Here’s a great video from Reason.tv on “The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen.” I have asked, seriously, why people still pay attention to hysterical scare-mongers like Paul Ehrlich. I’ve been told it’s because they “raised awareness” of environmental issues, but after reading The Population Bomb and other screeds–and I use that word deliberately–by the more radical elements of the environmentalist movement, it’s pretty clear that Ehrlich and others have not “raised awareness” of global environmental challenges. They have fueled hysteria about non-problems (overpopulation, for example) that have obscured rather than highlighted the real environmental and social problems we face (poverty, disease, racism, etc). There are a lot of words I would use to describe these endeavors. “Laudatory” is not among them.
One of the things I love about my job is that I get to spend a lot of time around thoughtful, passionate students who are willing to listen and eager to learn. I’m meeting with a student group called The Ruka this evening to talk about economics, the environment, and intentional community. Here’s more about the group, and here’s their blog. My tentative theme for our discussion will be “Dietrich Bonhoffer Meets Friedrich Hayek.” I look forward to an excellent discussion.
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Overpopulation – In order to save them, we have to kill them.
Ok, there is one very simple explanation why the top 5 environmental disasters did not happen. Some people rang the warning bells very loudly, the warning was heeded. So it did not happen. There is also another simple explanation isthat environmental alarmists where dead wrong.
Now of course it is not possible to go back in time, silence those who made the dire predictions and then compare the outcome with our present timeline. This video is misleading. It makes it seem like a good idea that to ignore environmental alarmists while the truth is, the evidence is not clear either way. I fail to see how it ever can be. And yet, the environment matters to everyone. What to do?
Perhaps on some of those issues the truth was cloudy, but most of them were outright lies. Overpopulation was a questionable issue at best and modern hydroponic technology has made it completely irrelevant(as for space, there’s still plenty of desert that can be turned into housing space if you don’t want to go vertical); DDT’s carcinogenic effects are unproven and the effect on birds at most called for more restrained use of the stuff; climate change – if it’s happening – is very unlikely to be anthropogenic in nature(part of the reason they can claim it is is the timing of the Industrial Revolution with the end of the Little Ice Age – of course temperatures have risen since) and preventing it’s just playing God.
Your kind of truth is subject to a lot of uncertainty. Any new fact you may discover in the future could force you to re-evaluate your knowledge about climate change or DDT. But the alarmist has all angles covered.
The position of the person who says there is no cause for alarm is always weaker than that of the person who raises the alarm. Any disaster anywhere can undermine the non-alarmist. A flood here, a tsunami there, an earthquake elsewhere. Even a snow storm can be evidence of global warming. If the disaster comes to pass the alarmist is right, if the disaster does not come to pass, it is because the alarmist gave an early warning. See? Win-Win.
Overpopulation was an issue. The alarm was sounded. Techniques where invented to mitigate the issue.
DDT had known effects and unknown side effects. The alarm was sounded. So the use was restricted. Which is why there are no DDT related problems now.
The climate cycles where being disrupted, the alarm was sounded a climate crisis was averted. So no climate crisis.
But if there was an overpopulation issue or a DDT toxicity problem or a climate crisis right now, then too the alarmist is right in the most obvious way.
So basically no future event can prove the alarmist wrong. While any future event could prove the non-alarmist wrong. So while the alarmist’s claims are future-proof, the claim of the non-alarmist is exposed to any uncertainty the future may bring.
Knowing that one must decide what to do when someone raises alarm.
The key here is proper application of Occam’s razor: That the alarmist was wrong is a strictly simpler explanation than that their bell-ringing averted the crisis. In order for the alarmist’s claims to be taken seriously, evidence needs to be provided for the counterfactual that IF the alarmist hadn’t caused an uproar over it, the predicted event would have occurred. For the DDT issue, for example, the environmentalist has to provide evidence that, if the bans and restrictions on DDT were not enacted, major environmental catastrophe would have occurred. And this evidence needs to be strong enough to outweigh the hypothesis’s complexity penalty. Needless to say, this evidence has not been produced.
Frist of all Occam’s razor does not exactly state the simpler explanation is the most plausible. It states, ‘plurality must not be posited without necessity’.
As for this:
That is just a bit more convoluted way of causing an uproar. If his audience is full of people like you, that is exactly what he would present. Then you act on it, his position is secure no matter what the outcome..we are back to square one.
Seattle
Another way of dealing with this is to consider the rule of who is responsible for providing proof for their claims. The burden of proof always rests upon he who asserts the positive. So, the alarmist and his chum boys must provide proof for their assertions. In the absence of proof such assertions may be regarded as arbitrary and discarded without further consideration.
