Bishop Hill I'm following Paul
Feb 9, 2013 Greens Royal Society Can I just recommend the Twitter feed of Paul Ehrlich to my readers. Try these choice excerpts from the last ten days or so.
#Climate disruption. Remember this when denier morons claim snow proves no warming. Just the opposite. #greed. http://bit.ly/Xiwu7G
#Overpopulation and idiocy -- more on the WSJ's latest moron. Right wing struggling to find even dumber "analysts" http://bit.ly/WxTdva
#Climate disruption. Arizona pol gives more evidence we'll never run out of morons http://bit.ly/XfuVW9
Friends of Fraud -- #Republithugs on the rampage #plutocracy #greed http://nyti.ms/UkMJTb
Tricky Dick pioneering the techniques of todays #Republithug #plutocrats. Richard Nixon's Even-Darker Legacy http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15846-richard-nixons-even-darker-legacy …
WSJ gibbing idiocy on #population http://on.wsj.com/Ytfg6p no accident. Part of Murdoch empire's attempt to murder our grandkids for profit.
#Population. Julian Simon proved by example long ago the ultimate resource, which will never be exhausted, is morons http://on.wsj.com/VBAmmd
For those who don't use Twitter, there is a thing called Friday follow, where you suggest good people to follow to your own followers. I think everyone on the dissenting side of the debate should be recommending Ehrlich. He's a hoot.
You can see why Paul Nurse and the other big wigs at the Royal Society would want to elect him a fellow. The voice of calm rationalism is just the thing don't you think?
Reader Comments (91)
If a warmer climate causes more storms due to more evaporation then we should have been getting more bad storms in the late 90's....logic.
Feb 9, 2013 at 11:15 PM | holbrook
Are these what you had in mind?
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/GLOBAL_SNOW_ON_THE_INCREASE_UPDATED.pdf
Heh, Mickey, Twitter is the zombie of brevity.
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Moronic comments in blogs</I>?
Surely he's joking, or channeling Joe Romm's guide to DIY demagogy.
[Snip - raise the tone please]
If you were Paul Ehrlich, how could you, in all fairness, call anyone a moron. That magical glow is becoming quite common:
"Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.[4]"
Famous for being spectacularly, inexcusably, irredeemably wrong ... that's a type of fame, I guess, just not any kind of credible scientific legacy.
The RS is a lobbying group for the career interests of a certain segment of the public sector and the corporate welfare handouts from which they draw much of their support.
Like Nurse, and so many others, Ehrlich's contribution to the climate debate is devoid of science to the point of antithesis.
It's not surprising that a degenerate doctor of butterflies like Ehrlich - who gets perpetually proven wrong about everything he says - should clumsily denigrate those who criticise his multiple wacky belief systems.
[Snip - venting]
The white noblemen get married between "them" rich and famous as the Royal family of England do not love their poor people whom they fabricate because they do not want the sharing out of treasures. Malthus was refuted. It is not scientific but the very rich would like to débarasser of poor people. Ecofascist religion took a party of power and tries to make live people in distort them purity. It is a new mode of power that becomes established on the debris of the industrial society. There will be very rich a lot or "elite" and poor people who will owe subject to the diktats of eco-fascist minority. They already know that supposedly renewable energies it is poor. It starts in France and there are complaints already; I hope that people will rebel because in any case it goes very badly too much poverty and inequality to us as I hope that people will rebel because too much of very poor and very rich on both sides. As everywhere in Europe anger growls, in any case écofasictes is égoistes, they do not think of the men. They will owe disparaitre too.
Paul Ehrlich is an anagram of "Talk Bollocks" .Give or take a few letters.
Feb 9, 2013 at 9:55 PM | Latimer Alder
Spot on, good man.
Actually, jamspid, "Paul Ehrlich" is an anagram of "hurl lie chap".
Shub i am aquainted ith sone of the right wing creationidt nuttery. Emails to prove it :(
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4787413/David-Attenborough-accused-of-snubbing-gay-animals.html
Love David Attenborough Wildlife Documentaries.but hate his twisted views of Humanity.
Story slightly less depressing than the 150 Orgasms a week Sex Toy Tester.
She a secret weapon on the War on Terror .Her Susan Boyle and Anne Widdecombe .Suicide Bombers would not be so keen. See what real Virgins look like.
possibly not Tweetable, but ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-a-demographic-shift-in-the-muslim-world/2013/02/08/54ce7bf0-7152-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_story.html
These are the rantings that one would expect from a member of the socialist workers party? This probably explains why Nurse wants him in.
