Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Former NSW Premier and Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr thinks even though Paul Ehrlich was wrong about global starvation and resource depletion, we should have listened to his warning about global warming.
Everybody’s scared’: The first mention in Australian media of global warming could only gesture to the future
Bob Carr
Industry Professor of Climate and Business at the University of Technology Sydney
August 30, 2021 — 5.58amIt was 50 years ago — August 30, 1971. I was 23, watching US ecologist Paul Ehrlich on the ABC’s Monday Conference, being interviewed by Robert Moore. Ehrlich said the world’s population was 3.7 billion and we were adding 70 million people a year. This was degrading the life support systems of the planet.
The prophet had spoken. At last, I thought, someone has identified the driver of all environmental decline: the explosive growth in human numbers.
Recently, I consulted the 33-page transcript. I saw a question from the audience I hadn’t noted at the time. An unidentified person asked Ehrlich about a cover story in New Scientist that said the world’s temperature had increased by a degree and, if it rose by 3.5, we would flood most of the earth.
Ehrlich replied he knew this research. “If we continue on the long-range energy course we are on, sooner or later we will melt the polar ice caps.” He said “atmospheric dynamics” were now being studied and “everybody’s scared”.
…
Ehrlich was wrong to talk up the threat of world starvation, to overlook the new plant varieties and farm techniques that enabled food to keep pace with population. Critics have made much of this alleged Malthusianism. But 50 years ago a lot was unknown, not just in environmental sciences. Western leaders believed in wage and price controls. China and Russia were locked in dogmatic Marxism.
Ehrlich was right about the biggest thing: the dramatic rise in world population that would lift numbers over 50 years from 3.7 to today’s 7.8 billion. It’s happened, on cue. According to one physicist it explains at least half the warming – it, and the spike in consumption it brought with it, like the rise in vehicle numbers from 200 million to 1.5 billion. Or the doubling in per capita pork consumption. Above all, the doubling in power use.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/everybody-s-scared-the-first-mention-in-australian-media-of-global-warming-could-only-gesture-to-the-future-20210828-p58mr6.html
Seriously Bob Carr, getting almost everything wrong is not a selling point for a prophet.
Paul Ehrlich frightened entire generations of kids with his failed prophecies, just as kids today are being needlessly frightened by empty global warming scares.
The damage to children from all this scaremongering is real, far more real than the fantasy terrors of slightly warmer weather. It is not just the Greta communists ruining their future career prospects by slacking off from school. There is evidence some kids are wrecking their lives with hard drugs, because they can’t live with what they have been told about climate change.
How many lives have been destroyed, and continue to be ruined, because self important prophets like Erlich and yourself continue to push empty scare stories? I am not suggesting you and others are deliberately setting out to destroy lives – but the destruction of young people is an incontrovertible consequence of the horror themed message you and other well meaning activists are pushing.
And after the climate story finally dies, there will be something else, some new panic. There always is. From witchcraft to resource depletion to global cooling to global warming, someone always tries to frighten the kids.
Please wake up, and quit being part of the problem Bob Carr.
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Scaring and scarring the kids is nothing to such propheteers. But frightening their horses, that’s another matter.
An intelligence test.
Prediction 1, false
Prediction 2, false
Prediction 3, false
Prediction 4, false
What is the apriori probability that prediction 5 is not false? That it is not a prefiction.
Erhlich published his book at the point where world population growth turned: if it had continued at mid 1960s levels, yes, there would have been a problem.
anyway, why the continued Erhlich obsession among skeptics?
There is much more recent science and evidence to consider…
You’re not different from Erhlich, and the science doesn’t make you smarter
The population growth did not turn, it continued to grow, just at a slower rate.
Ehrlich claimed that 100’s of millions would be dead with a decade or two.
Just how does the fact that population grew by 1.9 billion instead of 2 billion prevent that prediction from becoming true?
It’s relevant because the same idiots are still making claims of doom and despair, and those new predictions are also failing, for exactly the same reason.
There is much more recent science and evidence to consider, quoth Griff.
There is indeed, and it all goes to disprove Ehrlich’s predictions.
