Bjorn Lomborg’s new book, Cool It, is out and is, of course, taking flak from global warming alarmists. Most of the criticism of Lomborg is coming from one source:
Aynsley Kellow, professor and head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, believes “the attack on Lomborg came from a small circle of critics, mostly in the US and mostly closely associated with Paul Ehrlich [author of The Population Bomb]”.
If there is a poster child for wrong-headed, or simply wrong, alarmism, it’s Paul Ehrlich. If he’d been right back in the 1970s we’d all be living shoulder to shoulder right now:
Paul Ehrlich is the modern version of Thomas Malthus — the most visible and persistent predictor of mass famine and economic catastrophe. Unlike Malthus, though, Ehrlich doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes; when one of his predictions of disaster fails to come true, Ehrlich simply moves on and makes other predictions of disaster, constantly pushing back the timetable for massive world famine, perhaps in the desperate hope that if he keeps predicting the same thing, eventually pure chance will fulfill the conditions he requires.
Why does this Stanford professor still have tenure? Oh, never mind. So do all the Marxist professors who said the Soviet Union would last forever and that its command economy was robust and far superior to the West’s pitiful demand economy.
