A letter to the editor and a number of personal letters and phone calls criticised a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago challenging the efficacy of global warming. I guess my trouble is that over many years I have seen “cry wolf” so many times that I've become a sceptic.
Set aside the claim the world was freezing over as postulated in the 1960’s. Next up was the Club of Rome, a group of distinguished academics and scientists who in the 1970’s claimed that the world would run out of oil before the new millennium with dire consequences for civilisation.
Greenpeace, a wealthy American multi-national and another great doomsayer recently said that the world was now awash with oil and therefore the Russians have no need to drill in the Arctic Circle for more. Some of their dopey advocates attempted to hijack the giant oil rig and are now languishing in a Soviet gulag complaining of the cold and the fact that their captors don’t speak English.
Last week the International Panel on Climate Change said that starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, wars and disease will worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change.
I recall back in 1986 the Wairarapa Catchment Board, the forerunner to the regional council, calculated that due to global warming the sea at Riversdale Beach was encroaching towards the land at a rate of a metre a year. The Masterton District Council panicked and put a hazard zone restriction on most of the beachfront houses. 27 years later the waves still lap the shore exactly where they always have.
I also remember being taught at secondary school that the low-lying Pacific atolls would soon be under water and uninhabitable. I’d hate to admit to you how far back that was.
But the doozey of all doom and gloom merchants was undoubtedly Paul Ehrlich who scared the living
The battle to feed all of humanity he wrote in The Population Bomb is over. “In the 1970’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. We need to rapidly bring the world population under control,” he warned, “Reducing the growth to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved.”
Ehrlich even floated the idea of adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply or staple foods and expressed support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.
I’m thinking the Politburo in China must have bought the Chinese translation and this was their catalyst for the one child per couple policy. Apart from the words cousins, aunties and uncles disappearing from the vernacular as a result, the Chinese are now discovering that there are not sufficient young people coming along to create enough wealth for their ageing population in retirement.
Let’s just examine Ehrlich’s other predictions. In 1970 he forewarned that in ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of the coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
Well at least we were going to have a coastline, which will have surprised the boffins at the Catchment Board.
In a speech in1971 Ehrlich predicted that by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. “If I was a gambler,” he said, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
“When you reach a point where you realise further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me,” he said, “Is 1972.”
And so Ehrlich is back in New Zealand peddling more of this nonsense and I’ll bet he’ll find a willing audience morbidly hanging on his every word and subsequently criticising the rest of us for not preparing for the worst.
His latest rant is that Earth has too many people consuming too many things and imposing far too much stress on land and water and that only unprecedented cultural change provides any hope of averting a catastrophe.
Sounds like The Population Bomb all over again.
If I had my way I’d put him in a Russian jail.
You can't be serious with this. You miss the point the science says climate change is real and is being caused by humans. That point is not up for debate. How can someone who is clearly ignorant of science be on the local hospital board?
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