Pseudo-scientists are just as wrong as Rapture folk about end of the world
Posted: 11:04 PM, May 28, 2011
Ha ha. Harold Camping — what an idiot! He predicted the end of the world on May 21. Last week, the Christian radio station owner said he was kind of right, though no one else noticed, and anyway the judgin’ will continue until (new date!) Oct. 21 of this year, when the world really and truly will be destroyed, probably.
What you didn’t know is that after his loony prediction, Camping was promoted to full professor at Stanford and rewarded with adoring mainstream press coverage, more than a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show,” prestigious awards and praise from the Obama administration’s chief science advisor.
Sorry, I got one detail wrong. It wasn’t Camping who reaped those earthly rewards for his cosmic wackiness. It was Paul Ehrlich.
In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe tract, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis.
He came by this not through Divine Revelation but through Divine Equation, a k a the liberal scripture of pseudo-science. Ehrlich “calculated” using the equation I = P x A x T. This means that Human Impact (I) on environment equals the product of Population, Affluence and Technology.
No room for imprecision there!
Conclusion: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death . . . nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the human death rate.” Ehrlich predicted England would cease to exist by 2000. (N.B. he meant the whole country, not just that pathetic soccer squad.)
In 1970 he thundered, “In 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” He boomed that by 1980, life expectancy in the US would decline to 42 years.
Not quite getting the message, the world population both a) continued to grow and b) lived longer and healthier than ever.
Ehrlich has groused that he was kinda sorta right, and the worst you can say is that, like preacherman Camping, he was a little early.
President Obama’s point man on science, John Holdren, is an Ehrlich man. A text version of a speech Holdren gave in 2006 was accompanied by a footnote in which he praised Ehrlich’s call to end population growth “a key insight
. . . the elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.”
There are Ehrlich-men everywhere, and that ehrlich is German for honest just makes it so much richer, doesn’t it?
In 1970, when the first Earth Day caused the first spike in atmospheric baloney, Life “reported” that “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .” (Note to younger readers: Visible smog was the thing we were all afraid of before we became afraid of invisible carbon emissions.)
Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote at the time, quoting with approval Dr. S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institute, that “In 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Time quoted ecologist Kenneth Watt as saying there wouldn’t be any crude oil left by 2000. A scientist named Harrison Brown at the National Academy of Sciences said the world would be out of lead, zinc, copper, tin, gold and silver by now.
“Dead Heat” author Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said in 1990 that by 1996, the greenhouse effect “would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” More recently he said, “On the whole I would stand by these predictions.”
Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at England’s climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 that because of global warming, within a few years, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and flurries will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Heavy snowfall in England last year was, of course, also attributed to global warming.
Scientists love to see their names in print, don’t they? Coincidentally, they also love grant money, book deals, awards. The easiest way to obtain these things is by alarmism. No one ever made a buck saying, “The situation in the future will be pretty similar to what it is now.”
All Harold Camping has to do to be treated as a genuine visionary is to change the words at the beginning of his doom sermons from “the Bible says” to “science says.”
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com
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