But that is not good enough. The warmies campaign (post-CG1) is established on anecdotal emails and 'death threats' that proved that sceptics are denialist nuts. Do you agree with that assessment?
These same 'creationist nuts' in the US want a smaller federal governmental 'footprint', want to uphold 'family values', teach their children 'climate skepticism' in schools and build pipelines and drill for oil and gas. They are a significant reason for cap-and-scam dying in the US. There are lots of crony capitalists among them too - building windmills and growing corn for ethanol.
I can't understand how you fight for sceptics' to be taken seriously, often with people who don't deserve to take sceptics seriously, but are willing to denigrate another so-called social-political group as 'nuts', out of hand, just as the sceptics are (!)
Years ago (12?) I read Paul Ehrlich's book 'Human Natures'. Most of it has a fairly narrow academic focus, so he doesn't really slip into negativity or doomsday prophet stuff until the last chapter or so. Before that point the book is very intelligently written and (imho) provides genuine insights.
I often think that the intelligencia are far more susceptible to powerful memeplexes (such as the social phenomena of CAGW) than normal folks. Those tweets of his above are practically raving, and there's not the slightest sign of the intelligence visible in that book I read, not to mention a complete absence of any balance too.
It's much worse than a great waste of a decent brain, It's very dangerous. Academics need to get out more!
Has anybody on here ever complained to OFCOM about any TV show. Dellingpole or rather Leo Hickman is having a go at David Attenborough about claiming 3.5 degrees rise in warming in Africa in the last 20 years in the Africa Doc episode.
Im watching Country File and they were talking to some farmer about the flooding last year and he had to sell couple of his Cows His fields are waterlogged .Blame Climate Change no surprise . But they keep using this Phrase the Wettest Weather "Since Records Began".
Thing is when Watchdog Panorama or Politalcal News shows quote opinion polls or consumer surveys they always have a little caption as to the source of the survey.MORI You Gov etc etc.
Do the same with all reporting .So they cant keep saying "since records began" .So who did original records and when did the actual records actually begin.
I have been tracking Ehrlich and his Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior and its work with IHDP, the UN affiliated International Human Dimensions Programme quite hard over the last several weeks. Ever since that atrocious "Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided?" was published. It reminded me of all his statements in the 80s of changing education globally to foster Newmindedness, basically a nonrational mind grounded in emotion instead of a body of accurate knowledge.
Ehrlich arrogantly announced at an August 7, 2012 in Portland, Oregon that MAHB was "now more than five years into an attempt to help organize a near-total revision of human behavior." That obviously has to do with global education reforms and roughly tied into Oxfam's issuance of the sought guidelines for Global Citizenship. It also ties into Michael Barber going to McKinsey and using its high profile to lobby school systems all over the globe to reform consistent with his Citizenship-Global Dimensions reforms in the UK and Australia from about 2001.
Anyway I have tied them all together recently at Invisible Serfs Collar where education is viewed as the means to gain "new mental models" in individuals for the 21st century. Sustainable development and hyping CAGW and population growth is the excuse for why such change is supposedly necessary. All at taxpayer expense of course. If that's an area of interest for anyone.
So I believe Ehrlich is cocky because the actual classroom implementations are tied to the psychology theories of a close colleague. He should not because I now have all that work and those links. And how it relates to Barber's work for Pearson, the world's largest learning company as he excitedly called it when he took the job in 2011.
Those tweets would bring tears of nostalgie to Paul Nurse's eyes and bring back memories of happy days leafletting the benighted in East Anglia for the Socialist Workers Party, and that helps explain why Ehrlich got into the RS - it was all thanks to a wet Nurse, distracted by recollections of grossness past.
With so many of you scepttics being rude about him, Paul Erlich must be doing something right.
Rude like in : plainly quoting him.
Why would you want to follow someone who calls you and your friends morons or similar at every opportunity? Do you like being called morons?
Barry Woods wrote: ". . . before you judge Paul, be aware that there are very many 'anti-science', creationist types in the USA, otherwise we would not be compared to them!"
