Part 11 (2/2)

228. On disease: It is narrowly true, as Ehrlich said, that he predicted there would be novel diseases, but there are always novel diseases appearing as a result of unknown viruses and bacteria emerging from the wild, and known viruses and bacteria evolving. What Ehrlich actually predicted in The Population Bomb was something much more precise. ”As population density increases, so does the per capita shortage of medical personnel, so do problems of sanitation, and so do populations of disease-harboring organisms such as rats,” he wrote. ”In addition, malnutrition makes people weaker and more susceptible to infection. With these changes and with people living cheek by jowl, some of mankind's old enemies, like bubonic plague and cholera, may once again be on the move.” Or something new may emerge, Ehrlich wrote. There could be a terrifying new ”super flu,” like the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Or worse. ”What if a much more lethal strain should start going in the starving, more crowded population a few years from now? This could happen naturally or through the escape of a special strain created for biological warfare.” It is a stretch to see this as forecasting the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s. On climate change: It's also true that Ehrlich raised the possibility of climate change in The Population Bomb and elsewhere. He even mentioned carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse effect. But Ehrlich didn't limit himself to one hypothesis. In The Population Bomb, his worries about carbon dioxide emissions were matched by his fear that supersonic jets leaving icy contrails in the upper atmosphere could either warm the planet by adding to the greenhouse effect or cool it by reflecting the sun's rays back out into s.p.a.ce. In the 1971 book How to Be a Survivor, Ehrlich worried that dust and solid particles kicked up by agriculture and industry could decrease ”the ability of sunlight to penetrate the atmosphere” and cause global cooling. In a paper that same year, Ehrlich and co-author John Holdren discussed how nuclear energy and the burning of fossil fuels generate heat as a by-product, so if population and economies continue to grow, they could heat the atmosphere like lightbulbs in an Easy-Bake oven (”Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide” in Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man, 1971). In a 1969 paper, he warned there are ”several ways in which a new ice age could be rapidly generated,” including jet contrails-which he deemed ”a major threat to humanity”-a ”veil of pollution,” or a sudden outward slipping of the Antarctic ice sheet-which would also cause a tsunami so vast it would wipe out the United Kingdom (”Population Control or Hobson's Choice,” in L. R. Taylor, ed., The Optimum Population for Britain, 1969). So the most that can be said about Ehrlich's climate change predictions is that he predicted the climate could change.

228. And there's a final reason to be skeptical: Just how accurate is Ehrlich's number? In speaking with me, Ehrlich repeated this argument but he said the number who died of hunger was ”two hundred million,” not three hundred million. So I asked Ehrlich for the source of his number. He emailed this response: ”Starvation number is all over the web [e.g., /Disturbing%2Truths/18000_kids_die.htm] but that's likely low because many deaths of children and adults are ascribed to diseases that wouldn't have killed them if they weren't immune compromised by mal- and undernutrition.” The fact that the number is ”all over the web” didn't strike me as compelling evidence of its accuracy, so I contacted UN agencies and development researchers and discovered that official death-by-hunger statistics do not exist because it's too hard to define, identify, and count such deaths. His number, it seems, is the guesswork of persons unknown.

229. Ehrlich, The End of Affluence.

230. Even the less hyperbolic predictions in The End of Affluence fared poorly. Between 1970 and 1998, the proportion of income spent on food by the average American fell from 23 percent to 14 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States). Over the same period, the number of hours the average American had to work to buy a color television fell from 174 to 23; the hours worked to buy a VCR went from 365 to 15; for a microwave, they went from 97 to 15; and for a calculator, 31 hours to 46 minutes (”Time Well Spent” in the Annual Report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 1997). Americans may have had problems in those years but buying stuff wasn't one of them.

230. See ”Ecofables/Ecoscience: The Two Simon Bets” on the Web site of Ehrlich's Center for Conservation Biology at modities. In 1999, the index registered 96.02. It peaked in 2008 at 249.03 and declined to 171.25 in 2009. The ”Industrial Materials” subcategory of the index, which tracks metals, went from 95.13 in 1999 to 151.99 in 2009.

232. crowhill.net/blog/?p=7234&cpage=1.

232. ”Ehrlich's Erroneous Predictions Proved Him a Visionary,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 28, 2010.

CHAPTER 8.

Page 234. ”I Know a Hawk from a Handsaw” in M. Szenberg, ed., Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies, 1991.

