I just loves me some Malthusians - NOT!
These are the morons who go around telling everyone how we are running out of resources and we are all gonna die if we don't do something big, political, and expensive right now! Anthropogenic Global Warming is a perfect example of this pox.
Tim Worstall delivers a wonderful smackdown writing at The Register:
Limits to Growth is a pile of steaming doggy-doo based on total cobblers
Keeping a technologically based civilisation on the road isn't all that easy. There must be stuff available to make stuff from and there's got to be energy to do the transforming of that stuff. If we posited something like The Culture by Iain M. Banks, where there's a universe of stuff to transform and an entire universe's worth of energy, then there's no real limit to either how rich that society can get nor how long it can last.
Similarly, if all the stuff runs out in a few years' time, as does all the energy, then humanity will go back to being a couple of million hunter gatherers pretty sharpish.
What we'd really like to know, of course, is which version of the universe do we inhabit: one where Paul Ehrlich is right and we all starved in the 1980s, or one in which, around 2300 or so, the Jetsons finally get their flying cars?
Fortunately we've had people trying to work this out for us. One example was the Club of Rome which got together to create a report called Limits to Growth.
This was very much more optimistic than Paul Ehrlich was: this report said that we should all start dying around about now as all the stuff ran out. It's not, as we can see around us, happening quite yet. Yes, people are dying in Ukraine and Syria and so on, but that's from an excess of high explosive being sent their way, not from a lack of it. Never mind, though, the Guardian tells us it's about to start happening real soon now:
Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse. Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon
Well, yes, real soon now, no doubt. And the guy who has checked this research must be believed: Graham Turner is a physicist who used to work for CSIRO in Oz. And CSIRO are just great guys: they actually cited me in one of their academic papers so they must be. So, obviously, we should all just curl up and die right now, right?
We mustn't forget these two quotes from Dr. Ehrlich (this link goes to a bunch of great wacko-enviro quotes):
Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.
-- Paul Ehrlich
Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics.
-- Paul Ehrlich
Time does a wonderful job of debunking the two logical fallacies used in the Guardian article. They are out-and-out lying to us.
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