Before There Was Climategate: A History Of Scientific Alarmism

As the fallout from Climategate - where leaked emails reveal a history of lies and deception by global warming alarmists - continues, it is worth noting that this is not the first instance of scientific 'consensus' leading to calls for greater taxes has been proven wrong.

Robert Bradley provides this fascinating history of similar scares, such as the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots, the Club of Rome’s resource scare, when in 1972 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals (all have either have been falsified or will be), and global cooling. He also draws an intersting - and most instructive - parallel:

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612).

Read the full post to see how it ended...

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