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.
“Ehrlich” is a German word meaning honest, truthfull. Trust him.
Sounds like he’s defiled his family name. That I trust.
Anthony, I see that old Malthusian, David Attenborough, has a piece in today’s Telegraph calling Humans a plague on the Earth. Some people just never learn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html
Bloke,
That he gets away as Ehrlich apparently does, of talking flat-out lies and bs unchallenged, says more about the failed big media model of mass communications than just about anything else could.
Attenborough is a complete fruitcake.
‘..there is no certainty in science..’
Er, well, except ‘climate science’ where everything is settled. Other than those little papers that slip out saying ‘oooh, we didn’t know that’.
Paul Ehrlich really, really, really needs a thorough biography of him and his career.
Step it up a notch, folks; the warmists are fanatical
about throwing the virgin into the volcano. If it
works, they are heros, if it doesn’t, it was too late!
Facts and reality are useless, They BELIEVE!!!!
Better screen capture that review.
“There is no certainty in science”? I thought the science was settled and certain.
Brandon Shollenberger
November 13, 2015 at 3:38 pm
==============================
Logical fallacy. Not only tou quo que, but also a non sequitur.
“Ehrlich” in German mean “Honest”, which would make his contribution doubly curious. So curious in fact that I surmise that the “Ehrlich” writing the comment is not Paul but a false flag imposter.
Interestingly, about 97% of the other reviewers rate the book higher than he does…
“Mann can’t even be bothered to use current data is his slide show, leaving data on display to stop in 2005.”
I’m guessing he figures the science was declared settled by the referees around then so there’s no need to include later data.
Posted my comment on the Ehrlich review on Amazon.com:
“This review is a joke, right?
The man is beyond ridiculous. I think most people would see this, so no point in wasting any more words here.”
While you’re on Amazon something to cheer you up sad sack-
http://ggc-mauldin-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/pdf/OTB_Jun_24_2015.pdf
For what it’s worth, my advice to anyone suffering depression is the pills only work for a short time as a circuit breaker while you get your excrement together.
The anti-deps I was on really REALLY SC$%ED me up… I don’t recommend them to anyone.
Lost in the first edit / update.
A dis-recommendation by Ehrlich? Quel honneur!
Is there any more notorious has-been “futurist” than Paul R. Ehrlich? Given his own past success as a fiction author, it can be no surprise that he would ardently admire Mann.
Is Paul Erlich still alive? I thought he had starved to death with the rest of us. Or was that just for the lumpenproletariat?
/Mr Lynn
Maybe the title should be amended to read ‘Paul Ehrlich’s ATTEMPTED review….’
I am pretty sure it is a pretended review. There is nothing in it indicating he read the book.
Anyone out there know where to find cold hard facts on the real state of the parameters that people say are indicative of climate change? I hear of ice caps melting or growing, tornados and hurricanes either more or less frequent or intense. Droughts, wild fires, the list goes on. This should be a lot easier than it seems with all the Galileo-like atmosphere surrounding the issue.
Go to the Menu up top and click on ‘Reference Pages’; or click here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/
It would be helpful to have a CAGW-Claims-Refuted Summary page, though.
/Mr Lynn
Thanks.
Looks like I missed the obvious.
Interesting that Erlich actually admits “there is no certainty in science …” Except for the “consensus” on catastrophic warming.
Erlich reviews Mann.
The pot calls the kettle white.
I’ll buy that.
Brandon Shollenberger wrote:
“That means the only way Steyn could not be a liar is if he simply saw a sentence he liked the sound of and used it without bothering to check what the sentence was in reference to, not even reading the page he copied the quote from.”
No, there’s another pretty obvious possibility (likelihood): Steyn rightly assumes there’ a correlation between regional and global temperatures and he felt it’s the perfect quote to start his book even if it wasn’t perfect from a scientific point of view.
And your attempt to hold Mark Steyn, someone who literally identifies himself as an entertainer, to the same principles as a professional scientist whose (faulty?) work has been used as the basis of international treaties and government climate policy around the world is laughable. Steyn is defending himself from an attack by a professional scientist; it’s not two professional scientists debating each other. There is no reverse onus on Mark Steyn to hold himself accountable to the highest scientific standards. That standard *only* applies to Mann in this case. Your analogy is the equivalent of comparing John Stewart or Stephen Colbert to a network news anchor.
uh? Guys?
The appropriately initialed B.S. started the word fight claiming that Mr. Steyn mis-represented the words:
“Over the last 10,000 years it has been warmer than today 65 per cent of the time”.
So do a quick google search for them and you find:
“Over the last 10,000 years it has been warmer than today 65 per cent of the time…”
Climate change 25 May 2012
That is, according to Dr Gernot Patzelt of the University of Innsbruck (see http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/24/multiple-glacier-studies-show-wide-ho …). Glaciers in the Alps have grown and retreated on a number of occasions. Forests existed at elevations higher than they do today. A similar pattern emerges from glaciers in the Russian Altai.”
See: http://www.sis-group.org.uk/news/over-last-10000-years-it-has-been-warmer-today-65-cent-time.htm
Steyn was right.
The lesson? Never believe a believer without checking the facts first.
KJ and Paul Murphy,
Thanks for setting the record straight.
I’m not sure why I bothered, but I briefly checked out Brandon Shollenberger’s blog (sorry, comment section only he can post in) supposedly dissecting Steyn’s book. I didn’t get past this gem: .
“Anyway, I got it in the mail yesterday, and I started reading it.”
Ummm, is this genius actually publicly announcing he pirated a copy of Steyn’s book? Way to take the high ground Brandon. What a goof.
I would say that Steyn is near the truth. We have been in an interstadial/interglacial for the last 10,000 years. Bar some shorter mini ice ages. After the second world war, my mother (RIP) blamed England’s colder summers and winters (1947, 1963 particularly) on H Bomb tests and the number of bombs going off.
Without sufficient rain fall and warm seasons we could not have developed agriculture and domesticated animals. So why nit pick?
Something to really cheer Mr Ehrlich up (it’s ‘premium’ paywalled but I don’t think any of we rational folk need bother going past the lead in)
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/subscribe/news/1/index.html?sourceCode=AAWEB_WRE170_a&mode=premium&dest=http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/change-trees-in-landscape-to-boost-bushfire-survival-chances-academic-says/story-fni6uo1m-1227611363305&memtype=registered
Comedy central from academe but I feel our learned perfesser may be donning a suicidal vestment here. Still you never know nowadays and perhaps he’s got the inside running and the Green loons have secret plans to replace all the Oz gum trees with some wonder fireproof ethanol plant.