In the first instance the alarmist is asserting the positive (the world is overpopulated by people, Man’s activities are responsible for global warming, the sky is falling, etc.). In the second instance the alarmists’ wee chummies assert that in the absence of timely alarmist warnings disasters would have occurred, that they did not is supposedly due to people of power and means listening to the alarmist message (overpopulation did not occur because the alarmist’s warnings were heeded and so billions of people were not born and many of the living were eliminated prematurely by various means, the world’s climate has not gone as wild as warned because world governments slowed or eliminated much of Man’s activities taxing and restricting and and regulating and erecting recession, the sky hasn’t fallen because brave bureaucrats heeded the warnings and are collectively holding the sky up, etc). As you might expect none of these assertions have been proven. Unlikely they ever can be. Best discarded.
Sione
Sione:
.. the sky is falling.
Actually, the environmental frauds are reverse Chicken Littles. They are claiming that the sea is rising. Perhaps they are relativistic Chicken Littles.
Both you and Seattle have missed the point. Of course the burden of proof is on the alarmist. But the proof being provided for is a supposedly likely state of future events. It is not like in a court case, where proof is used to establish the happenings if an unchangeable past.
So the alarmist has an alarming vision of the future and provides evidence for it. Whatever the quality of evidence, whatever the outcome, no future event can prove the alarmist wrong. If the sky fell, the alarmist was right, if the sky did not fall, the alarmist’s warning it was because the alarmist’s heeded to.
Nonsense. They even mentioned in the video how Ehrlich’s suggestion was to stop sending food to China and India. It was following the advice of these fearmongers that would have brought about the problems they prophesied.
Again, if they problem prophesie and the prophecy comes true, it appears to vindicate them. Outcomes cannot make them wrong. Interpretation of outcomes can. But then shortcomings in the methods of the interpreter could be discovered. The game goes on and on.
Yes population is a biggest reason for the disasters so we should keep try to minimize that….
What amazes me is the amount of backlash in the comments on youtube. Everyone seems to have a hard on for hating Monsanto, and they’re trying to claim Reason has sold out. Insane.
If you do not believe in intellectual property, you would hate monsanto. You see how people in mises.org are ranting about how copyrights are making many good works disappear from the market and how making property of a non-scarce good(information) is ending up contributing to further scarcity among non-scarce goods (books, movies, songs, etc.,).
Well Monsanto is creating artificial scarcity by patenting genes. Genes believe it or not, is information. By patenting genes you can enhance scarcity in anything that uses the (food crops, plants, flowers, trees, etc.,). If all goes well, through the monopoly of the genes, monsanto can obtain monopoly over all life forms in the biosphere. Monsanto ought to be hated and feared.
I pretty much hate Monsanto for that very reason. That and suing people for having their fields cross polinated involuntarily under that very patent regime.
That’s like saying “if you do not believe in the almighty power of Vishnu, you would hate followers of Hindu.” Of course “intellectual property” is not property, and patents are illegitimate. That doesn’t mean anyone who files for one should be “hated and feared.” Seriously…”hated and feared”?
The whole point of that video was to show how all the fearmongering from the environmentalist church is unfounded, and people accuse the makers of the video of “selling out”. All I did was point out this fact and you basically tell me that if I knew any better I would “hate and fear” a company that wasn’t even mentioned in the video.
Say what?! Your analogy is exceedingly out of place. You brought up the company that was not mentioned in the video. I just responded to your comment. Monsanto by the way is not “anyone who files for a patent”. Monsanto tries to use gene patents to control food globally. That claim is easy enough to cross check that I will let you do it yourself.
There is the fear-mongering environmentalist and then there is genuine concern for the environment. If you cannot distinguish between the two, that is a problem.
If my analogy is so inaccurate one would think you would at least demonstrate why.
And I mentioned Monsanto because that is the name flooded in the comments of that video. I was commenting on the ridiculousness of the reaction to Reason’s video. You are the one who presumed to tell me who or what I should “hate and fear”…just like those commenters.
I would also love to hear your fundamental differentiation between Monsanto and any other patent enforcer. Your entire reasoning for why I should “hate” the company is because they utilize intellectual property laws. So please, explain how I should “hate and fear” one company for filing for and enforcing patents, but not feel the same way about anyone else who does the same thing.
There is the logical and consistent philosophy of liberty, and then there is the pick-and-choose capricious ideology of “whatever I happen to think”. If you cannot distinguish between the two, that is a problem.
