A succinct appraisal of the irrepressible, egregious and ever wrong, Erlich. Thank you. You'd think the man would own up to his folly. Erlich, I think, appeals to those who consider themselves progressive and whose ideological views cannot be altered by evidence. Many Greens fit into this category. They wear their pessimism as a badge of honour, always hoping for (or creating in the case of climate) impending doom to prove them right. I am reminded of the following quote from Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist: "My disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change.” Hear, hear.

Curmudgeon

If it's not too late for you to read this. I apologise for my hasty terminology regarding the "millions killed in wars over land disputes." It should really have read IN wars and land disputes because wars are nearly always directly or indirectly started in relation to land ,even if the excuse is religious or access to resources or even a considered superior culture.

Some statistics can be obtained here -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

You will see the millions that died from wars and indiscriminate killing since 1967

Paul Ehrlich and quite a few others who were saying the same sorts of thing around 1967 were wrong about global collapse because they could not predict the success of the Green Revolution, since agricultural production was the really important limiting factor at the time. Even the agronomist William Paddock was caught out. In 1967 India was a net importer of food, already had large numbers of malnourished people, and had a population growth rate that was set to double the population in 30 years. It hardly took a giant leap of the imagination to predict trouble. As for the Ehrlich-Simon bet, Ehrlich's only problem was his timing. If it had run to the present day, he would have won. "An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart)".

http://www.economist.com/node/21525472

Now we are facing a wide range of different environmental and resource problems, according to the consensus of scientists in different fields from climatology to geohydrology, to soil science, even with much of the present population living in dire poverty (and we are going to get 2 or 3 billion more just from demographic momentum). We have been staving off declines in living standards by going into environmental overshoot, using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. When an aquifer is pumped dry, the water is gone. It is like Cohenite living it up while he runs through an inheritance or lottery winnings. Eventually the money will be gone. See

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2010.pdf

The Cornucopians have to either assume, with no evidence, that the world's scientific community is part of some vast conspiracy and lying to them about global warming, depleted aquifers, extinctions, deaths from pollution, etc. to introduce "socialism by stealth" or the like, or that a large number of technological solutions with no undesirable side effects are going to magically turn up in time to save us.

Divergence says:

"As for the Ehrlich-Simon bet, Ehrlich's only problem was his timing. If it had run to the present day, he would have won."

Yes, well timing is everything; if Erhlich can hang around to the heat death of the universe he is bound to be on a winner.

Commodity price rises occur for reasons other than scarcity; oil prices for instance can be and are controlled by cartel collusion; the scarcity can also be a product of the time it takes to develop new projects and pass the hindrance of green tape.

The Earth is awash with energy sources; you would have to be [ideologically] blind not to see that.

As for the old canard of population growth; population is, religious influence aside, determined by education, prosperity and emancipation of women. Those things depend on cheap energy, a free society and technology.

By doomsaying, objecting to 'unnatural' energy sources and attempting to limit prosperity and restrict freedoms those who advocate population control are creating the very problem they complain about.

That is a special sort of stupidity.

Ehrlich and his ilk are essentially Luddites who suffer from Future Shock; as I say, they are little people who project their own fears and shortcomings onto the rest of humanity.

It is not, as Divergence speciously says, about "living it up", it is about being forced to live it down to satisfy the irrational and childish fears of a group of people who have far too much influence, self-regard and far too little foresight and regard for the rest of humanity.

Cohenite,

The issue isn't just energy, but the fact that there are many ways in which humans are having a negative impact on the environment. These problems can't be fixed by just one technological solution, as in the case of the Green Revolution. What looks like a good solution to problem A can also sometimes make problem E worse. This paper by Rockstroem et al. from Nature identifies 9 different planetary thresholds relating to different environmental issues that define "a safe operating space for humanity".

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

open version: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

This second paper discusses the risks of crossing thresholds and tipping systems to a new stable state.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature11018.html

Note that these papers are from Nature, probably the most respected peer-reviewed science journal in the world. If a scientist started making pronouncements in your own area of expertise, you would most likely proclaim him to be an idiot, and quite rightly too. Yet you feel free to go around saying that scientists who have been working in these areas for most of their lives either don't know what they are talking about or are liars. What basis for those opinions do you have apart from wishful thinking?

Yes, some greenies can fairly be called Luddites. I'm not one of them. I am in favour of nuclear power, genetic engineering, and any other technologies that have been properly tested. Some of them are likely to be desperately needed to avert collapse. Nor do I feel any guilt about having a decent standard of living or obligation to move over for people who have overpopulated, apart from eliminating senseless waste.

With respect to population control, foreign countries will have to make these decisions for themselves. Australia's fertility rate is not a problem, and population growth in Australia is only an issue because our growthist politicians are overriding the wishes of the majority of the population to suit their business mates and running an enormous mass migration program, at a rate that will double our population every 43 years.

"What basis for those opinions do you have apart from wishful thinking?"

The history of "Tipping Point" alarmism, the butterfly effect, The Venus Syndrone etc is amusing.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/laugh-riot-190-year-climate-tipping-point-issued-despite-fact-that-un-began-10-year-climate-tipping-point-in-1989.html

There have been "Tipping Points" in paleoclimatic history; they are known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events; they can be serious:

http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Bond%20et%20al.,%201997%20Millenial%20Scale%20Holocene%20Change.pdf

But they have nothing to do with AGW since CO2 levels at the time of previous OD events was both high and low.

The fact is humans are incapable of affecting this planet to any great scale; an interesting comparison is between the Torino Scale which is used to measure the energy impact of asteroids and meteorites and that of the combined nuclear arsenal of the world; that arsenal has an energy capacity of about 50,000 megatonnes; the asteroid which got rid of the dinosaurs had an energy capacity of about 100 million megatonnes; that strike basically set the world on fire and evaporated the top 100 meters of the ocean.

5 years later the 'winter' created by that strike had disappeared.

Nature dwarfs what humanity can do and does; in this respect the AGW alarmism is all ego.

In terms of how the environment is going I prefer Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, a monumental analysis of the state of the ark. I think things have got better in the 10 years since that was written, in pollution terms because the Russian communist block has finally lost the vast polluting factories and the world's worst polluter, Saddam has been hung:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/2008/12/ten-worst-man-made-disasters/