Category: Econut O’ The Day
A once darling of the climate alarmism community-turned skeptic climate scientist Judith Curry told John Stossel that the “man-made climate change” narrative is a “manufactured consensus” because researchers found that they could make money pushing it.
The video released on Tuesday pointed out how some scientists take aggressive attempts to hide data that shows that climate change isn’t a crisis. She said they do “Ugly things” such as “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”
The media insist a “scientific consensus” says climate change is a manmade crisis.
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” researcher @curryja tells me.
Curry knows—she once spread alarm about climate change.
Now she reveals the nefarious ways “the science” is corrupted. pic.twitter.com/EHTN413Vv6
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) August 8, 2023
“The origins go back to the…U.N. environmental program,” Curry said about the “climate changed industry.” She noted that some UN officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”
She pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was set up “to look for dangerous human-caused climate change” and “not focus on any benefits of warming.”
Curry discussed how science journals aided in promoting one side of the narrative. She pointed to an instance of an editor of the journal “Science” who once wrote, “The time for debate has ended” in a political rant.
“What kind of message does that give?” she asked. Then said it promotes “the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.”
Curry was highly promoted after she published a study that showed an increase in hurricane intensity. She said, “We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled.”
“This was picked up by the media, alarmists said ‘Oh, here is the way to do it.’ Tie extreme weather events to global warming!” she added.
Curry said after that she was “treated like a rockstar.” She added that she was “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”
However, it was after seeing critics of her work point to other periods with lower levels of hurricanes that she went back to investigate. She said it turns out “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.”
The man-made climate change narrative has shifted public policy on a global level. The Biden administration has a goal to reduce greenhouse admissions by 50 percent by 2030. A goal that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to meet it. The administration gave the Environmental protection agency $576 billion in the 2022 omnibus spending bill.
Climate czar John Kerry recently claimed that their climate policies were not rooted in ideology but “math, mathematics, and science, about physics.” In June, Multnomah County in Oregon filed a lawsuit against oil companies, alleging that they caused a heat wave in 2021.
There’s too much money in geoengineering for “climate change” not to turn into a business. The Biden administration is already studying blocking the sunlight. Now Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement joins Solar Radiation Modification.
-Richard Fernandez
Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project: ocean-based carbon removal
A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, has spun out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of using the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.
Additional Ventures, cofounded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small-scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting for those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.
The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet.
But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds that nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt, or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.
The ground-up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline, or used in onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.
When the toxic media push enough hysteria, vulnerable individuals will be affected.
BLUF
Refutations of this narrative are easily found, if you know where to look. Not, however, in the pages of the New Yorker. Read Drs. Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry. Read Alex Epstein or Bjorn Lomborg. Read other serious energy experts at (mostly conservative) think tanks and organizations.
That will expose the real rationale for all of this: the desire by some to control resources for all. Those invested in the “green economy” of wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles want to justify banning their competitors for long-term profits. Rational answers also expose their cynicism. And they have the added advantage of being true.
Welcome to the ‘Climate’ Nut House.
Like everyone, we at The Pipeline have our moods. So when we stumbled across the recent “Therapy Issue” of New Yorker Magazine we were intrigued enough to see what they had to say about things. After all, given the unhappy realities of America’s elite, liberal culture, and the depression, anxiety, and isolation that has been so widely reported since the Covid lockdowns, maybe they knew something we don’t.
And, indeed, in one particular article we learned that there is a whole new category of mental illness stalking young people in particular, leading to despair, loneliness, and a sense of impending mortality. Its title: “What To Do With Climate Emotions?: “If the goal is to insure [sic] that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?” It turns out, according to author Jia Tolentino, that the highly ideological “climate change” narrative has taken a serious toll on them, plunging them into a deep depression over the putative impending death of our planet.
I think we need to end the bossy class instead.
Climate Expert: Gas Car Cancellation Is Intended to End Private Transport.
Soon after a World Economic Forum partner was caught calling for an “end” to private car ownership, a climate expert is warning that the push to cancel gas-powered cars is just a ploy to end private transport. The climate crisis is a hoax, but it’s such a darn useful hoax for authoritarian globalists.
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano went on Fox Business Thursday and discussed how the Democrat and globalist push to replace gas cars with electric vehicles (EVs) isn’t about helping the environment but restricting Americans’ freedom of movement. “This really isn’t about them driving an electric car,” Morano said, highlighting how this is a top-down decision not based on popular demand. “This literally is — the banning of gas-powered cars — is being done just like a COVID lockdown without a vote,” he added. From California to the Biden Environmental Protection Agency to Australia, leftists are trying to force ordinary citizens into a corner with their gas car restrictions.
