“Global Warming” Guesswork
Nobody believes a weather prediction 12 hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And to make huge financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
“Even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.
“Look: If I were selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?
“Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.
“I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the Green Revolution. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich said, ‘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. Ten years later, he predicted 4 billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen.
Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.
“It is impossible to ignore how closely the argument over global warming fits this template.”
(Caltech Michelin Lecture delivered by science novelist Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology)
Legal Abortion not “Safe” for Women, Say WHO Officials
Those who argue for abortion-on-demand assure us that this would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women worldwide. The only way to stop deaths from so-called “back-alley” abortions is to make abortion “safe” by legalizing it.
Dr. Gunta Lazdane, European Regional Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on Reproductive Health and Research, disagrees. Speaking at a recent conference in Washington, Dr. Lazdane maintained that “up to 20 percent of maternal deaths are due to abortion, even in those situations where abortion is legal…there is a question whether ‘safe’ abortion is safe.”
It remains to be seen how Dr. Lazdane will be punished for her indiscretion. (Friday Fax, Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, 21 May 2004)
Presbyterians Caught in Time Warp
There’s always someone who doesn’t get the word, as we used to say in the U.S. Navy. In this case it’s the Presbyterians who, apparently oblivious to the global birth dearth are now debating whether to urge a worldwide goal of fewer births than deaths by 2030.
Never mind that such a target would inevitably lead to abuses, as governments intervene to force down fertility rates. Or that it would be used to justify coercive programs, such as China’s. Or that fertility rates are set to fall below replacement by 2050 anyway, according to the recent projections of the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has a long history of hysteria where the population issue is concerned. It was the first mainline Protestant denomination to advocate population control, issuing a warning about the dangers of “overpopulation” way back in 1972.
One wonders if they still bother to read the Bible? At least some Presbyterians do, commenting about the proposed population plan that “Scripture’s overwhelming message is the value of human beings to God. People are intended by God to be both blessings and resources. When God gives the blessing of children, he adds the blessing of ‘crops and flocks.’ (Deut. 7:13).”
If the history of our times proves anything, it proves that as human numbers have grown, so has human well-being. Our “crops and flocks” would astonish the ancient Israelites, as would our barrenness.
Movements have momentum. So the Presbyterians press on, following a herd instinct even as their herd, in particular, diminishes and grows decrepit, blind to the demographic cliff that looms before them.
(“Population Problem: Explosion or Implosion?” Presbyterians Pro-Life News, Spring/Summer 2004, page 6)
