Thursday, November 07, 2013
Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia? - WSJ.com
Unfortunately, in today's world, history doesn't seem to be very important.
Is it any wonder that we often repeat mistakes of the past?...
Is it any wonder that we often repeat mistakes of the past?...
In the World Street Journal, Bret Stephens includes this in his recent article:
"'With or without adaptation,' the report warns, 'climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050.'
If this has a familiar ring, it's because it harks back to the neo-Malthusian forecasts of the 1960s and '70s, when we were supposed to believe that population growth would outstrip food production. This gave us such titles as 'Famine 1975!', a 1967 best seller by the brothers William and Paul Paddock, along with Paul Ehrlich's vastly influential 'The Population Bomb,' a book that began with the words, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
In case you're wondering what happened with that battle to feed humanity, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization has some useful figures on its website. In 1968, the year Mr. Ehrlich's book first appeared, Asia produced 46,321,114 tons of maize and 439,579,934 of cereals. By 2011, the respective figures had risen to 270,316,205, up 484%, and 1,289,633,254, up 193%."
