Maine Owl

George Will is at it again, waving his shallow understanding of the history of the development of climate science in order to pound politically President Obama's Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, and others who would argue that action must be taken globally to reduce fossil fuel burning.

Dark Green Doomsayers
By George F. Will
Washington Post - Sunday, February 15, 2009 - Page B07

... Others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975)

Will scarcely comprehends the context of the state of knowledge about climate change during past decades. Spencer Weart's "History of Global Warming" could be helpful. In a nutshell: There has been a massive paradigm shift since the 1970s with respect to understanding rapid climate change. Major discoveries were made in climate history during the 80s and 90s showing just how fast global-scale changes can occur. Furthermore, consensus on the likely direction of rapid change has developed since then--consensus that did not exist when those 70s articles appeared, as a decent reading of the better articles Will himself cites would reveal.

Others have listed the many errors in Will's climate-related statements. However, no one seems to be dealing with this:

Will: Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

Will, of course, presents here the cornucopian view that mineral resources do not deplete, but rather expand over time because they are "created" by entrepreneurship and market economic forces.

My view is that the cornucopian position is crazy talk. Oil and minerals in the ground are finite. Period. Civilizations collapse when the key ingredients they are based on run out. Paul Ehrlich's bet was based on mistaken assumptions about the time scale and economic conditions over which prices will respond to depletion. This is not something anyone easily can predict. The silly incident does not repeal depletion, or prove that John Holdren will be a bad science adviser.

Will should take to heart the axiom he quotes: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."