Viscount Ridley was non executive chairman of Nothern Rock when it blew up and caused the first run on a British bank in 150 years. Perhaps had he been less of a rationalising optimist, he would have been less of a financially suicidal risk taker?
By the 1970s the focus of chemical concern had shifted to air pollution. Life magazine set the scene in January 1970: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support … the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” Instead, driven partly by regulation and partly by innovation, both of which dramatically cut the pollution coming from car exhaust and smokestacks, ambient air quality improved dramatically in many cities in the developed world over the following few decades. Levels of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, ozone, and volatile organic compounds fell and continue to fall.
So our liberatarian friend is saying that by worry about things and legislating we can solve problems.
So his own argument fails. We worry, we act... therefore we should not worry. Circular logic.
The threat to the ozone layer came next. In the 1970s scientists discovered a decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs, and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits, while The New York Times reported “an increase in Twilight Zone-type reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts” in Patagonia. But all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.
There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.
The ozone hole was predicted in the 70s. It was only discovered in the 86. Whats more this is a confused, unreferenced argument. He seems to be claiming that CFCs have no impact but has no source.
A few years later, a fatal virus did begin to spread at an alarming rate, initially through the homosexual community. AIDS was soon, rightly, the focus of serious alarm. But not all the dire predictions proved correct.
34million black africans live with the disease. So for a white, wealthy, failed banker, nothing to worry about.
And again, why is the spread of AIDS being slowed? Because we acted to increase preventative measures.
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter went on television and declared: “World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But sometime in the 1980s, it can’t go up anymore. Demand will overtake production.”
Jimmy Carter? A politician was wrong once, there oil reserves are unlimited.
In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14 trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.
All these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to rise during the past 50 years
Funny he is ignoring the prediction that Hubbert got right. That oil would peak in the US in about 1970.
So this failed banker can cherry pick some predictions that went wrong and then use the grossly dishonest argument that by being concerned and acting we have reduced and prevented problems as proof that problems do not exist.
Pollyanna hopium for the desperate.
I on the other hand believe in the science of ecology and the dangers (to ourselves, our biosphere, and other living creatures) of exponential human population growth and natural resource depletion. Who's the wack job then?
