Originally posted @

The Silicon Graybeard

Watts Up With That posts a “Friday Funny: Over a Century’s Worth of Failed Eco-Climate Quotes and Disinformation”.  The article contains all the usual bloopers that many have read, alternating regularly back and forth, between thermageddon and ice age, since the earliest quote in 1922 about warming:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot…. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone… Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. -Washington Post 11/2/1922

Barely 10 months later, the Chicago Tribune was warning of a coming Ice Age:

Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” –Chicago Tribune August 9, 1923

And so it goes, predictions of fire and ice, until today.  Before that, though, Anthony lists some quotes from the stalwarts of the environmental movement.  You can see much of their true agenda in these.  I believe I’ve printed all of these before.

Now, lets look into the motivational background of a few typical players in the green climate movement.

On their love for the human race:

Paul Ehrlich, professor, Stanford University: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.” John Holdren, now President Obama’s science czar made this statement before taking on that role: “There exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated…It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Ted Turner, billionaire, founder of CNN and major UN donor: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

David Brower, a founder of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

As I’ve noted before, the guy who wants to kill of 95% of humanity, Ted Turner, is the moderate in this discussion!

Thoughts on cheap power
Cheap power is the ultimate lever for multiplying human effort and productivity. The end of worldwide slavery can be directly tied to the advent of steam power, and the availability of cheap electrical power was a key enabler for the creation of a large middle class and the advancement of women’s rights, among many other profoundly positive sociological changes. What do key green players think about cheap power?

Paul Ehrlich, professor, Stanford University: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation: “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”

“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”

-Of course, that last quote was from Presidential candidate Barack Obama, January 2008.  The guy in the White House has essentially nothing in common with that candidate.

The human brain is fantastic at finding patterns and correlations – even where none exist.  Do you know a sports fan, perhaps, who always wears the same shirt for a game?  A racer who always goes through the same ritual before every race?   This superstition, that a shirt he’s wearing will influence a game hundreds of miles away, is the same thinking that influences these predictions.  Sure they’re phrased in words of science, but they’re all based on the same thinking primitive tribes go through; the volcano is angry or happy, it must be something we did.  Then they go off and find, or manufacture, some “science” to back it up.   Certainly with the vagaries of weather there’s bound to be a few years with an upward trend in temperature or a few years with a downward trend.  The primitives declare it to be “our fault” and we must do something to change to avert the runaway warming or the impending ice age.  The malicious manipulators create models that demonstrate it’s our fault and we must give them our money, or sacrifice our lifestyle, or in the really extreme cases of Rifkin, Turner, Foreman, Brower, Ehrlich, and Holdren, we must give our very lives to appease the daemon.  It’s like sacrificing a virgin to the volcano.