Joe Romm squeals at Climate Progress:
In a collective act of media irresponsibility, the New York Times and Washington Post have joined the Wall Street Journal in publishing “don’t worry, be happy” articles days before the big UN climate science report will say quite the opposite.
We expect the WSJ to be a haven for disinformation, and as I discussed Sunday, Matt Ridley didn’t disappoint. But it’s sad when we see at the very same time
— The Washington Post publish a piece downplaying the climate threat from the well-known and well-debunked confusionist Bjorn Lomborg, and
— The NY Times run a Pollyannish piece, “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem” which asserts, contrary to much recent science, that, “There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity.”
It also happens that the Low Band (the only one ever even close in its predictions) of the UN Population Survey projects a peak around 8bn by 2045 or so. The demographic chart is going pear-shaped, and depopulation looms as a far more serious problem than overpop.
BTW, there’s no “d” in refrigeration, or in its pronunciation. Just in the colloquial abbreviation, “fridge”.
Half O/T: David Suzuki has turned up in Australia and been welcomed with one of the all-time great fiskings:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/09/false-notes-and-the-suzuki-method
Romm’s hockey stick graph is imaginative, I give him that. Particularly the red bit at the end.
“… “just about every one of their prediciotns…” That is not correct. It is not “just about”, it is Every Single Prediction of Doom; and the record stretches back in an unbroken row to at least Thomas Mathus’ essay on Populaiton, i.e. 1798. Only the Sectarians predicting the Second Coming have a worse track record.
Sorry, can’t go to Climate/Think Progress to read the rest of Romm’s rant; it would count as a “hit” for the website and I wouldn’t feel right about that.
Hey, you know what’s really good at reducing waste and spoilage? Fossil fuel powered transportation and refrigeration. R-12 helped a bit too.
Tha was supposed to be amount of land under cultivation is “decreasing”
For some reason I can’t post comments at Think Progress.
May just send this to Joe Romm directly:
Joe,
It is the folks pushing the “carrying capacity” meme who are not backed up by facts and are generally irresponsible. Doesn’t the fact they have been wrong with just about every one of their predictions over the years tell you something? Has Paul Erhlich ever gotten it right?
Food production is up world wide. Amazingly, it is occuring at the same time the amount of land under cultivation is increasing. Yet the capacity crowd chooses to ignore this. Or they make unsupported claims about how climate change is going to have all sorts of negative impacts. So far, after 50 years of changing climate, the negatives have yet to show up. Another piece of information ignored is the percentage of food grown lost to spoilage and waste. That figure is 40% in the US alone (mostly waste) and over 50% world wide (mostly spoilage). Instead of spending trillions on CO2 reduction projects which have highly questionable abilities to impact climate, doesn’t it make more sense to spend the money on addressing food loss? Or perhaps on inexpensive electrification to the world’s poor? With affordable energy comes access to clean water. It brings refridgeration, meaning less spoilage of foods. It brings a lessoning of burden to women, who then have more time for things like education, made easier by having light to study by and ability to access distance learning methods through tv and computer. And it has been well documented that with increasing levels of education, women are able to choose to have fewer children, thus taking care of the population problem.
But hey, if you want to play the role of the boy who cries climate wolf. go ahead. We all know how that story turned out. I’d be more concerned about the elephant – ie. real problems.