Population, Environment, and Thinking Things Through

Or perhaps I should say "and the Sky Isn't Falling." I was at the cafe of the Science Centre at the university earlier, and it just so happened that there was this huge, framed page from The Age about population being a menace to the environment. There was a big picture, the silhouette of a pregnant woman, that had the caption "A growing problem", I think. What a difference a few years can make. Time was when The Age worried over the economic viability of Australia having a small population. The pendulum has swung the other way for some, I guess. My impression is that some folks in the more affluent countries are too pessimistic. Instead of valuing both the environment and human beings, and putting them together, they seem to see a conflict where there isn't necessarily one. I mean, rather than focusing on culling the human race, why not focus on educating the human race? They might think that shrinking the gene pool is good for the earth, but I wonder if they realize how many future champions of science, the arts and other fields they'll be eliminating from our future. If we now have a few leaders in the sciences have emerged to sound the alarm and do something about the environment, what can be achieved if we invest in more of them?

Oh and I just noticed that we see a lot of prominent people sounding the alarm with.. not exactly the right credentials. Here is a professor of reproductive biology sounding off on terrorism and climate disaster. Here's a poet, and here's a population expert in there talking about CO2 emissions. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a climatologist myself, which is why I can't go gung-ho on my own opinion and limited reading. But I can say that it is wrong to blame it on numbers (of people on the planet) and seek to resolve it by population control in any which way.

Calling off the global warming panic?

This is good news, or it should be for most people. For others, they'll have to find something else to panic about.

Rethinking Global Warming

This is off-topic for this blog, but I'd like to share some interesting developments.

• A UK court ruled that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is unfit for schoolchildren to see, but neither Gore not the American media cares.
• Mr. Gore's awareness campaigns and his behavior seem to have worn out their welcome in London, but perhaps American mainstream media won't care either.
• Scientists are turning around against the climate change panic.
• and the UN divulges information about the IPCC and the reports behind the ruckus, and some unlikely revelations:

	Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’... The reports from working groups II and II .., since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny. ...
	The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little over 600 in total.
	A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR [Second Order Revision -- the final report assembly], but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented [on] more than one chapter.
	An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that ‘hundreds of IPCC scientists’ are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.