It's increasingly difficult to believe the wilful stupidity of the BBC, their blind ignorance, and their dogged determination to keep us all in a fog of superstitious error.
The other night BBC4 screened an edition of Horizon entitled “The End of the World? A Horizon Guide to Armageddon”, in which Dallas Campbell examined scientific predictions about the end of the world. Campbell is one of the presenters of the BBC1 “science-lite” series “Bang goes the theory”, though not himself a scientist but an actor.
The programme was deeply alarmist, but anything about the end of the world would be, I suppose. There was stuff about all the usual culprits – the super-volcano under Yellowstone Park, the tsunami-in-waiting locked into the cliffs of the Canary Islands and so on. There are one or two inconsistencies about both of these threatened events – scientists tell us that Yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years and time is almost up, but I don't believe there's any actual concrete evidence of the last eruption, or the one before that, and although we've seen recent examples of the destructive power of tsunamis, I have never heard of any scientific evidence of a tsunami four-and-a-half kilometres high, which is what they're predicting from the Canary Islands, in the entire history of the universe. There was one in Alaska that sort of slopped a long way up the hillsides by the shore, but not four-and-a-half kilometres or anything like it. Still, what do I know?
What stuck in my throat was not the BBC's failure to explain that they were talking about largely discredited theories from thirty or forty years ago, but that Paul Ehrich was prominently featured. Remember that name – Paul Ehrlich? We've written many times about this scientific fraud, the ludicrous predictions he has a habit of making, and the masterful confidence which enables him to keep making predictions even when they're proved comprehensively wrong by history.
In a forty-year career this man has almost never been right, yet he's still predicting stuff and being taken seriously by the Guardian and the BBC. Only recently he featured in the Guardian: “The world's most renowned population analyst ...” (huh!) “... has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor. Ehrlich, who was described as alarmist in the 1970s but who says most of his predictions have proved correct, says he was gloomy about humanity's ability to feed over 9 billion people [the predicted population peak in 2050]."
This is the man (the world's most renowned population analyst, remember) who said in 1968 “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. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” He predicted four billion deaths, including 65 million Americans. But in fact since 1968 the world population has doubled to seven billion but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25 per cent. There are famines still, but the death rate has gone down. Unless the CIA are better at keeping secrets than I give them credit for, a significant number of Americans haven't starved.
About the same time Ehrlich said “The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion.” India was doomed, and should be left to die in order to concentrate resources on those places that could be saved. Luckily the Indians took no notice. They just pressed ahead with what they call The Green Revolution, a series of technological and agrarian advances that transformed their ability to produce food. India now has a booming economy, is a nuclear and space superpower, and a net exporter of food aid. In the next hundred years most economists think the three major players will be China, Brazil and India, and bloody good luck to 'em, I say.
Closer to home Ehrlich predicted that "by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000". Apparently we all either starved or drowned and never even noticed! Silly us.
In America Marc Morano has said “Ehrlich should go down in history as one of the most disgraced scientists that we have ever seen ... (he) should be disgraced, scientifically, politically, culturally - instead he is given awards and he is praised by the Obama administration. It is a perversion of science”. Morano points to a 1972 article in which Ehrlich suggested adding a forced sterilization agent to staple food and water supplies and, warning of 'unpredictable climatic effects', called on the US to 'de-develop'.
One physicist mocked Ehrlich as 'mad, a kook, a lunatic obsessed with doomsdays, and a parasite on the Academic system ... his career built on making absolutely preposterous statements. He's the Bernie Madoff of science ... wrong on virtually everything he has predicted about future state of the world'.
Ehrlich's prescription to deal with the catastrophes he was inventing has been, in every case, for the individual to surrender his/her autonomy and future, to an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful central entity that'll make all the hard, life and death choices for them. The fact that a similarly megalomaniac ambition governs the IPCC and the UN's policies on climate change is probably the reason why Ehrlich has not been exposed as the fraud he is. The UN wants world government, and so does he.
Morano explains that Ehrlich's error over 40 years ago was to take a snapshot of current trends and project it forward into future. He was trying to project population growth vs. technological change, which in the end he got completely wrong. Now, he and other leftist climate scientists are trying to project a snapshot of recent global average temperature trends into the future. Unfortunately for them, they understand the climate change process about as well as they understand the process of technological advancement. He has never been right about anything. You could literally become a millionaire by betting against his every statement.
Yet still the man can claim without blushing that most of his predictions have proved correct, which is the diametric opposite of the truth. And still the BBC, an internationally respected broadcaster supported by the British taxpayer and government, is peddling his views in a major pseudo-science programme without adding any rider. You or I would have been careful to say “This is what Ehrlich was saying in the 1970s ...” or “... but subsequent events have proved him wrong”.
But no. The BBC and Dallas Campbell are happy to present this forty-year fraudster as a bona fide scientist and his loopy theories as fact.
It came as no surprise, therefore, when the programme moved on the Global Warming. The ice sheets are melting, the Antarctic continent is coming apart and starting to flower with lush growth of green plants, sea levels are rising, low-lying countries are doomed and all the rest.
Did he mention the thousands of scientists who don't believe it? Did he add a caveat that in the words of former US Navy Meteorologist Dr.Martin Hertzberg the global warming scam is “slowly unfolding; it's beginning to crumble like a house of cards”? Did he admit that in 2012 the Arctic sea ice is greater in extent than it has been for years and larger than last year by the equivalent of Texas and Oklahoma combined, that sea levels have hardly risen at all and nothing like as much as was predicted, that the Gulf Stream continues to flow as normal, that some glaciers are actually growing, not melting, and that there is not a scrap of compelling evidence for man-made global warming and that in fact the only scary 'evidence' that exists is based on computer models, none of which have been proven and all of which reflect the biases of the people loading in the data?
Well, no, he didn't. He, like the BBC and the Guardian and the liberal middle class everywhere, are still buying in to the Global Warming myth simply because their weak intellects demand a religion to lean on in these troubled times and political parties aren't quite cutting it lately. The Church of England doesn't come up to scratch, the Catholic Church is riddled with Nazis and sodomy, happy-clappy born-again-ism is intellectually démodé and a bit redneck, Islam might be all right but there's the danger of having to wear a special waistcoat to the Olympics ... but Global Warming is just right: it's free, you don't have to go on Sundays and do embarrassing prayers, it's easy to defend because you can always claim that anyone who disagrees with you must be in the pay of Big Oil, the 21st Century equivalent of Old Scratch, and no one will think badly of you because everyone's on the side of sweet little animals and trees and stuff, aren't they?
Well, not Jeremy Clarkson of course, but he tends not to carry too much intellectual weight in the dining-rooms of Islington and Camden Town ...
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