Indeed, Pew Research Center published the results of its new survey on June 28, which found that “Less than half of the [U.S.] public (40%) favors phasing out the production of gas-powered cars and trucks.” It’s also significant that EV batteries actually generate lots of toxic waste, so they’re not better for the environment.
“The intent is not to necessarily force people into an electric vehicle,” Morano went on. “The intent is to collapse our plentiful freedom of movement and force us to use mass transit. They want us on the subway.” It’s a global collusion. “They want us on buses. That is what this is about,” Morano insisted. “[Former UK PM] Boris Johnson’s transportation secretary said owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’. They are rationing vehicle use. It’s very simple. You can look at Cuba to see how that turned out; you are going to have a lot of used cars.”
Morano also called out the hypocrisy and deception of U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, who just testified to Congress and denied owning a private jet (though his family owned a private jet for years):
Now, keep in mind when John Kerry was confronted publicly last time was in Iceland. He flew on a private jet to Iceland to pick up an environmental award, and he gave the original defense, the equivalent of ‘Do you know who I am? I am so important I have to fly a private jet. I am trying to save the climate.’ But he doesn’t have time to be with the masses on a commercial airplane.
What he said today was, ‘I don’t own a private jet’, and ‘We don’t own one,’ meaning his wife owned one — until last year. And now he says he has been on only one flight and that goes against a lot of contradictory evidence. There is evidence that shows that since the Biden administration started, he has been on several dozen private jet flights.
Bill Gates was asked the same thing, and he said he gives to carbon offset funds when he flies a private jet. Al Gore actually had the same exact line about 20 years ago, he said he didn’t own a private jet without addressing whether he flew in them. This is Bill Clinton-level parsing.
Climate alarmists have been wrong for 50 years, and they’re not right now. But many of the top-level climate propagandists don’t believe their own lies (which is why they fly private jets). As Morano emphasized, climate hysteria is a political tool to end private transport and thus give governments ever more control over people’s lives.
BLUF
One final point: imagine how much further along the world would be today if the $4.1 trillion spent on wind and solar over the past 18 years had, instead, been spent on developing and deploying the next generation of nuclear power plants. That would be an energy transition worth writing about.
We are inundated with claims about the “energy transition.”
In February, E&E News, reporting on the State of the Union speech said, “President Joe Biden laid out his vision for the energy transition Tuesday night.” In March, a reporter for Politico declared “The U.S. energy transition is well underway.”
Also in March, during a speech at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that “As this transition progresses, our energy mix will change.” Or consider the March 9 press release from the White House, which said “The Administration is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already galvanizing our clean energy transition and making clean and energy efficient technologies more affordable for American families.”
I could list many more examples like the ones above. But the hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review of World Energy show, once again, that despite rapid growth in wind and solar, those two forms of energy are not even keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons. That’s true both globally and in the U.S.
And here’s the key point: hydrocarbons are prevailing despite staggering amounts of spending on wind and solar. According to a January report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.
Democrat Donor Arrested for Starting Massive Fire Democrats Blamed on Climate Change.
What happened: Authorities busted a Democratic donor for allegedly starting a “ginormous inferno” in Yosemite National Park. Democratic politicians had insisted climate change was to blame for the blaze, which destroyed more than 100 homes and injured several firefighters in July 2022.
• Edward Fredrick Wackerman (his actual name) of Mariposa, Calif., faces a number of charges including aggravated arson following his arrest on Friday.
By the numbers: The arson suspect has donated $1,775 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2020, government records show, including a $1,000 donation to Tim Ryan’s failed U.S. Senate campaign in 2022 and $400 to the Lincoln Project, a disgraced liberal super PAC.
• The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.
What they’re saying: “Ed Wackerman is facing several felony charges, including aggravated arson. These charges carry serious legal consequences and the District Attorney is committed to ensuring a fair trial and upholding justice,” Mariposa County District Attorney Walter Wall said in a statement. Authorities did not say how Wackerman is believed to have started the fire.
What they said: “Thank you to all the firefighters and first responders working tirelessly under difficult conditions to combat the #OakFire,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D., Calif.) wrote on Twitter on July 25, 2022. “Worsening drought and severe weather will only continue to put lives and property at risk from wildfire if we don’t take climate action NOW.”
