Climate Scaremongering Antidote: mankind is making progress, doomsayers are low-credibility distractions

Picture: http://kabiza.com/images/buga25.jpg

Pierre Gosselin reports on a recent article in a German publication which points out just how much progress has been made over the last century or so, and how the doomladen forecasts of such as Paul Ehrlich have been refuted time and time again.  Such facile, highly articulate but profoundly stupid, doomsayers will no doubt always be with us, but must we take them so seriously?  Perhaps the spectacle of the IPCC disappearing in the quagmire of its own making will help this along.  Anyway, back to the article which is reported on here: http://notrickszone.com/2011/01/26/german-focus-magazine-facts-show-planet-much-better-today/

Extracts below are in italics, other words are by Gosselin:

'Human prosperity

   " The world’s population has grown 6-fold since 1800, and at the same time life expectancy has doubled. Between 1955 and 2005 inflation-adjusted average personal income has tripled for the average person on the globe.”

Many of the poor indeed have gotten much richer.

Agriculture

How often do we hear about the threats of industrial agriculture devouring land to feed the exploding masses of people? Guess what? Modern agriculture protects wildlife and forests.

    "With the crop yields of 1961, farmers would have needed 32 million square km of cropland to have fed the 6 billion persons on the globe in 2000. Instead they have been able to harvest the necessary amount of crops on just 15 million acres. That means an area almost the size of South America was spared the plow. Forests and savannahs were thus saved."

All thanks to modern agricultural technology, which today continues to develop nicely. Yet, today, many greens are busily bemoaning the very agriculture that has rescued millions of sq km of forests and wildlife from primitive manaul agricultural practices. Worse, they also want us to fuel our cars with bio-diesel, which would require the extra deforestation of millions of sq km.'

The report on the article ends as follows:

' The future
So what lies in the future now that we have seen that every apocalyptic warning heard earlier in history has ended up being just fly-crap in the wind? The business of apocalypse is a big industry and involves lots of money – so don’t expect the end-of-world-charlatans to go away. There’s more money in it today than ever.

Being wrong every time isn’t going to deter today’s modern charlatans. They have a whole new line-up of catastrophes in their bag of tricks: climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, species extinction, to name some. And, there are plenty of malcontents out there who want to hear more, more, more.

But I suspect, like the earlier scares of the past, we’ll soon be able to put those on the list of seriously endangered species as well. Here today, extinct tomorrow.'

 
Schoolteachers should not be forced to show such travesties of truth and decency as 'An Inconvenient Truth', full as it is of doomladen prophesies based on errors of various kinds, including the error of forgetting that the truth will out in the end, and that people are not so dumb as Al and those behind him suppose.  But while teachers may be required by their curricula to propagate ill-founded scares around CO2, they may also have the freedom to inform their charges of all the amazing progress we have made in modern times. Reports such as the one linked to above will help with examples, as will books such as Matt Ridley's 'The Rational Optimist'.