Friday, December 19, 2008

O's "Science" Adviser

Meet Dr. Frankenstein......or perhaps better said, Dr. Mengele.

It looks like president-elect Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor. Holdren is a professor of environmental policy at Harvard and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth.

Not deterred by the abject failure of predictions, he cites (!!??!)

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

Yah. According to Ehrlich, we are almost all dead now. (Pinch yourself.) Observes Yuval Levin:

The Population Bomb was the book in which Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death,” because all the world’s resources were running out while population was growing out of control, and there was simply no way we could sustain our civilization at modern levels of consumption and growth. Just about every one of the book’s predictions has proven wrong, and its empirical claims and methods have not held up well under later scholarly scrutiny.

If this guy Holdren is a "scientist," then I'm ....ohhhhhh......Clarence Thomas.

3 comments:

Larry Denninger said...

"If this guy Holdren is a "scientist," then I'm ....ohhhhhh......Clarence Thomas."

Pleased to meet you, Your Honor!

;-)

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

Anyone who cares about scientific debate and energy independence shouls be very afraid of this guy. (The energy pick ain't that great, either)

steveegg said...

Everybody knows you're Antonin Scalia.