• “More people will be killed and the survival of our civilization is at stake,” former Vice President Al Gore said on July 24, 2022, citing climate change as the reason “droughts and fires are hitting us so hard.”
Crucial context: Several days before Wackerman’s arrest, authorities busted Democratic donor Themis Matsoukas for allegedly performing sexual acts with his dog at Rothrock State Forest in Pennsylvania. “I do it to blow off steam,” the Elizabeth Warren supporter told investigators.
• Matsoukas is 64 years old; Wackerman is 71.
Bottom line: We need a total and complete shutdown of liberal Baby Boomers entering state and national parks until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
In honor of the widening fronts in the war against “climate change,” the-Pipeline.org takes pride to announce that the remainder of this month will be devoted to further analysis and refutation of this malicious hoax, which feeds off irrational fear in order to impose severe lifestyle restrictions on the people of the West — who, after all, created the technology that has made our current prosperity possible. Such prosperity, however, is intolerable to the philosophical and lineal descendants of the Frankfurt School, who have made it their mission since the end of World War II to dismantle the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian first world and force the rest of the planet to return to to ignorance, superstition, and savagery.
Having failed to destroy us with the Covid Hoax (even the loathsome Facebook nazis have given up on it), the Left has now moved “climate change” front and center as the international left’s preferred soul-sapping means of destruction.
Based on the small (in the cosmic scheme of things), 140-year-old sample of randomly gathered temperature data, jealous and vengeful cultural Marxists have decided to extrapolate from cherry-picked, manipulated, and massaged data to convince a gullible and trusting public that the world is coming to an end any day now, unless we act now. Like sleazy used-care salesman, they employ scare and pressure tactics in order to get you to work against your own best, self-preservative instincts and willingly destroy infrastructure, cripple food production, kill sea life, and incinerate forests.
The key to their successful sowing of confusion can be found in the Heisenberg Principle, which states: “we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.” In popular understanding, this terms of physics is expressed thus: the act of observing a thing changes its behavior and the closer it is observe, the more its nature becomes unclear. Or, if you stare at the word “cat” long enough, you can convince yourself that “cat” is misspelled.
The same is true of the “science” of “climate change.” No one from the ancient Greeks to the mid-Victorians would have seriously entertained the notion of “man-made climate change” were it not for the relatively recent invention of rudimentary means of measuring temperature and forecasting the weather. Armed with this little bit of knowledge, we have now created — in our own minds — the dangerous thing called “climate change.” Take that, Aristotle!
Rationing for the ‘unwashed masses’ has always been the goal.
Climate Change is just the excuse.
Climate Change Activists’ Embrace of Rationing
Seth Barrett Tillman, Associate Professor
Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology
(academic title & affiliation for identification purposes only)
June 20, 2023
Irish Examiner
Letters Editor
letters@examiner.ie
RE: John Gibbons, ‘Why we should ration the distance each person can fly every year,’ Irish Examiner (June 20, 2023, 11:55 AM),
John Gibbons suggests a 1,500 km annual allotment per Irish national/resident for air travel. So you could do Dublin–Paris round trip. Europe is within reach.
But if you are a new Irish national, from Caracas, Venezuela, and you’d like to visit family and friends: Dublin-to-Caracas is a 7,000 km distance, just one way. And if you are a new Irish national, from Cape Town, South Africa, and you’d like to visit family and friends: Dublin-to-Cape Town is a 10,000 km distance, just one way. And if you are a new Irish national, from New Delhi, India, and you’d like to visit family and friends: Dublin-to-New Delhi is an 8,000 km distance, just one way. Even Rabat, Morocco is over 2,000 km from Dublin.
Under Gibbons’ scheme, as near as I can make out, if you want to visit a historically Caucasian-majority country in Europe, then you can continue to do so tax free. But just go try and visit some third-world country where the majority population’s skin tone has a different complexion, and then you will be taxed for the privilege.
If one of Ireland’s minuscule right-wing nationalist parties proposed such a policy, they’d be labelled bigots. But if the very same policy is put forward in the name of environmentalism and climate change, precisely what conclusion should we draw?
Is mise, le meas,
Seth Barrett Tillman
Michigan’s fourth-largest school district is having “significant” performance issues with its expensive electric buses, issues that come after the Biden administration spent $1 billion to “transform America’s school bus fleet” with electric models.