There is 5.5 times the body mass of termites than there is of man kind on earth, apparently.
Anyway, man made CO2, thats increased crop yields by about 35% I have read, since 1900. Thats one reason Erlich was wrong, but principally he falls into the human ‘the end is nigh!’ trap.
Its nothing new, and every culture going back thousands of years, has suffered from it. In fact religion, which Climate Changism is an example of, is just another ‘the end is nigh’ scare story.
The end is not night, the earth has about 8 billion years before our sun goes supernova on us and mankind and all of life, will continue to evolve. The future, what we will achieve, will be quite staggering. What we must do though is rid ourselves of this fear, this straightjacket, that we are inherently guilty of some sin, that we must be punished. We are not, we are free, we have the right to live and use the planet as every species has. We must stop limiting ourselves.
If you look at the comments on that SMH article you’ll find almost complete agreement with Carr and Erhlich. Why? Because its comments section is one of the most censored of any “media” I’ve come across. I haven’t managed to get a comment published in more than a year, mainly because I (politely) point out the glaring mistakes in the articles. SMH isn’t a newspaper, it’s a propaganda sheet that only allows groupthink and on no occasion does it ever to any mathematical calculations to back up its claims.
SMH is dedicated to making the Sydney bourgeoisie feel good about their hypocritical virtue signaling. All champagne socialists.
About Bob Carr, this guy fashioned himself as a modern day Marc Aurelius, an enlightened despot way above everybody else
anyone wonder what was going through the heads of the folks who created the Sahara, just as they were finishing their self-appointed task
or the Minaoans as they put the finishing touches to the vast expanse of desert that was The Fertile Crescent. (Made it a great place now for playing with Boys Toys and squabbling about Oil)
or the Aborigine as a continent-sized rainforest was reduced to the dust we all know and love
I know what what going through their heads: Sugar was going through their heads
There’s one, arguably,Galactically Great Thing about Sugar – it makes its consumers happy; it blinds them to reality.
As in Climate Science’s endless confusion with Heat/Temperature/Energy..
Do not confuse Calories with Food
edit to PS
Somewhere I saw the word ‘Pig’
Get this and cry
Peta; where did the sugar come from? Given the history of sugar, I doubt those people had any at all before the spread of Islam and the Aborigines not before western colonialism. It must have been something else.
As to the pig article it’s a sad thing, the knock-on effect of lockdowns and the pingdemic, but I guess David Cameron might be interested?
Eric,
While the Prophets of Doom have been part of the human experience for countless millennia, they have never had the power to destroy young minds like they do today! The Internet and the multiple devices, that most are addicted to, are not just crippling our ability to think, they are destroying our ability to communicate; one of the most important human characteristics that sets us apart from other animals! Most animals communicate in some way or other, but human communication is many orders of magnitude greater!
That’s why disinformation and it’s purveyors, like Professor Paul, are so damaging to society! Human communication gave us the ability to work together to find food and shelter, and avoid danger. Now we have vast swathes of the public believing in the nonexistent dangers of a climate apocalypse, while living in luxury and feasting like the royalty of old! It is going to take generations to clean up all the garbage that Ehrlich and his fellow priests have dumped into our society!
Perhaps in the future Humankind will stop allowing this sort of child abuse, and keep the pushers of panic porn separated from society until they start speaking rationally!
The profits of doom also control the media and the schools. That’s never happened in the past either.
“China Bob” [he’s fallen conspicuously and completely silent on the CCP’s vast, on-going Crimes Against Humanity] wrote, “…Ehrlich was wrong to talk up the threat of world starvation, to overlook the new plant varieties and farm techniques that enabled food to keep pace with population.” But, Bob, food production has not just kept “pace” with population growth, food production has far outstripped it, despite governments seriously suppressing food production in different ways.
Paul Ehrlich IS NOT a biologist.
I expect that this assertion will be shocking and will trigger the immediate reaction of many people.
