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Volume 1.19 | Front Page | June 17, 2002 |
The Views Featured Webpages |
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Silent Spring
at 40: Rachel Carsons classic is not aging well. (06/12/02) new Federal
Judge Throws Out Charge in Shoe Bomb Case (06/11/02) new Dispatcher
Says She Was Told Not to Report Shoe-Bomb Incident (06/13/02) new Shoe-bomb
flight conduct criticized (06/13/02) new Post-Sept.
11 Backlash Proves Difficult to Quantify (06/12/02)
new Much
of Sept. 11 Charity Remains to Be Disbursed (06/11/02) new The
State of the Special Relationship (June 2002) new Climate
Changing, U.S. Says in Report (06/03/02) White
House defends U-turn on global warming (06/04/02) Bush
burned by climate report (06/08/02) Dont
tell Dubya (06/09/02) C.I.A.
Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said (06/03/02) Face
to Face With a Terrorist: Government Worker Recalls Mohamed Atta Seeking
Funds Before Sept. 11 (06/06/02) The
Other Shoe: Obsessing over Sept. 11 distracts us from preventing the next
attack. (06/07/02) Wartime
Distractions (06/04/02) A
Few Very Good Men: Priest Recruiter Bill Parent Is Looking for Those Who
Have Seen the Light (06/09/02) Celibate
and Loving It: For Many Priests, True Happiness Lies in The Joining of
Self and Church (06/06/02) The
Body of Christ and the spring meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops
(06/09/02) The
Bishops and the Vatican (06/10/02) Tearful
FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims (05/30/02) FBI
admits bureau missed clues of Sept. 11 attacks (05/30/02) Stop
frisking crippled nuns (06/01/02) Liberal
Reality Check (05/31/02) In
the mind of a would-be suicide bomber (05/30/02) Shin
Bet, IDF nab reluctant female suicide bombers (05/30/02) My
fellow Muslims, we must fight anti-Semitism (05/26/02) The
Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts (05/02/02) Political
Diversity Lacking in Many UNC-CH Departments (May 2002) The
unhyphenating of America: Census finds fewer citing European roots
(05/31/02) UN
Misses the Forest for the Trees (05/22/02) Weakland
apologizes for his sinfulness (05/31/02) Text:
Weaklands apology (05/31/02) Occasionally, some links are moved from this section into the Featured Webpages Trove. |
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Classic articles that are, or should be, famous (new at top) | |
Advice
to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971) new The
End of History? (Summer 1989) An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995) The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997) A brilliant parody: Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996) Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996) There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998) |
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The Views Featured Websites, Series, and Multi-Part Articles |
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Arts
& Letters Daily Business
Daily Review Catholic
Dossier Catholic
News Service Catholic
Telecommunications Catholic
World Report City
Journal CNSNews Corante First
Things Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education FrontPage
Magazine The
Hoover Digest: Research and Opinion on Public Policy Jim
Romeneskos MediaNews JunkScience Luciannes
News Forum NewsMax Notable
Quotables Archive @ Media Research Center RealClear
Politics Reason
Online Reuters SciTech
Daily Review Statistical
Assessment Service (STATS) Tech
Central Station United
Press International Opinion
Journal The
Wilson Quarterly WorldNetDaily ZENIT
News Agency |
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Reference, etc. | |
American
Heritage Dictionary @ Bartleby.com Columbia
Encyclopedia @ Bartleby.com The
U.S. Constitution Online Founders
Library The
Cambridge History of English and American Literature @ Bartleby.com Catholic
Encyclopedia IntraText
Digital Library The
1911 Edition Encyclopedia Britannica The
Internet Archive | |
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Collections, etc. | |
Special Wayback Collections at The Internet Archive: The
September 11 Web Archive US
Election 2000 Web
Pioneers: The Early Years A chronicle of high-level USA government actions in September 2001, at two websites: Ten
Days in September (WP) Response
to Terror (Austin American Stateman) News coverage of September 11 and the aftermath: Fighting
Terrorism: America Retaliates (BG) Attack
on America (Guardian Unlimited) Miscellaneous Collections: Catholic
Poets @ ELCore.Net Verse
@ Bartleby.com HTI
American Verse Project Newman
Reader What
We Think of America (Granta) Hot
Issues: Persecution (Christianity Today) Gay
Activism in Schools (Teachers in Focus) Skepticism
Toward The Skeptical Environmentalist (Scientific
American) Document
Archive in English (ZENIT) Archives:
Fallout of September 11 (ZENIT) STATS
Spotlight (Statistical Assessment Service) Legacy
of Shame (New Times LA) A
Trust Betrayed: Catholic
Church Abuse Scandal (Yahoo! News) The
Crusades (Catholic Dossier) Pope
Pius XII (Catholic Dossier) The
New Rise of Islam (Catholic World Report) Christianity
and Islam, Terrorism and War (Catholic World Report) The