During an April 19 presentation to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education, the district’s environmental sustainability director, Emile Lauzzana, highlighted a number of issues with the district’s electric bus fleet. Those buses, Lauzzana said, have “a lot of downtime and performance issues” and aren’t “fully on the road,” despite the fact that they are “approximately five times more expensive than regular buses.” The infrastructure upgrades required to use the buses, meanwhile, were “originally estimated to be only about $50,000” but “ended up being more like $200,000,” according to Lauzzana. “I have a number of colleagues in different states who are facing similar challenges,” the district official lamented. “For the school bus market, it’s been challenging for us.”
Just months before Lauzzana’s admission, President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency announced it awarded nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funds to “transform America’s school bus fleet” with “over 2,400 clean school buses that will accelerate the transition to zero emission vehicles.” But problems with electric buses occurred long before the agency’s announcement.
“OUR CHILDREN WILL NEVER SEE SNOW”
The scientific method works as follows: 1) You come up with a hypothesis. 2) You look for the implications of the hypothesis. What will be the case if the hypothesis is true, but will not be the case if the hypothesis is wrong? 3) You carry out observations or run experiments to find out whether the facts implied by the hypothesis do or do not obtain. 4) If you find that a fact implied by the hypothesis is indeed the case, it provides support for the hypothesis. If you find a number of such facts to be true, as implied by the hypothesis, then you may have strong support. 5) But it is not conclusive: if a fact or condition implied by the hypothesis is shown by observation or experiment not to be the case, then the hypothesis is refuted, and you go back to the drawing board.
Global warming hysteria is politics or religion, not science. This conclusion follows from the fact that the global warming models have generated many predictions that turned out to be wrong. A single wrong prediction is enough to disprove a model. Numerous, consistently repeated failures mean that the model is a joke.
The global warming models predict that rising temperatures will cause a precipitous decline in snowfall. Thus, alarmists like Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia, the main center of global warming research and propaganda, predicted 23 years ago that:
…within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
This prediction, like so many others generated by defective models, has failed to come true. In fact, there has been no decline in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the last 50 years:
Speaking for myself, I will add that my four children have come of age during this time when alarmists assured us that snow was about to stop falling, and they have not lacked for winter fun. This year, we had a long, cold, snowy winter and a late spring. We had an unseasonably late snow storm on April 1 that dumped massive amounts of heavy, wet snow on the Upper Midwest, bringing down many trees, including one that narrowly missed my house.
If the global warming alarmists actually cared about science, they would admit that their models have proved to be wrong, apologize, and shut up for a while. But the imperative of left-wing politics allows no respite from their misguided labors.
Extreme cold in Antarctica is coming earlier than expected this year
Apparently there are too many measuring stations from different nations in Antarctica, so that fraud in the sense of climate madness is not possible. Since the beginning of May, temperatures of down to minus 76.4 degrees Celsius have been measured at the Vostok research station. However, the current season in the southern hemisphere is still autumn. Low temperatures are unusual for this time of year. The norm for the location in May is -61 to -64 degrees Celsius.
Climate fanatics might consider it a success. Because they stick to the ground in European cities, are temperatures dropping at the South Pole? Hardly likely. However, it is a proven fact that the temperatures in the Antarctic in 2023 will be significantly lower than the ten-year average. Between 2005 and 2015, temperatures between minus 61 and minus 64 degrees Celsius were measured for the month of May.
Extreme cold should not be reached for months
Lowest temperatures are usually measured in Vostok when the northern hemisphere has its hottest summer – i.e. July, August and sometimes September. The fact that the Antarctic winter broke out in May with such temperatures is considered a special feature. The Russian measuring station was set up in 1957 at a distance of 1,300 kilometers from the South Pole at an altitude of 3,500 meters. The previous minus temperature record is said to have been reached on July 28, 1997 with minus 91 degrees Celsius (Wikipedia speaks of “unconfirmed”, July 21, 1983 with minus 89.2 degrees Celsius is confirmed). The warmest day in recorded history was January 5, 1974 with “only” minus 14 degrees Celsius.
Of course, spot temperature records are due to “weather” and not the “climate” that is supposed to be warming and from which we are all meant to die unless we regress to a pre-industrial age in trees and in caves. At least that is the plan of the climate apocalypticists – although many of them also dream of a depopulation of the earth.
Temperatures in Antarctica have been falling for 40 years
As early as 2021, scientists reported the “ coldest winter season in more than 60 years ” in Antarctica. After a trend has been emerging since 2021, one could cautiously speak of “climate” here. It would be time for politicians to come to their senses and stop destroying the wealth of western countries and citing some fictitious climate targets as the reason for doing so.