But, please, take a deeper look at it, give it some thought:
When Ehrlich started to make predictions and “deducing” from them his “no-alternative” political (and democracy disruptive) proposals, he ceased to be a scientist, a biologist, and became a politician. He changed his field and scope of inquest; perhaps he became a “social” scientist; in any case, he has been no longer a biologist.
It is crucial to be aware of this fact when evaluating political actions that are based on his arguments and try to anchor undemocratic, Malthusian policies in “the science of biology”: his arguments ARE NOT scientific, they ARE political or ideological.
I was one of that generation bast*rds like ehrlich n strong removed hope from and didnt see a future worth a damn for myself or kids so I didnt have kids and led a life of want n poverty, going without to save the planet
thats why i am So Angry at the same crap different era happening now, and keep trying to wake people up to the never ending LIES!
Seriously? Professor of Climate and Business?
I was born in 1952, and the big, perpetual and very popular imaginary peril of my childhood and youth was thermonuclear war. Smart people were building bomb shelters. Earnest and very bright people (Bertrand Russell comes to mind) were certain that there was a significant risk that human beings would destroy themselves in a global nuclear war.
Greenpeace was originally founded with the goal of nuclear disarmament. Of course, as years went by, and then decades, and it became obvious that mutual assured destruction actually did deter the use of nuclear weapons, and the general population fear of nuclear war subsided and became the province of neurotics and cranks, Greenpeace had to come up with a new way to monger fear and monetize it. And climate change was that new way. Very profitable too.
I hope they step up their alarmism as we probably enter a La Niña. It will make for some teachable moments. I also hope they start to actually follow through on zero carbon 2050 in key economies, so we can show what devastation that has.
I rather hope we get a clear La Nina signal that stops the decline to net zero – I wouldn’t wish that level of mortality and misery on any society.
Bob Carr the unelected Minister of the Left just loves his own voice believing he is relevant whereas really he is just another entitled lefty piggy with his snout in the trough gobbling up taxpayer funds on the good life.
Not to be listened to!
Well Erlich scared my pants off, literally. I was so frightened I immediately saw my doctor and had him do a vasectomy so I wouldn’t be part of the problem. My wife at the time thought it was a good idea, taking the pill was adding to her weight problem. (So she said) Years later my second wife wanted kids and the world starvation problem was gone so I had it reversed. Two kids and couldn’t be happier. Never trusted the man after that.
An unidentified person asked Ehrlich about a cover story in New Scientist that said the world’s temperature had increased by a degree and, if it rose by 3.5, we would flood most of the earth.
I presume we’re talking in degrees Fahrenheit here as the world’s temperature had not risen by 1C in 1971. Therefore, Ehrlich seems to agree that the icecaps will melt if the temperature increases by1.94C (3.5F). And given that Ehrlich does not deal in really long-range forecasts (1971 – “everyone’s scared”, according to Ehrlich) I expect his timeframe for 1.94C and an icecap melt deluge has come and gone.
Ehrlich is a Professor of Wrongology.
Per the above article, Bob Carr stated “According to one physicist, it {the doubling of the world’s population and accompanying doubling of power consumption–GD} explains at least half the warming.”
That’s a lot to lay off on “one physicist”. ROTFLMAO.
Blood and Green. Planned population and phobic predictions. Diversity (e.g. racism), inequity, and exclusion. Political congruence (“=”) and wicked solution. The Pro-Choice (ethical) religion.
He was flat wrong on resource scarcity predictions and anyone who praises that is doubly stupid.
He was in fact making a prediction in an area that he had no expertise or training in and those he asked for help were not much better.
He was a man born ahead of his time – he fits in with the climate enthusiast crowd perfectly, or maybe Ehrlich was where they got the template.
So Paul Ehrlich is the Joe Biden of the social sciences. Never been right once in his career.
Nearly 100 years old and in radiant twinkly-eyed health typical of a wealthy pampered elite darling.
Happy to be condemning billions to poverty, ill health and short lives by the economic destruction flowing from his Malthusian dystopia that is such music to the ears of power-brokers determined to keep their elite small and reduce population any way possible.
Like Ehrlich they have it completely wrong, it’s economic growth and societal development that are resulting in smaller families and falling population growth – one word of Hans Rosling is worth more than 1000 of Paul Ehrlich.
