Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
Actually what I see, is, That is your modus operandi, you are the ones that keep tell me, that I have it absolutely wrong, and are a total idiot, because I don't walk lock step, with your inflexible dogma.
Again, how many things were projected to have run out?
Crops, were suppose to have tanked in the 1970's, the oceans were suppost to be dead, in the 1980's,
IN 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus inaugurated a grand tradition of environmentalism with his best-selling pamphlet on population. Malthus argued with impeccable logic but distinctly peccable premises that since population tended to increase geometrically (1,2,4,8 . . . ) and food supply to increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4 . . . ), the starvation of Great Britain was inevitable and imminent. Almost everybody thought he was right. He was wrong.
In 1865 an influential book by Stanley Jevons argued with equally good logic and equally flawed premises that Britain would run out of coal in a few short years' time. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 and again in 1951, the Department of the Interior said American oil would last 13 years. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.
In 1972 the Club of Rome published a highly influential report called "Limits to Growth". To many in the environmental movement, that report still stands as a beacon of sense in the foolish world of economics. But were its predictions borne out?
"Limits to Growth" said total global oil reserves amounted to 550 billion barrels. "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," said President Jimmy Carter shortly afterwards. Sure enough, between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So, according to the Club of Rome, reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels-not counting the tar shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels.
The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc. In every case, it said finite reserves of these minerals were approaching exhaustion and prices would rise steeply. In every case except tin, known reserves have actually grown since the Club's report; in some cases they have quadrupled. "Limits to Growth" simply misunderstood the meaning of the word "reserves".
Others have yet to cotton on. The 1983 edition of a British GCSE school textbook said zinc reserves would last ten years and natural gas 30 years. By 1993, the author had wisely removed references to zinc (rather than explain why it had not run out), and he gave natural gas 50 years, which mocked his forecast of ten years earlier. But still not a word about price, the misleading nature of quoted "reserves" or substitutability.
So much for minerals. The record of mispredicted food supplies is even worse. Consider two quotations from Paul Ehrlich's best-selling books in the 1970s.
Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30 years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed. Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally impossible in practice.
The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.
In 1984 the United Nations asserted that the desert was swallowing 21m hectares of land every year. That claim has been comprehensively demolished. There has been and is no net advance of the desert at all. In 1992 Mr Gore asserted that 20% of the Amazon had been deforested and that deforestation continued at the rate of 80m hectares a year. The true figures are now agreed to be 9% and 21m hectares a year gross at its peak in the 1980s, falling to about 10m hectares a year now.