I did not explain why your analogy is obviously inaccurate because it would lead the discussion away from the important issues and I prefer not to. In any case, you are the one who here started commenting about what is not even in the video and then it is somehow inappropriate to responding to that comment because it is not in the video!!
You want to know about the fundamental difference between controlling food through patenting as opposed to software or movies? We can survive without software and movies but we cannot survive without food. That is the obvious difference behind all differences. If Monsanto monopolizes the food market through patents they decide who lives and who dies. Simple enough?
Nah, it is just fear-mongering right?
Ah the ol’ “I could do that. I just choose not to” excuse.
Again, as I said, it was the commentors on the video on the actual YouTube page who invoked Monsanto when the company wasn’t even mentioned in the video. I was merely likening those people and their nonsense comments to the nonsense comments here. Just because I addressed the fact that ignoramuses brought up Monsanto doesn’t mean that I was condoning its introduction…quite the opposite. It was you who took that name and ran with it…telling everyone they should “hate and fear” the company. Much in the same vein as the very commentors on YouTube I was talking about.
And of course I understand the difference between the industries of Monsanto, and say, Microsoft. That doesn’t change your logically inconsistent argument.
You are talking too much nonsense, that I find little reason to continue on with this thread. There is little intelectual content in your argument. It is mostly hotair from a self-righteous windbag. The intellectual impotence in your arguments can be summarized as such?
You merely used too many words to say that it was ok for you to talk about Monsanto, but not so ok for me to respond to you about Monsanto because ‘it wasn’t even mentioned in the video.’ Then you implied there is no fundamental difference between Monsanto and any other patent enforcer and concluding thereby that I my argument was logically inconsistent, challenging me to show the difference. When I showed the difference, you said you knew it all along, but my argument was inconsistent anyway.
I expect that there is more hot air in this windbag. After all you did revitalize a thread that was two months old. So you will probably respond and if you do, don’t expect me to respond back. You are just not worth my time. If you are really that desperate for a response, you could consider paying me for it.
Now it is only a guess, but I expect that next you will accuse me of making arguments that I never made and then go on to debunk it.
And you’ve finally reduced to psychoanalysis and name calling. What a surprise.
All I said was that I was amazed at “the amount of backlash in the comments on youtube. Everyone seems to have a hard on for hating Monsanto, and they’re trying to claim Reason has sold out.” And you launch into this whole line of nonsense telling me that Monsanto utilizes IP enforcement and that I should “hate and fear” the company because of it.
For one, it has nothing to do with the video, and that was part of the point I was making originally, and two, your entire reasoning for why I should “hate” the company is because they utilize intellectual property laws. And then of course when attention is called to your logical inconsistency in hating one company for invoking IP and not hating others who do the same thing you resort to the most puerile recourse tactic in all of debate, and ironically pretend to be riding off on some high horse while doing it. Pathetic.
You are twisting my words, so fools will believe you.
Oh? Like when you said you wouldn’t be posting anymore? lol
It’s very possible that there exists some validity within the prognostications of doomsayers. However, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and nothing is more squeaky than an idea which is recognized by politicians as a gateway issue to more government oversight and control (vote-buying) and then pumped-up and sold to the masses in the scariest form possible for purposes of creating a polarized, debate-resistant, holier-than-thou majority that can not be cracked until decades of unfulfilled forecasts assuage the fears generated by death-is-just-around-the-corner rhetoric. By then, countless debilitating laws have been passed and, subsequently, countless politicians and their specially interested cronies have retired rich.
When will someone finally get recognized for sounding the alarm about a massive, unsustainable buildup of laws which will kill us all by some randomly picked date? I won’t hold my breath.
“We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Stephen Schneider, environmental activist, in “Discover”, Oct. ’89
I have a hard time with some of the info in #5. There are many GM crops that are made to be resistant to a particular pesticide. This has worked for a time, but now we see the rise of many stronger forms of weeds that are now resistant as well. The companies involved are big lobby spenders and also employ PR firms to shape opinion concerning their companies and product. A current example of this is the rebranding of High Fructose Corn Syrup as no different than Sugar. Sugar is sugar. Soon we’ll probably see a push to have labeling rules relaxed to allow HFCS to be simply called sugar. A further example would be Canola Oil (there is no Canola plant).
Thanks to IP and the incestuous relationship between Big Ag and Big Gov’t, GM crops are being pushed on people. I’m not against their existence, I’m just against the coercive tactics of their promoters.
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