Causing economic destruction under an environmental pretext is not the way to reduce populations and conserve the environment. It’s just a hate-filled political vendetta.
Email sent.
+++++++++++
Dear Mr. Carr,
It is a pleasure to be able to free you of fright about the climate and CO2 emissions.
Peer-reviewed, published, open-access, and correct, “Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections” demonstrates that climate models have no predictive value.
None.
See for yourself: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
The IPCC speaks from ignorance. Paul Ehrlich spoke (and speaks) from ignorance. So does your one physicist.
And, from the review process, I have 60 MB of evidence that climate modelers are not trained to evaluate the reliability of their own models.
No one knows what, if anything at all, CO2 emissions are doing or may do to the climate.
The effect of CO2 emissions, if any, is so far below their level of resolution as to be invisible to climate models.
As to the climate itself: nothing unusual in view.
Be reassured, Mr. Carr. Nothing is there of which to be scared.
Happy to help out.
Yours,
Pat
Patrick Frank, Ph.D.
email: XXX@xxxxxxx
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
These things are, we conjecture, like the truth;
But as for certain truth, no one has known it.
Xenophanes, 570-500 BCE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No reply as of 31 August. Pretty typical.
In another email episode, I wrote to Jim Kossin who was featured in a WUWT article 3 weeks ago. Jim’s a NOAA scientist, an IPCC author, and apparently is a professional advisor about climate risk. He wrote that we should all be scared about AGW.
So I sent him a reassuring message and a link to my paper. Jim wrote back that he’s “an empiricist” and that his views about climate are “based on observed changes and physical process understanding.”
After I responded that everything AGW relies on unreliable climate models, that radiation physics is not a theory of climate, and that the climate has varied significantly all across the Holocene, Jim reverted to type. Silence.
These people have no reasonable argument. Merely convictions.
I am not a psychologist, but I will hazard a guess here that the behavior of people like Paul Ehrlich and Michael Mann is the product of a emotional and psychological need for fame and fortune in front of large crowds and TV cameras.. I believe I read somewhere that Mann is worth over a million dollars.
With the letters ‘Phd’ after their names, all people like Ehrlich and Mann have to do to get the mass media attention that they crave is to create and/or nurture a gloom-and-doom narrative to which mass media with gladly attach themselves. They will do whatever it takes to attract viewers and readers. It works every time with the great masses of people who don’t know any better.
Ehrlich is approaching 90 years old now, so it is hard to say how much longer he will be around. When he is gone, all that will matter is that he obtained the fame he wanted. For him and Mann, the climate scare narrative was the dream of a lifetime.
Maybe they were both nobodies that thought they were entitled to be noticed and showered with accolades. When they didn’t get that as an automatic right, they wanted to tear down the system and replace it with one that was a better fit for their fantasy. Fantasists with delusions of adequacy.
Marx was wrong about everything but that doesn’t stop the Marxists. We are simply dealing with a broad class at people who live in an alternate world in which facts, reason and simple observation mean nothing.
Marxists were the first group of people who when given the choice between a model of reality, and reality itself, always choose the model.
It is madness to argue logic against emotionalism. I suggest that they mostly know their statements are BS but they have a stronger understanding of what drives the media and by that path politics.
Bob Carr is a slimy bastard but he knows how to get a run in the media. How many stories that we read here are going to make the front page news? Very close to zero I am guessing, yet we keep on banging on against brain dead ‘horror’ stories as if we are prophets of common sense, yet nobody is buying or reading common sense!
Attack is the best form of defence.
I remember when this population explosion scaremongering crap hit in the 1960s, I was born in 1962. We were all doomed – doomed! because there would soon be too many people, but here we are nearly 8 billion people later and people are living better, longer and healthier than ever before. You can take all the people on this planet and put them in texas and each person would have 100 square meters of living space…so you see there is plenty of room on this planet for more, many more people.
I for one look forward to the day when earth has 100 billion people living on the open oceans and colonies on Mars. The universe is vast and can support an infinite number of humans. Ever watch star trek?