Most creationists are not nuts nor do they challenge the basics of Darwinian theory. Mostly they are concerned that Darwin is being used to promote atheism or hostility toward religion. There are all kinds of creationists. You are creating an inaccurate stereotype here. I do not recall reading any creationist position on climate change so your attack on them is mostly irrelevant on this forum. Certainly they are not driving the skeptic side of the deabte. Your apologia for Ehrlich is noted, but it must be noted that he is probably the most mistaken scientist of the past half-century and is now reduced to calling everyone who disagrees with him "morons."
If you 'follow' Ehrlich, the twitter thing sends you mails suggesting you follow other like-minded Malthusian morons. How Tom Nelson stays sane while monitoring all this alarmist tedious twittery twaddle is a mystery.
I taught Biology in Northern Ireland for 24 years. I long since lost count of the number of Free Presbyterians assuring me that evolution was impossible as the world was only 6000 years old. :-)
john in cheshire | Feb 9, 2013 at 8:26 PM
Doesn't Ehrlich mean Honest in German. Is that appropriate for this man?
More exactly "ehrlich" means "honorable" (or "honourable", whichever); and, no, it isn't appropriate.
Why would you want to follow someone who calls you and your friends morons or similar at every opportunity? Do you like being called morons?
Feb 10, 2013 at 5:52 PM | BitBucket
I get a lot of that when I debate climate change with sceptics.
[Snip - manners]
Love the Dylan Thomas quote, Latmer...:)
Feb 10, 2013 at 1:44 PM | esquirerobin
Interesting. Just reading through your site, and wondering when I'm going to encounter Robert Muller...
Now I know who David Suzuki's mentor was ....
Imagine living with such a ranting, raving megalomaniac. Overpopulation is true, if only as applies to this one individual.
Poor old Paul. I think he wanted to be a prophet, but in order to be a genuine prophet you need to be associated with a thing called, "Truth." Because everything he has predicted has failed to happen, he can be called a "false prophet."
There is no need to dredge up "Poe's Law." That "law" was originally used as a way of scoffing at Christians without debating them. Then it was used as a way of scoffing at Global Warming Skeptics without debating them.
I don't think we need to scoff. Simply point out the facts and speak the Truth. In the end the false is revealed as being false. How? Reality rears its head, and when that happens that which is false becomes a flop.
That's what poor old Paul is. A flop. I reject him, but not without pity, even if he calls me names worse than, "a flop."
Simple - because it's always useful to understand peoples' mindset, especially those you disagree with.
Ehrlich isn't the only fruitcake at the global warming picnic. Hansen endorsed a book calling for the destruction of human civilisation. Sir John Houghton (first IPCC chair) thought AGW was a punishment from God. Many so called scientists (like Mike Hulme ) have been infected by back to nature romantic Volk philosophy.
There is a passage in the Jewish book of Genesis that deeply offends these people.
Genesis 1:26
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth.
That is antithetical to the paganism of pre Jewish / Christian Europe where man is just another animal. Judaism was the first transcendental (beyond nature) religion. Monbiot blames this progressive (non cyclic) transcendentalism for all the problems of the world. He wasn't the first !
God of the Soil
The peculiarities of the Abrahamic religions - their astonishing success in colonising the world and their dangerous notion of progress (now inherited by secular society) - result from a marriage between the universal god of the nomads and the conditions which permitted cities to develop.
At Easter, the Christian belief in a permanent resurrection is mixed up with the pagan belief in a perpetual cycle of temporary resurrection and death. In church we worship the Christian notion of progress, which has now filtered into every aspect of our lives. But, amid the cracking of easter eggs and the murmur of prayer, there can still be heard the small, faint voice which reminds us that our ecological hubris must eventually be greeted by nemesis.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/03/22/god-of-the-soil/
Canman,
Great definition! Do you have any suggestions for the the phrase "an appaulling ehrlich"?
Sorry, could only get so far with the 'twitter feed'.
He's a candidate for some more Lewpaper and that is for sure.
Speaking of "conspiracist ideation" and "counterfactual thinking" ... Mann's feed is a veritable plankton bloom for Lew..
Greg Laden and Peter Gleick are next to back up Mann.
Now I had believed, until now, that twitter was inhabited by a bunch of self referential tossers - I stand well and truly corrected.
"Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"
It is entertaining how a discussion of Ehrlich's sad acting out and sorry history is now the fault of creationist straaw men.
What are we talking about here, please tell me?
Then, among all these frustrations please tell me, who are `you´ that wishes to reach to..?