Cross and the Crescent (Catholic World Report) |
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Other columnists (alphabetical) | |
Diane
Alden Ann
Coulter Bill
Dunn Victor
Davis Hanson
Charles Krauthammer Michael
Kelly Jonah
Goldberg Jonah
Goldberg Nat
Hentoff John
Mallon Steve
Milloy Peggy
Noonan Fred
Reed Mark
Steyn Deb
Weiss
George F. Will |
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Weblogs (alphabetical) | |
The
Blog from
the Core Ad
Orientem Annunciations BrinkLindsey.com CampusNonsense Catholic
and Enjoying It! ChristianityToday.com The
Conservative Underground The
Corner Susanna Cornett keeping an eye on the spins and weirdness of media, crime and everyday life EveTushnet.com Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood Fools
Folly The
Goliard Blog Holy
Weblog! Amy Welborn (wife of blogger Michael Dubruiel) Juan
Gatos Bucket o Rants David Nieporent Thoughts, comments, musings on life, politics, current events and the media. Louder
Fenns Whirligig Mallons
Media Watch Media
Minded Minute
Particulars Nota
Bene Orthopraxis OxBlog Relapsed
Catholic Rhetorica:
Commentary and Analysis Sand
in the Gears ScottRubush.com Veritas |
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Series and multi-part articles of news or opinion (new at top) | |
Four columns by Rod Dreher at National Review Online about the June bishops meeting in Dallas: new The
Dallas Outlook: The American bishops need a conversion. (06/12/02) new Dallas
Diary: In town with the bishops. (06/13/02) new Dallas
Diary, Part II: Outside and around the main event. (06/14/02) new Done
in Dallas: The problems that persist. (06/17/02) Joe Klein is writing a multi-part report from Europe for The Guardian: France?
Its like 1970s America (05/28/02) The
Prince (06/06/02) The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Manner (the 1985 report to American Bishops): First
Part Second
Part Related articles in The New York Times on the last messages to come out of the World Trade Center after the first plane struck: History
Recorded From the Messages of Victims (05/26/02) 102
Minutes: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died (05/26/02) Accounts
From the North Tower (05/26/02) Accounts
From the South Tower (05/26/02) A three-part UPI series by Martin Sieff on how some mainstream media were bamboozled about a massacre that had never happened: Part
One: Documenting the Myth (05/20/02) Analysis:
Why Europeans bought Jenin myth (05/21/02) How
Europes media lost out (05/22/02) A three-part essay How Contemporary American Poets are Denaturing the Poem by Joan Houlihan @ Web Del Sol: On
the Prosing of Poetry I=N=C=O=H=
E=R=E=N=T The
Argument for Silence: Defining the Poet Peter Principle A two-part article on Economists & Ecologists by Arnold Kling @ Tech Central Station: Common
Sense and Sensibility (03/28/02) Lomborgs
Lessons (04/02/02) A two-part article @ Salon, by Andrew OHehir, on J. R. R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings: The
book of the century (06/04/02) A
curiously very great book (06/05/02) A three-part article on some current thinking on the Koran in The Atlantic: What
is the Koran? Part 1 (Jan. 1999) What
is the Koran? Part 2 (Jan. 1999) What
is the Koran? Part 3 (Jan. 1999) Occasionally, some links are moved from this section into the Featured Webseries Trove. |
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This Views Column A
Tale of Three Doctors |
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This is a reprint of a two-part column originally published in February and March. Part One (February 25, 2002) No, theyre not physicians, the three doctors of this Tale. They are the following:
Population studies? Business administration? Statistics? Yawn. No... wait... these gentlemen, their ideas and their writings, are at the center of an international fracas. No kidding. Doctor One. Ehrlich appears first in this Tale, all the way back in 1968: in that year, his book The Population Bomb was published. It sold 3,000,000 copies, and got the author a guest spot on The Tonight Show. In his book, Ehrlich proclaimed that the battle to feed all of humanity is over. And we lost that battle: In the 1970s and 1980s 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.... Later, in 1974, he and his wife Anne published The End of Affluence. We were still facing an impending apocalypse: the book warned of a nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s). Due to a combination of ignorance, greed, and callousness, a situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.... Ehrlich, of course, has not been able to say I told you so. And, fortunately, it does not seem that he will ever be able to do so. Doctor Two. Simon comes into the Tale in 1980. Fed up after more than a decade of similar apocalyptic pronouncements, he published Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News in the June 17, 1980, issue of Science. His article began with something of a manifesto, and has earned Simon the epithet The Doomslayer:
(Arable land is land capable of being cultivated for food production. And the strange double negative scarcity... has been decreasing required, I surmise, by the terms in which his opponents had been framing the discussion means that the known supply of natural resources has been increasing.) Ehrlich wrote a letter to Science in response to Simons article. But they engaged their argument in quite a different way later that year. In response to a proclamation from Ehrlich If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 Simon publicly proffered a real wager: he was willing to stake $10,000 that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run. Ehrlich and two colleagues took the bet. (They thought, it is said, that it would be easy money.) The raw materials they chose were chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten: they expected all of these materials to become scarcer and, thus, to rise in price over the following ten years. They were wrong, and Simon won the bet, as detailed in a remarkable article by Ed Regis in Wired, Feb. 1997:
Now, Ehrlich has been wrong, over and over and over again, for decades, yet he has won world-wide acclaim for being some kind of prophet. He should be a gambler: he loses every hand, but somehow manages to win the game. Simon, having merely the available facts and demonstrable history to back up his contrary opinions, lived somewhat in the shadow of his acclaimed opponent. He published quite a few books, which only won him opprobrium for daring to say, in effect, that The Good News is That the Bad News is Wrong. As Regis put it in his Wired article:
Yes, Simon received naturally? bad press for his good news. This is a theme to which we must return. Now lets bring this Tale closer to our own time. Doctor Three. Lomborg is a late comer to the Tale with the publication of his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. Whats the connection between Lomborg, on the one hand, and Ehrlich and Simon on the other? The connection is the very article on Simon by Ed Regis that I have quoted: Lomborg read it and was aghast that Simon had the impudence to say that all the doomsayers were wrong, and that facts and historical trends show them to be wrong. Lomborg believed the doomsaying and, being a statistician naturally keen on facts and historical trends he took Simons effrontery as something of a professional challenge. So, Lomborg and some of his associates set out to prove Simon wrong. Instead, they discovered that the facts do, indeed, tend to prove that Simon, The Doomslayer, is largely right, and the doomsayers, like Ehrlich, are largely wrong. I have not read The Skeptical Environmentalist. But Lomborg wrote a series of three articles, published the first week of September 2001, in The National Post, a Canadian publication. In them, he lays out the case in brief that he lays out at length in his book, also published that month. (These articles are no longer available at the URLs I have for them.) In the first article, Sep. 1, Lomborg sets forth what he (following Simons lead) calls The Litany:
He wastes no time in setting the record straight about The Litany:
He proceeds to dispute almost every aspect of the doomsayers scenario:
In his second article in the series, Sep. 3, Lomborg takes a closer look at our resources, and oil in particular our dependence on it, and our fears of running out of it. It seems that we have been running out of oil as long as anybody can remember:
Though consumption has, of course, increased dramatically, we now have more known reserves of oil than ever before. This is the case, too, with other natural resources: though we use more and more of them, we have more left over for the future. Why? Because we discover more and more of them and learn ways to use them more efficiently. In the last article in the series, Sep. 5, Lomborg basically accepts the premises of a 2001 report sponsored by an agency of the United Nations, but thinks that many conclusions drawn from the data are outlandish: he says we have to sort reality out from the hyperbole. And he argues that some of the proposed cures for global warming could be worse than the problem itself:
Indeed, the Kyoto Protocol would require that the developed world spend astronomical fortunes to produce only a minuscule effect on the environment by the end of this century, money that Lomborg argues would be much better spent improving conditions in the developing world. A spate of articles preceded and accompanied the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist. But Lomborg has been in the news again lately and that will be the subject of the rest of this column, which will continue in the next issue of The View. Part Two (March 4, 2002) A spate of articles, as I mentioned last time, preceded and accompanied the publication of Bjorn Lomborgs book The Skeptical Environmentalist, September 2001 . And Lomborg has been in the news again lately. (Which, by the way, is why I have been writing this two-part column.) He has become, in certain respects, Julian Simon Redivivus: his message The Good News is That The Bad News is Wrong has not exactly been well-received among environmentalists. Unlike Simon who, as far as I can tell, was widely ignored and, thus, easily dismissed Lomborg has been getting a great deal of attention. And much of it has been very bad attention, as reported in an article in the London Sunday Times, Jan. 13:
