DC, but it is certainly not science.”
When your “science” is funded mostly by DC, that is indeed the “science” you get.
A real scientist should dispassionately follow the truth. Once a scientist becomes an activist, that scientist has lost the credibility to be called a scientist.
Michael Mann is an activist not a scientist. He is clearly trying to prove a point and isn’t following the evidence. At best, he is suffering from bias and is cherry picking the evidence that supports his chosen point of view. At worst, he is a craven fraud.
There is always a silver lining in every cloud. Until Dr. Mann tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period I believed in AGW. So, he has created at least one skeptic.
Ehrlich’s review ..”Rupert Murdoch and his ‘False News’ network”
I’ve never seen that before. Whenever someone is trying to denigrate Fox News, it’s always been transformed to ‘Faux News’,
“Senior Fellow, by Courtesy” Paul Ehrlich is as strong in French as in everything else.
Already have my signed copy. Nobody that is sane that read the book could claim what Ehrlich has said unless they’re just an our right liar. I believe the later is the case for him. But then again that probably goes for most of the alarmists “scientists”. They have sold their souls to the almighty dollar.
I’ll bet Ehrlich didn’t realize he had so many well-read fans who commented on his review.
/sarc
This fool really should go back to his nursing home. His lack of awareness is stunning
Harold Camping predicted – not for the first time – that Jesus would return to Earth in 2011, and certain folks would be taken to heaven in the rapture, ….
Paul Ehrlich looks a lot like the late Harold did, and Ehrlich’s predictions are equally wrong.
A strong belief based on nonsense is still nonsense.
Hasn’t anyone noticed that he called all those scientists critical of mann ‘hacks and has-beens’?
That’ll play well with those scientists. Or not.
It looks as though the people of Paris may not be entirely focused on the fate of sea ice in the Hudson Bay this month. Unfortunately this is because the alarmism of Mark Steyn has shown itself to be more immediately prescient than that of Michael Mann:
“Such would be the delusion, that when the evil day came, as come it would, the people would start up, as from a dream, and ask themselves if these things could have been true. All his eloquence was in vain. He was looked upon as a false prophet, or compared to the hoarse raven, croaking omens of evil. His friends, however, compared him to Cassandra, predicting evils which would only be believed when they came home to men’s hearths, and stared them in the face at their own boards.”
Charles Mackay, on the predictions of Walpole concerning the South Sea Bubble.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/11/13/multiple-deaths-reported-after-shootings-explosions-paris/75727746/
“nearly missing our resident member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
Did you have to take your dog to the vet to get the wound taken care of?
Why didn’t he mention Anthony Watts or WUWT? Are they still on the “do not mention” list?
*All real climate scientists* are the scientists who agree with his opinions. Anyone who doesn’t agree with his opinion aren’t, obviously, *real climate scientists.*
Ehrlich would probably want to rescind First Amendment rights for those that don’t agree with “real climate scientists”, too.
really amazed at the audacity of ehrich.
paul ehrich -> fear of human population -> zero population growth movement -> low birthrates in the developed countries -> population growth stagnation -> demand for migrant workers -> migrant crisis
-> end of european civilization as we knew it
saving the planet from human beings may a well-meaning, innocent, and benign diversion
but it can go horribly wrong.
ehrlich
sorry about the many typos
I find it amusing that he claims that “humanity is facing catastrophic climate disruption as part of an existential threat” as abject truth. But then goes on to say that “there is no certainty in science.”
But then again, for the likes of him, it never has been about the weather, it has always been about excessive population.