Environmentalists Still Can't Get It Right Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions they would prefer we forget. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore's hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50% of the world's resources and "by 2000 they (Americans) will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000." Harvard biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look magazine, that by 1995 "somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct."....
Testing The Waters When the United Nations World Meteorological Organization recently reported that global temperatures had not risen since 1998, the explanation given by WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud was that the cool spell was the effect of the Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, "part of what we call 'variability.'" Well, oops, the Earth will do it again. According to a report by German researchers published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, shifting Atlantic ocean currents will cool parts of North America and Europe over the next decade as well. Noel Keenlyside of the Leibnitz Institute of Marine Science at Germany's Kiel University says "in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." The key to the Kiel team's prediction is the natural cycle of ocean currents called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO for those who aren't oceanographers or don't play Scrabble. The AMO is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the coasts of Europe and North America. The cycle is not well understood, but is believed to repeat every 60 to 70 years. According to the greenies, the Earth is supposed to warm continuously and disastrously without taking any rest breaks. Yet after taking actual data from the Labrador Sea where the Gulf Stream gives up its warmth before sinking and returning southward and projecting forward, the Kiel team says the Atlantic currents will keep rising temperatures in check around the world, much as the warming and cooling associated with El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific affect global temperatures. Howard Hayden, physics professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, has described the machinery of the computer models used by the IPCC and others to predict imminent and cataclysmic climate change as ones that take "garbage in" and spit "gospel out."....
Eye Of The Hurricane Colorado State University says it'll no longer promote the work of Dr. William Gray. Is it really a cost-cutting move or are CSU and eco-fascists trying to silence the godfather of hurricane forecasting? The university says its decision is based solely on the burdens of keeping up with media requests and inquiries about Gray's work that overwhelm a lone media staffer. It says the decision has nothing to do with the fact that Gray, professor emeritus of CSU's atmospheric department, has been an effective voice offering inconvenient truths debunking Al Gore's climate disaster theories. If these requests are too burdensome, we'd suggest CSU divert some funds from Frisbee 101, or whatever passes for higher learning these days, and hire another media staffer. We don't buy the excuse that inquiries relating to Gray detract from the promotion of others' work. The man is America's most reliable hurricane forecaster. If anyone's work should be promoted, it should be his. In a memo to colleagues after CSU officials informed him that media relations would no longer promote his forecasts after 2008, Gray wrote: "This is a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the department's capitulation to the desires of some who want to rein in my global-warming criticisms." And critical he has been. At last year's National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, Gray called Gore a "gross alarmist." "He's one of those guys that preaches end-of-the-world type of things," Gray told AP. "I think he's doing a great disservice, and he doesn't know what he's talking about." Gray says fluctuations in hurricane intensity and frequency, exhibit A in Gore's inquisition, have nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels or human activity, but with natural variations in ocean currents....
Are We Running Out of Food? Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, April 7 that there is a world food shortage, accompanied by skyrocketing prices. Because of this, poor people in Africa and other places are starving. Krugman's proposed solution to these problems is for us to give more of our money to government, so that it can solve the problem the market is apparently incapable of solving. And now, the real story: Regardless of whether one thinks the above-listed factors play a role in world food shortages, there are in fact two issues of primary importance related to food shortages and food costs that Krugman does not mention and may not know. First, the underlying cause of any shortage is the lack of a free market, since genuine shortages cannot appear in a free market. Instead, while prices of goods would likely rise at the onset of reduced supplies, the goods in question would always be available at some price — and the higher the price, the more the supply would increase to meet demand, which would then of course reduce the price. If we had free world markets, food would be exported from some countries, such as the United States and Europe, where food is plentiful, to countries where it is needed. This is because it would be profitable to ship goods to needy areas like Africa, where shortages were making prices rise. The fact that this is not currently happening can be a result only of government price controls (which prevent prices from rising in needy countries), trade restrictions, or some other government barrier that prevents people from getting what they need. The World Bank has cited a list of 21 countries that have price controls on basic staples. We all remember the stories of people in Ethiopia starving in the 1980s, when 3 million people went hungry. What was unreported was that there were 60 million people in Ethiopia at the same time who were unaffected by famine. The moving of food from one part of the country, where it was plentiful, to the other part, affected by drought, was prevented by fighting between the government and rebel groups near the area of the drought. Economic incentives were prohibited by the government's forced withholding of food shipments (so that rebel soldiers would not have access to supplies), by price controls, by the declaring of grain wholesaling illegal in much of the country, and by the prohibition of the private selling of farm produce or machinery. A similar situation occurred in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. Indian economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that most famines are caused not by lack of food but by governments' ill-advised intrusions into the functioning of markets....