236. A long-term prediction that looks a little better in hindsight is found in John Maynard Keynes's 1930 essay ”Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Great progress has been made, Keynes writes, and there's no reason it can't continue. Extending the trend line out a hundred years, and factoring in the power of compound interest, Keynes foresees the standard of living in 2030 being ”between four and eight times as high as today.” It was a very simple and narrow a.n.a.lysis and it is roughly on track, so far. But then Keynes ponders what such an increase in wealth would mean and the train flies off the rails: People will be free of ”pressing economic concerns”; making money will no longer be of ”high social importance”; the love of money will be regarded as ”a disgusting morbidity”; and the greatest problem people will face is figuring out what to do with their boundless leisure time. There are still twenty years left on Keynes's clock but things will have to change in a hurry if these forecasts are not to produce wry smiles in 2030.

237. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years, 2009.

239. William Vogt, The Road to Survival, 1948.

239. ”The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

240. George Eaton, ”Q & A: George Friedman,” New Statesman, August 27, 2009.

242. The extent to which it was pricey gas or the lower speed limit that caused the decline in fatalities is debated. For my purposes, it doesn't matter, as both factors were unexpected.

243. James Fallows, ”Blind into Baghdad,” The Atlantic Monthly, January/ February 2004.

245. And Ehrlich had more than the usual reasons to consider that possibility, because the two books that deeply influenced his views and shaped the course of his life-Road to Survival and Our Plundered Planet-contained predictions that looked shaky even in 1968, when Ehrlich was writing The Population Bomb. Unless the United States is ”willing to place 50 million British feet beneath our dining room table, we may well see famine once more stalking the streets of London,” William Vogt wrote in Road to Survival, which was published in 1948. ”And hand-in-hand with famine will walk the shade of that clear-sighted English clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus.” Vogt said the same about j.a.pan. Instead of seeing that things might be more complicated than they appeared, Ehrlich repeated both forecasts, foreseeing hunger in the United Kingdom in his 1969 paper ”Population Control or Hobson's Choice?” and the same for j.a.pan in the 1974 book The End of Affluence.

245. A similar threat to good decision making is the product of hindsight bias, and it can also be ill.u.s.trated with the 1970s food crisis: It is a matter of record that global demand for food almost outstripped supply and the world came dangerously close to starvation on a ma.s.sive scale. It could well have happened if events had been even a little different. But that's not how it feels in hindsight. There was no starvation on a ma.s.sive scale and so it feels as if it was highly likely, even certain, that there would not be. Unfortunately, that feeling contributed to the sense that the world's food supply wasn't a serious concern, and that, in turn, contributed to drastic cuts governments and donors made to agricultural research-the very research that had averted disaster-during the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, agricultural advances slowed, which was a big reason that, in 2008, the world experienced substantial food shortages, and food riots, for the first time since the 1970s.

246. It's worth noting the contradiction in the position of many climate change activists. They often cite the predictions of climate change models as if it were a near certainty the future will unfold as described. But on the subject of geo-engineering-such as proposals to spray aerosols into the Arctic atmosphere in the expectation that they would increase sunlight reflection and decrease warming-they are opposed on the grounds that we know so little about the complex interactions of the atmosphere that we cannot possibly predict the outcome of such schemes. They can't have it both ways.

246. Something many scientists have been admirably clear about. They include John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, who acknowledged that the uncertainties in climate predictions are ”quite substantial” (see Haroon Siddique, ”UK's Top Scientist Urges Care in Presenting Results of Climate Change,” The Guardian, January 27, 2010).

247. See the ”Copenhagen Diagnosis,” a statement released by twenty-six climate scientists in November 2009.

247. Charles Krauthammer, ”At $4, Everybody Gets Rational,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post, June 6, 2008.

248. Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins, Predictable Surprises, 2004.

248. Charles F. Doran, ”Why Forecasts Fail,” International Studies Review, 2002.

253. Andreas Graefe, Alfred G. Cuzan, Randall J. Jones Jr., and J. Scott Armstrong, ”Combining Forecasts for U.S. Presidential Elections: The Polly-Vote,” 2009.

255. Chrystia Freeland, ”The Credit Crunch According to Soros,” Financial Times, January 30, 2009.

255. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1963.

257. Adam Clymer, ”And the Winner Is Gore, If They Got the Math Right,” New York Times, September 4, 2000.

257. Henry N. Pollack, Uncertain Science . . . Uncertain World, 2003.

259. plished! New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008.

Cialdini, Robert. Influence. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2007.

Clarke, Arthur. Profiles of the Future. Popular Library, 1977.

<script>