The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming
Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome
(TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s
co-founder, Alexander King with
Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
They believe all these problems are created by humans
but exacerbated by a growing population using technology. “Changed attitudes and behavior” basically means
what it has meant from the time Thomas Malthus raised the idea the world was
overpopulated. He believed charity and laws to help the poor were a major cause
of the problem and it was necessary to reduce population through rules and
regulations. TCOR ideas all ended up in the political activities of the Rio
1992 conference organized by Maurice Strong (a TCOR member) under the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The assumptions and objectives became the main
structure of Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century. The global
warming threat was confronted at Rio through the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and creation of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). It was structured to predetermine scientific proof
that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”.
The IPCC was very successful. Despite all the
revelations about corrupted science and their failed predictions (projections)
CO2 remains central to global attention about energy and environment. For
example, several websites, many provided by government, list CO2
output levels for new and used cars. Automobile companies work to build cars
with lower CO2 output and, if for no other reason than to appear green, use it
in advertising. The automotive industry, which has the scientists to know
better, collectively surrenders to eco-bullying about CO2. They are not alone.
They get away with it because they pass on the unnecessary costs to a befuddled
“trying to do the right thing” population.
TCOR applied Thomas Malthus’s claim of a race to
exhaustion of food to all resources. Both Malthus and COR believe limiting
population was mandatory. Darwin took a copy of Malthus’s Essay on Population with him and remarked on its
influence on his evolutionary theory in his Beagle journal
in September 1838. The seeds of distortion about overpopulation were sown in Darwin’s
acceptance of Malthus’s claims.
Paul Johnson’s biography of Charles
Darwin comments on the contradiction between Darwin’s scientific methods and
his acceptance of their omission in Malthus.
Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encourage the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law… in fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States.
There was no point at which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every 25 years everywhere and in perpetuity.
He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need, he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one.
Darwin’s promotion of Malthus undoubtedly gave the
ideas credibility they didn’t deserve. Since then the Malthusian claim has
dominated science, social science and latterly environmentalism. Even now many
who accept the falsity of global warming due to humans continue to believe
overpopulation is a real problem.
Overpopulation was central in all TCOR’s activities.
Three books were important to their message, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment (1977) co-authored
with John Holdren, Obama’s
Science Czar, and Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, published in 1972 that anticipated the IPCC approach of computer model
predictions (projections). The latter wrote
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
Here is what the TCOR web site says about the book.
They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection.
They estimated the current amount of a resource,
determined the rate of consumption, and added an expanding demand because of
increasing industrialization and population growth to determine, with simple
linear trend analysis, that the world was doomed.
Economist Julian Simon challenged
TCOR and Ehrlich’s assumptions.
In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ – a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with – Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”
Simon proposed,
You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted – copper, tin, whatever – and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
John Holdren selected the materials and the time.
Simon won the bet.
Global warming used the idea that CO2 would increase
to harmful levels because of increasing industrialization and expanding
populations. The political manipulation of climate science was linked to
development and population control in various ways. Here are comments from a PBS interview with
Senator Tim Wirth in response to the question,“What was it in the late 80s,
do you think, that made the issue [of global warming] take off?” He
replied,
I think a number of things happened in the late 1980s. First of all, there were the [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen hearings [in 1988]. … We had introduced a major piece of legislation. Amazingly enough, it was an 18-part climate change bill; it had population in it, conservation, and it had nuclear in it. It had everything that we could think of that was related to climate change. … And so we had this set of hearings, and Jim Hansen was the star witness.
Wikipedia says about Wirth,
In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore chaired the 1988 “Hansen” Senate Hearing and was
central to the promotion of population as basic to all other problems. He led
the US delegation to the September 1994International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo
Egypt.
That conference emerged from Rio 1992 where they linked population to all
other supposed problems.
Explicitly integrating population into economic and development strategies will both speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty alleviation and contribute to the achievement of population objectives and an improved quality of life of the population.
This theme was central to Rio+20 held in June 2012 and
designed to re-emphasize Rio 1992.
The Numbers
The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is
perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global
warming and latterly climate change. So
what are the facts about world population?
The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was
6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it
passed 7 billion; the difference
is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242
listed by Wikipedia. It confirms
most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on
individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them
Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most
people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5
percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world
with approximately 35.3
million residents estimated in 2013with California
where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010.
Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in
a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by
the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person.
Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live
there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans
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