MIT Atmospheric Physicist Professor Richard Lindzen podcast.

From Reason Magazine:

Environmentalists and globalization foes are united in their fear that greater population and consumption of energy, materials, and chemicals accompanying economic growth, technological change and free trade—the mainstays of globalization—degrade human and environmental well-being.

Indeed, the 20th century saw the United States’ population multiply by four, income by seven, carbon dioxide emissions by nine, use of materials by 27, and use of chemicals by more than 100.

Yet life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years. Onset of major disease such as cancer, heart, and respiratory disease has been postponed between eight and eleven years in the past century. Heart disease and cancer rates have been in rapid decline over the last two decades, and total cancer deaths have actually declined the last two years, despite increases in population. Among the very young, infant mortality has declined from 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 1913 to just seven per 1,000 today.

These improvements haven’t been restricted to the United States. It’s a global phenomenon. Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled, from 31 years in 1900 to 67 years today. India’s and China’s infant mortalities exceeded 190 per 1,000 births in the early 1950s; today they are 62 and 26, respectively. In the developing world, the proportion of the population suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite a 83 percent increase in population. Globally average annual incomes in real dollars have tripled since 1950. Consequently, the proportion of the planet’s developing-world population living in absolute poverty has halved since 1981, from 40 percent to 20 percent. Child labor in low income countries declined from 30 percent to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003.

Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated than ever. People are freer politically, economically, and socially to pursue their well-being as they see fit. More people choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb, and property.

Social and professional mobility have also never been greater. It’s easier than ever for people across the world to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth. People today work fewer hours and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time than their ancestors…

Read the whole thing.

Contrast this record of human achievement not just against the doomsayers of today, but against the perpetual predictions of impending humanitarian disasters that have been with us always.

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich is a good example. Today he is one of the elder statesmen of the environmental movement, lending his celebrity status to the cause of climate hysteria. Back in the 1960s he was a NYT best selling author, writing things like:

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. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

and

A minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century.

and

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.

and

There is no sacred legal “right” to have children. The argument that family size is God’s affair and not the business of the government would undoubtedly be raised — just as it was against outlawing polygamy. But the government tells you precisely how many husbands or wives you can have and claps you in jail if you exceed that number.

and

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies — often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.

What the hell is he talking about? Humanity is a “cancer”? What “brutal and heartless decisions” must be made? Mass exterminations? Forced sterilizations?

In more recent interviews Professor Ehrlich betrays an antipathy towards basic human progress, saying:

Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.

and

We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.

Professor Ehrlich obviously hates people. He feels an urgent need to set aside basic human rights in favor of an all powerful, coercive central authority. But he is no fringe lunatic. He is a a tenured professor and respected academic. A few of his awards:

• The John Muir Award of the Sierra Club
• The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
• MacArthur Prize Fellowship
• The Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• ECI Prize winner in terrestrial ecology in 1993
• A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri in 1993
• The Volvo Environmental Prize in 1993
• The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize in 1994
• The Heinz Award for the Environment in 1995 (as in Theresa Heinz-Kerry)
• The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1998
• The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences in 1998
• The Blue Planet Prize in 1999
• The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America in 2001
• The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2001

Ehrlich dreams of totalitarian utopia, and he’s willing to make the most absurd predictions under the guise of science to hasten the abandonment of individual liberties. He is not unique - university basements are full of passionate, bright, narrow, anti-social types who think the whole world should drop everything to support their vision. Political collectivists find natural alliances with such people, finding a common cause in promoting central authority at the expense of individual liberty.

From Der Spiegel:

Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite. Germans’ fundamental hypocrisy about the US suggests that it’s high time for a new bout of re-education.

The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent history. They’ve believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser. They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.

Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich would ultimately be victorious…

…Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular — 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise — said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran…

…For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq…

…Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party’s hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington — just look at Gerhard Schröder….

…Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there’s no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness…

…Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20 years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women’s underwear. Carell received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds, led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just safer…

…The Americans are more dangerous than the ayatollahs? Perhaps the Americans should take the Germans at their word for a change. It’s high time for a new round of re-education. The last one obviously didn’t do the job.

Really good stuff - hard to excerpt. Read the whole thing.

On a related note, Orwell wrote this of a group he called Anglophobes in 1945 Britian:

Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win.

Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain.

English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain.

In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

Here’s the photo from wikipedia.fr’s listing for Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:

And the photo from amazon.fr’s listing for Jaques Chirac’s new autobiography:

From Alaska Report:

“If you look back far enough, we have a bunch of data that show that warming has gone on from the 1600s with an almost linear increase to the present,” Akasofu said. He showed ice core data from the Russian Arctic that shows warming starting from the early 1700s, temperature records from England showing the same trend back to 1660, and ice breakup dates at Tallinn, Estonia, that show a general warming since the year 1500.