This article on Eike Klima Energie also shows with clear tables that no global warming has been detectable in the Antarctic for at least 40 years. Rather, a cooling can be detected at the German Arctic station. Conclusion there: The winters are getting colder at the South Pole. The current measurements seem to confirm this theory.
Just in from NOAA:
No warming in the US since January 2005, despite 44% more atmospheric CO2.
If every emission warms the planet, where's the warming?https://t.co/9hM6Zu4hdr pic.twitter.com/dhkRqxarHi
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) May 18, 2023
GloBULL Warming
Baby, it’s still C-O-L-D outside
I know a lot of people have their hearts set on eating bugs, and the world ending with pestilence and fire devouring humankind. Cranky as they are in their native, foaming-at-the-mouth state, the sort of intermission we seem to be in right now on our march to our self-induced, fiery (or watery, if you’re, like, on an island or in Miami) climate change doom just makes them worse. You know, the scrabbling around in Saharan dust looking for excuses to explain why we’re…well…frustrating as it is…not all dead yet. Or drowned. Or at least have wet ankles.
Considering the weather outside lately, if we were expiring in any great numbers from Global Warming/Climate Change/anything AL Gore’s ever predicted, our bodies would be well preserved into early summer.
Take the U.K.: “Balmy” is not the word for springtime in England this year.
This morning, -7.4C (18.7F) was the UK’s official low temperature, set at Loch Glascarnoch, Scotland. This breaks the nation’s coldest-ever low for the date, previously held by Glenlivet’s -6.1C (21F) set in 1956.
Mainland Europe is also enduring a late-season freeze, bringing heavy show [sic] to the higher elevations–most notably the Alps.
Our very own wild west is wooly, too, but that’s what they’re wearing, not a state of mind. Records have fallen over like frozen antelope. The snow and ice coverage extent measurements have only started since the advent of satellite monitoring in 2001, but when you approach doubling the average?
HELLO
…Starting with the chill –and according to ‘warm-mongering’ NOAA data– the U.S. has set 7 ‘all-time’ low temperature records so far this year (to April 24) vs just the 1 for heat; while in April alone (again to the 24), 321 ‘monthly’ lows have fallen vs 66 for heat.
Moving onto the snow –and in official books dating back to 2001– prior to this year, the highest-ever area of Western U.S. land covered by snow/ice at the onset of April was the 398,000 square miles posted back in 2019. This year, however, has blown past that benchmark, with satellite imagery revealing more than 444,000 square miles of the West was under snow/ice as of April 1.
For reference, the average snowpack in the Western U.S. by the end of March stands at 242,000 square miles.
That crucial mountain snowpack is at record stages in many parts of the west.
…The estimated water content of the western snowpack on March 15, 2023, expressed as a percentage of 1991-2020 average for that time of year. Areas in darkest blue, from parts of California into Nevada, northern Arizona and southwest Utah, were most above average. A number of 150 means it is 50 percent above the average for March 15.
The Central Sierra Snow Lab at Donner Pass has tallied 668 inches – over 55 feet – of snow this season, their third-snowiest season since the end of World War II.
That’s a boatload of frozen goodness that will be joining the rain in the rivers and reservoirs when it starts to melt, besides causing mayhem with flooding already saturated hillsides and inland valleys.
Crazy! In #LakeTahoe, the staff at Bear Valley Ski Resort posted this before/after photo. That’s a lot of snow! pic.twitter.com/IRzFUeW8jl
— News Source LA (@NewsSourceLA) March 14, 2023
After 53 [now 54] Earth Days, Society Still Hasn’t Collapsed.
Cassandra in Greek mythology was the Trojan priestess who was cursed to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. Ideological environmentalism features a cohort of reverse Cassandras: They make false prophecies that are widely believed. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 classic, The Population Bomb, prophesied, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich continues to predict imminent overpopulation doom.
Another reverse Cassandra was Rachel Carson who warned in her 1962 Silent Spring of impending cancer epidemics sparked by humanity’s heedless use of synthetic pesticides. In fact, even as pesticide use has risen, rates of cancer incidence and mortality have been falling for 30 years.
On the occasion of the 53rd Earth Day, let’s take a look at the prophecies of another reverse Cassandra, the Club of Rome’s 1972 The Limits to Growth report by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. The book and its dire forecasts were introduced to the world at a March 1972 conference at the Smithsonian Institution. Let’s focus primarily on the report’s nonrenewable resource depletion calculations. The 1973 oil crisis was widely taken as confirming the book’s dire scenarios projecting imminent nonrenewable resource depletion.