Huh? Good news backed up with facts and statistics and history is greeted with... vilification and violence? Perhaps somebody can explain that to me; in the meantime, Ill try my own explanation. How about an analogy? A family has (as they say) fallen on hard times: Dad has been laid off, with little real prospect of similar employment; Mom has been able to find only a low-paying part-time job. They watch their small savings dwindle with every bill they have to pay. The wolf is at the door (as they used to say) and the future that Dad and Mom imagine is inevitably worse than their past. One afternoon, though, Mom makes a discovery. Shuffling through the household papers, scanning for anything they might have overlooked, she suddenly realizes that her husbands life insurance policy has built up a pretty good cash value: they can withdraw enough money to see them through a couple of months, when the situation (as we say) might pick up. Mom is overjoyed to have, finally, some good news for Dad. She hurries to him and announces her discovery: We have some money that we had forgotten about; we can breathe easier, at least for a little while. Dad says that cannot be true. So Mom shows him the policy and the latest statement: The cash value is a bit more than $5,000, and we can withdraw almost all of it. Dad says she must be she must be wrong. But Mom points here and there, to figures and facts, to the history of premiums paid and to the projection of cash values and death benefits, and she tells Dad the good news again: We can withdraw, $5,000 and it will be tax-free because we have already paid more than $5,000 in premiums! And Dad slaps her right across the mouth. Bjorn Lomborg is Mom, so to speak, and Environmentalists are Dad. Now, while the wisdom of my analogy is sinking in, allow me to move to a broader topic for a minute: what the heck is an Environmentalist? There must be lots of them: I see this or that person, on TV or the radio, or I read about this or that person in a newspaper or magazine or on the Internet and this or that person is identified as an Environmentalist. For instance, I was looking at a TV news story, and the reporter was interviewing different folks: some were identified as Farmers, others as Ranchers, and yet others as... Environmentalists. The distinction that was being drawn implicitly between Farmers and Ranchers on the one hand, and Environmentalists on the other is pretty much lost on me. Especially since Id be willing to bet money I dont have that the Farmers and Ranchers are much closer to the environment than the Environmentalists are. Now, I pretty much know what a Farmer, or a Rancher, is. What do they do for a living? Basically, they grow crops and raise livestock. Where does their money come from? Basically, from selling their crops and livestock. Where does their money go? Basically, back into the farm or the ranch, most likely. These are things I know, and I think pretty much anybody knows them, without having to ask about them. But I do not know what an Environmentalist is. What do they do for a living? I dont know. Where does their money come from? I dont know. And where does their money go? I dont know. Do you? Back to the Mom and Dad of our analogy. The only real explanation for Dads reaction to Moms good news is that to put it politely Dads mental health has deteriorated while contemplating the familys bad state of affairs. In the case of Lomborg and the Environmentalists, that explanation just wont do. (Okay, I could be wrong about that. But I shall proceed as if Environmentalists whatever they happen to be are sane. I hope you do not think this too unlikely.) Now, allow me to recall a quotation from last time, from Ed Regis 1997 article on Julian Simons attempts to spread good news about the enivronment:
Naturally? I ask again. Good news about the environment naturally gets bad press? Well, yes. But not because its good news. Rather, because good news about the environment is heresy: it is contrary to the received orthodoxy that the Earth is going (as they say) to hell in a handbasket, and that drastic curtailment of human activities and only drastic curtailment of human activities will keep the Earth from going there. Im not the only one who sees that good environmental news is heresy to the Environmentalists. Regis used the term years ago. The London Sunday Times article quoted above is entitled Eco-heretic beset by hate campaign. And a London Telegraph article, Jan. 20, takes the language even further:
The article is entitled Anti-Christ of the green religion, and I think that the writer, David Thomas, has hit the nail (as they say) on the head: Environmentalists passionate beliefs and professional livelihoods are being challenged. That being the case, good news for the Earth is bad news for them, for their worldview, for their reputations, for their livelihooods, and for their influence. But it remains good news for everybody else. Of course, Lomborg is in the minority among published authors on environmental topics. And some of his opponents seem to think that fact tells very heavily against him and his arguments: why is he virtually the only one saying what he is saying? One answer is this: because he is a pioneer. Lomborg is looking further and deeper into the evidence, and discovering that it does not really lead us to where it has been supposed to lead us. And he is not so lonely as Environmentalists and mainstream media would have us think. The BBC ran an article, Feb. 25, about scientists disputing the generally received opinion about global climate change, which has recently become the linchpin of the Environmentalists relig... er... worldview:
The article goes on to quote Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeology at the University of London:
And science author John Gillot, in a spiked-science article, May 22, 2001, explains how an apparent scientific consensus is rigged through a media compliant to Environmentalists extremism:
Sometimes, scientists have felt obliged to go on the public record about how mainstream media has distorted their findings. Even such a prestigious body as the USAs National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is not immune from having its reports distorted. For instance, Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the NAS panel on climate change, published an article in the Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2001:
Lomborg himself recognizes that his position is perceived to be in the minority; in an article I quoted from last time, he gives four reasons why this is so:
Is all this enough to explain the hostility which has greeted the good news from Julian Simon, first, and now from Bjorn Lomborg? In the 1960s, the public especially the media was spell-bound by horror stories of imminent global catastrophe. Never mind that they never came true, and that in fact the world situation has been, by and large, getting better and better for a very long time. The train (as they say) had left the station, and there was nothing to stop it. Bad news some of it exaggerated, some of it mere speculation, some of it outright deception has been continually trumpeted by the mass media and welcomed by the general public. Biases built into scientific research, and into the propagan... er... the publicity methods of Environmentalist groups, have lent support to the widely received impression that bad environmental news is the only true, or the only significant, environmental news. Is all this enough to explain the hostility? I think so. But other explanations are available, and I do not think we can merely discount them. Columnist Diane Alden wrote recently about her research into fraud by employees of both the US federal government and the Washington state government Fish and Wildlife Service agents whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers concerning the presence of an endangered species of lynx in certain forest areas. She and others speculate that the individuals involved want to be able to declare the forests off-limits to human activity as part of a larger, long-term plan:
I, for one, do not dismiss this out of hand. For it doesnt take long to realize that Lomborgs critics arent always motivated merely by concern for the state of the environment. Rather, some of them seem to be motivated by more concern for the state than for the environment. For instance, one of his most strident critics, Mark Lynas, has noted the following (as of todays publication of The View) on a website devoted to debunking Lomborg:
Ah. Yes. I see. But even if one is not willing to go so far as Alden does, we nonetheless have all the evidence we need to understand something about Environmentalist groups. Their assertions whether they be apocalyptic forecasts of the future state of the environment, or even simple claims of the current global state of affairs their assertions need to be scrutinized and criticized much more than they have been these past 30 or 40 years. And so do their motivations and their intentions. Strange that I should have to say this, but I think a little more inquisitiveness on the part of reporters would go a long way towards helping the public to sort out fact from fiction about the environment. It seems to me, for instance, that I must be supposed to know about Environmentalists, and what they do, and where their money comes from, and where it goes: you see, nobody has even attempted to explain these things to me. A reporter ought to get mighty strange looks for asking, say, Farmers or Ranchers what they do for a living and how they earn their money. But I think reporters ought to start getting strange looks for not asking Environmentalists what they do for a living, and why they do it, and how they earn their money. Strange, having to tell reporters to be more inquistive, no? P.S. According to a Reuters article, Feb. 27, Lomborg has been appointed to head a new Danish independent environmental organization, the Institute for Environmental Valuation. Though it seems to me that he would bring a needed balance to their activities, his appointment has enraged local environmentalists and invited criticism from opponents abroad. P.P.S. Some of the articles cited in this column are already unavailable at the URLs I have for them. © ELC 2002 |
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