Akasofu said scientists who support the manmade greenhouse gas theory disregard information from centuries ago when exploring the issue of global warming. Satellite images of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean have only been available in the satellite era since the 1960s and 1970s.

“Young researchers are interested in satellite data, which became available after 1975,” he said. “All the papers since (the advent of satellites) show warming. That’s what I call ‘instant climatology.’ I’m trying to tell young scientists, ‘You can’t study climatology unless you look at a much longer time period.’”…

…”I think the initial motivation by the IPCC (established in 1988) was good; it was an attempt to promote this particular scientific field,” he said. “But so many (scientists) jumped in, and the media is looking for a disaster story, and the whole thing got out of control.”

Records of river ice breakups (of interest to sailors) have been kept for hundreds of years, and are the closest thing we have to a continuous, consistent, long term direct measure of temperature.

Here’s an example of one such record (from the UN’s own Environmental Program).

There’s been an almost linear trend for more than 300 years, suggesting consistent warming since the end of the Little Ice Age.

Half the warming suggested on this graph happened before 1850, and no one would reasonably argue this was due to greenhouse gasses emitted by human activity. From 1690 - 1850 the world population grew from 700MM to just 1B, the majority living subsistence lifestyles in Asia and Africa as they had for millennia. The CO2 belching Industrial Revolution in Europe didn’t take hold until the 1850s.

If you prefer longer term temperature proxies, here’s a recent discussion Terra Daily:

The biggest of them (continental glaciers) cover the Antarctic, where 90% of the world’s ice is accumulated, and Greenland. The melting of this ice could lead to a catastrophe. But is there any reason to panic? The temperature rise of 3-6 degrees Celsius over the next century promised by pessimists could not have a significant influence on the Antarctic, where the average temperature is less than 40 degrees below zero…

…Studies of the ice core retrieved by Russia’s Vostok Antarctic station show that this is what has been happening on earth for at least the last 400,000 years. Today, scientists say that the melting of the permafrost has stalled, which has been proved by data obtained by meteorological stations along Russia’s Artic coast…

UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer:

ht: LGF

What would happen if one of our Nato allies found that some nefarious country was using its embassy to smuggle and hide terrorist weapons?

From Ekathimerini:

A joint operation by Greek and US secret service officers in March 2003 led to the seizure of a large cache of explosives from the basement of the Iraqi Embassy in Athens, Kathimerini has learned.

Sources said a raid on the embassy unearthed explosive materials, car bombs, detonators, several guns and dozens of rounds of ammunition. Much of the material was “ready to use” while some was too old to be of any value, according to sources who said all the material was destroyed within a few weeks of discovery.

Just don’t say Saddam had anything to do with terrorism.

Rethinking Schools Online has a story by two teachers on their efforts to teach their elementary school students the evils of capitalism. From Why We Banned Legos:

The children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned…

…Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation. Ann suggested removing the Legos from the classroom. This bold decision would demonstrate our discomfort with the issues we saw at play in Legotown. And it posed a challenge to the children: How might we create a “community of fairness” about Legos?

The teachers allowed the children to resume their Lego play so long as they adhered to the following pudding headed principles.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Hilltop school is in King County, WA. King is one of the 10 wealthies counties in the US, is 80% white, and was carried by Kerry in the 2004 election by 35% points (Kerry won LA by 25% pts).

Ann Pelo, one of the authors, was ranked 51# in the 2005 book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Her citation there references her book That’s Not Fair!: A Teacher’s Guide to Activism With Young Children. Michelle Malkin covered that book in her 2003 column Brainwashing preschool peaceniks.

Also covered in TCS and NRO.

An article in today’s National Review follows two recent NYT corrections.

The first concerns the cover story of last week’s NYT Magazine, The Woman’s War. The article includes the account of Amorita Randall who claims she was raped twice during her 6 year tour in the Navy and suffered brain damage when an IED blew up under her Humvee in Iraq.

Unfortunately the author of the article never made a serious attempt to verify the story. After seeing the story the Navy contacted the NYT to say it had no record of sexual assault against Ms. Randall. They also say she was never in Iraq, and was in fact in Guam at the time of the alleged IED related injury.

The NYT Magazine second story was about a woman who was allegedly sentenced to 30 years for aborting an 18 month pregnancy in El Salvador. That story was similarly flawed - the trial was for infanticide, and autopsy records clearly described a recently born infant (for reference, an 18 month old fetus is about 6″ long, 1/4 - 1/3 the size of a newborn). NYT Magazine never ran a correction to that story, but 6 months later newspaper’s public ran a column debunking the article.