For some obscure reason an Australian University was playing host to Paul Ehrlich this week, and apparently his lecture wasnt titled “I was wrong, boy wasnt that silly”. No instead hes jumped both feet first on the Global warming bandwagon and milking it for all hes worth.
Mr Ehrlich at his day job
As a serial wrongist of long standing I felt it might be worth a gentle layman’s Fisk of his radio interview.
ELEANOR HALL: The United Nations says the world’s population will reach 7 billion some time today, though it concedes the date is symbolic and its calculations could be out by six months in either direction.
The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon says reaching the 7 billion mark is an opportunity for progress.
But Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and author of the controversial book, The Population Bomb, Dr Paul Ehrlich, says the milestone is no cause for celebration:
PAUL EHRLICH: I think it’s cause for a lot of alarm and so does every scientist I know.
(Every scientist he knows, careful parsing of the phrase there Paul)
You have got to face it, we still have close to 3 billion people living in poverty, almost a billion hungry. We are wrecking our environment, we are changing the climate, we are toxifying the planet from pole to pole and the worst thing is that nobody is doing anything about it.
(Heres an article from a poverty fighting website, in fact things are getting better on an absolute level, in pretty well every area mentioned,
- 25 years ago in China, over 600M people were living on < $1/day. Today this number is 180M … meaning 420M+ people are now above this level.
- Between 1999 and 2004, 135M people worldwide rose from < $1/day to above this level. This is more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.
- In South Asia, the number of people without clean water has halved since 1990.
- In 1975, 75% of people aged 15-25 were literate. Now the rate is almost 90%.
- In 1970, the fertility rate in East Asia/Pacific was 5.4 and now is 2.1 In South Asia, it was 60 and now is 3.1. Overall, global fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in 25 years. Africa has all but one of the countries with fertility rates above 5.0.
- A World Bank study noted that every 1% increase in national income her person in an emerging country translated in 1.3% fall in extreme poverty.
- In 2007, the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% growth — the longest period of expansion since the 1970′s. Also, trade grew 9% despite all of the challenges.
- Almost half of all humans lives in countries with growth of more than 7% per year (which doubles the economy every decade).
- Inequality has risen in both rich and poor countries overall, but there are examples where this is not true questioning whether globalization is the main culprit of inequality. The Economist argues that lack of [quality] education is likely the biggest culprit.
- In 1990, more than 25% of people in developing countries lived on < $1/day. At current rates, this will be 10% by 2015.
- Income is not the only way to quantify improvement for the poor. Monetary measures understate the real gains from things such as lower child mortality, safer water, literacy and other social achievements.
- A study shows that the number of conflicts (international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990′s to just over 30 in 2005. The number of international wars peaked in the 1970′s and have been falling ever since. The death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1990′s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000′s. [The WHO has higher numbers.]
- The number of incidents of terrorism has increased since 2001 although the number is still very small.
Much, much more paul slapping under the fold.
Or you could just watch this little video from
The Tizona Group 