Doomsday for Doomsaying?
The Commons Blog
By shayward on Environmental Alarmism
I've been wondering for a while now whether Paul Ehrlich-style doomsaying hasn't about run its course. (I reflected on this at length in a recent AEI commentary, which can be found here: aei.org. After all, Ehrlich once sold millions of copies with Simon & Schuster and appeared frequently on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Now he publishes with Island Press, and doesn't even make it onto cable.
There are even starting to be some cracks in the environmental press. Nature magazine gave bad reviews to Gus Speth's Red Sky at Dawn, and also to another doomsaying book, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, which is by 11 authors. Of Speth's book, Nature's reviewer concluded: "Speth shows as little regard for contemporary evidence as he does for the reliability of previous forecasts of doom. . . Speth raises serious issues, but they deserve a more balanced treatment than the prescriptions in his book."
Hans von Storch, who has been increasingly clear-headed and helpful about climate change, wrote the Nature review of the Global Change book, and among other things said: "the book is a good demonstration that the environmental sciences are driven not only by curiosity and reductionist interests for detailed processes, but by an endeavor to integrate different sorts of often uncertain and contested knowledge claims from a broad field of disciplines-in an area that has high stakes. The result is an effort with a normative agenda of improving or saving the world. . .We can already see that large parts of the public and politicians, in both Europe and the United States, no longer trust many of the knowledge claims advanced by environmental scientists."
The obvious exception is the current best-seller status of Jared Diamond's doomsaying book, Collapse, currently number 2 on the best-seller list. But I suspect this owes more to his prior reputation, and predict that this book won't have the legs of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and may turn out to be a career dead-ender for him. |
