I was getting pretty happy with Obama's appointments but this one I simply cannot agree with.
Hat tip to Luboš Motl for this bit of news and an excellent explanation:
Crackpot John Holdren will become Obama's science adviserBasically put, Holden is a Malthusian and Malthusians are invariably wrong. They are great for doom and gloom hypotheses but ten years later, their disasters have never materialized and our standard of living is higher than before. To have President Obama receiving Scientific concealing from such a ninny is a great disservice to this Nation. John Tierney also weighs in at the New York Times:
Science magazine reports that John Holdren, a professional environmental judgment day doomsayer, is going to become Barack Obama's top science adviser.
John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world.
Population growth means death
Do you want to know what is his specialization? Well, look at his publication list at scholar.google.com. No, he hasn't found anything about laser cooling, like Steven Chu, despite his PhD in plasma physics. Instead, he has only written 3 very well-known texts - with at least 100 citations - and all of them are about the "catastrophic" population growth. A few additional, newer articles with 50 citations or so are about the "catastrophic" climate change.
The most famous article, by far (400+ cits), is his and Paul Ehrlich's 1971 text in Science magazine: Impact of Population Growth.
The subtitle says that "complacency concerning this component of man's predicament is unjustified and counterproductive". In other words, it is an unforgivable crime not to be hysterical about the population growth. Wow. They study the "interlocking crises" in population, resources, and environment that have been the "focus of countless papers, dozens of prestigious symposia, and a growing avalanche of books".
Recall that the second author, Paul Ehrlich, predicted that 4 billions of people (90% of the 1980 total), including 65 million Americans (28% of the 1980 figure), would perish of hunger in "Great Die-Off" in the 1980s. Well, Holdren and Ehrlich may have narcissistically talked about "prestigious symposia" but it's hard to change the fact that events where people compete who is going to propose a more absurd die-off scenario are just gatherings of pompous loons.
Do I really have to argue that their forecasts have been proven remarkably wrong? Do I have to argue that all similar papers are likely to be wrong because the "arguments" in them are simply not rational? It's no science.
Flawed Science Advice for Obama?What he said...
Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science adviser? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science adviser on Saturday.
