The Royal Society is a joke

...Were this a story in any field other than "Climate Science" it would be given massive play by both the BBC and in the print media – for what has happened here is a national scandal. An institution which was manifestly good has now been made bad, for no other reason than the arrogance and egotism of three blinkered men who took it upon themselves to behave like political activists rather than scientists.

You don't even need to be a climate sceptic to understand that what May, Rees and Nurse have done is wrong. All you need is a rudimentary understanding of the history of science: think of phlogiston; of continental drift; of Warren & Marshall's discovery of Helicobacter pylori…

Science does not advance by consensus. In the early days, the Royal Society understood this. That's why for two centuries, its house journal Philosophical Transactions, contained the following advertisement:

… it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.

This wasn't a cop-out. This wasn't fence-sitting. This was the world's pre-eminent scientific institution laying out – and abiding by – one of the most important rules of science: that the science isn't "settled"; that a useful scientific theory holds the key to its own destruction – that is, it is falsifiable, and thus capable of being overturned by a more plausible theory, as was, say Becher's theory of phlogiston.

What May, Rees and Nurse have done between them is killed the Royal Society. It is no longer fit for purpose. I would leave the last words on this to Montford's report, which I highly recommend you read in full:...

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_tanton_2003oct.html

Garrett and Jane Hardin: A Personal Recollection (Hemlock Society adviser to Hardin on FAIR — who with his wife committed suicide)

Tribute to Garrett Hardin - by John H. Tanton, M.D.

My interest in population developed in the late 1950s as I was finishing medical school. By 1975 I had been elected national president of Zero Population Growth, an organization inspired by Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb.” Then in the late 1970s the US fertility rate fell to below replacement, and immigration emerged as the main source of domestic population growth. To Garrett’s dismay, ZPG declined to address these new circumstances.

When in 1979 I helped set up the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to tackle the immigration question, Garrett served from the beginning as an advisor. Later he consented to set aside his aversion to board meetings by joining the FAIR Board. Much of his later writing was on the demographic aspects of immigration and can be found by searching under his name in the archives of a quarterly journal of the immigration reform movement, TheSocialContract.com. The bookstore at this site offers for sale three of Dr. Hardin’s books that the Social Contract Press reprinted: Stalking the Wild Taboo; Mandatory Motherhood: The True Meaning of the Right to Life; and Creative Altruism: Source and Survival. Also available is his The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons, published by FAIR.

It is hard to see one’s friends and people we admire decline physically to the point where they decide to exit this vale of tears felo de se. Garrett’s post polio syndrome had reduced him to using a wheel chair; he could no longer swim well. Macular degeneration cost him the reading vision in his right eye. Life in a nursing home was not an option for this man of letters. Jane had been diagnosed with ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, one of the least desirable ways to leave this planet. It worsened. Both were long time members of the Hemlock Society, and decided to take matters into their own hands. This can give us a lot to think about, especially as our own infirmities come to the fore - and since my wife and I live in a state that counts Dr. Jack Kievorkian among its citizens.

Anne and Paul Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren “The Population Bomb”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_H._Ehrlich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich

http://www.amazon.com/Dominant-Animal-Human-Evolution-Environment/dp/1597260967

http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/paul_anne_ehrlich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren [Obama’s science and technology advisor]

6. The situation has been analyzed and reanalyzed in the technical and popular literature. Two key technical papers are P. R. Ehrlich and J. P. Holdren, “The Impact of Population Growth,” Science, vol. 171 (1971), pp. 1212-17, and J. P. Holdren and P. R. Ehrlich, “Human Population and the Global Environment,” American Scientist, vol. 62 (1974), pp. 282-92. Much important information can be found in works by Lester Brown and his colleagues in the excellent State of the World series issued by Worldwatch Institute and published by W. W. Norton, New York, and in the World Resources series issued by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), (published by Basic Books, New York). Two other landmark works are the Global 2000 Report to the President, issued in 1980 by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State, and the World Commission on Environment and Development’s 1987 report Our Common Future (the “Brundtland Report,” named for the commission’s chairwoman, the Prime Minister of Norway), published by Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford. A detailed exposition of the connection of population growth to the rest of the human predicament can be found in P. R. Ehrlich, A. H. Ehrlich, and J. P. Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1977). The most recent extensive popular treatment is A. H. Ehrlich and P. R. Ehrlich, Earth (Franklin Watts, New York, 1987).

Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion, 1990.

In 1968, The Population Bomb1 warned of impending disaster if the population explosion was not brought under control. Then the fuse was burning; now the population bomb has detonated. Since 1968, at least 200 million people — mostly children — have perished needlessly of hunger and hunger-related diseases, despite “crash programs to ‘stretch’ the carrying capacity of Earth by increasing food production.”2 The population problem is no longer primarily a threat for the future as it was when the Bomb was written and there were only 3.5 billion human beings.

http://www.ditext.com/ehrlich/preface.html

The world’s biggest problem? Too many people

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/21/opinion/la-oe-harte-population-20110721

Mary Ellen Harte is coauthor of “Cool the Earth, Save the Economy.” Anne Ehrlich is a senior research scientist at Stanford University. John Harte and Paul Ehrlich contributed to this piece. All are biologists involved in the study of climate change and sustainability.

http://www.masterresource.org/2011/03/holdren-malthusian/

If there is one quotation by Obama’s new science advisor John P. Holder that every American should hear, it is this:

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . . Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political”

- John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.

Holdren’s deep-seated belief of the human “predicament” as a zero-sum game–America must lose for other countries to win–was also stated by him two years before:

“Only one rational path is open to us—simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDC’s), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, “Introduction,” in Holdren and Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology, 1971, p. 3.

Holdren and the Ehrlichs paid homage to the gloomy worldview of Thomas Robert Malthus, who saw “misery or vice” as the necessary equalizer between growing population and the means of subsistence in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798):

“We find ourselves firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp. We hold this view not because we believe the world to be running out of materials in an absolute sense, but rather because the barriers to continued material growth, in the form of problems of economics, logistics, management, and environmental impact, are so formidable.”

- Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 954.

Holdren and Paul Ehrlich put their anti-growth philosophy into a mathematical equation, I=PAT, where a negative environmental impact was linked to any combination of population growth, increasing affluence, and improving technology. This “gloomy prognosis” required, according to the three:

“organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government” (1977: p. 5).

Does Dr. Doom still believe all this? He has repeatedly been challenged with some of his past quotations and he has held fast to his exaggerations. Mid-course correction not.”

http://citadelcc.vo.llnwd.net/o29/network/Levin/MP3/ShowAudio/HOLDREN-NEEFUS.doc

White House Science ‘Czar’ Tells Students: U.S. Can’t Expect to Be Number One in Science and Technology Forever
By Christopher Neefus

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration’s top science and technology official, who has argued for the economic de-development of America, warned science students last Friday that the United States cannot expect to be “number one” forever.

“We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely,” Dr. John P. Holdren said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Holdren is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (PCAST), making him the top science adviser in the administration.

The former Harvard professor was at the AAAS to speak to students about the Obama administration’s priority of advancing science and technology issues, its goal to increase spending in the area to 3 percent of the gross domestic product, and Obama’s great personal interest in the fields.

In a question-and-answer session with students after the talk, one student asked Holdren how the United States could move forward now that it is no longer “the big shiny beacon” where all scientists travel to do their research.

Holdren called it a mixed picture, and said it was not purely bad for the United States that other countries were making gains instead of us.

“That is, there are many benefits to the increasing capabilities of science and technology in other countries around the world,” he said. “It’s not an unmixed or dead loss that other countries are getting better in science and technology.”

“Other countries getting better increases their capabilities to improve the standard of living of their countries, to improve their economies and, as a result, ultimately to make the world a better and safer place,” he said.

Holdren, who was previously at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said that as a result of those good advances, “We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely.”

“Probably the most appropriate responses to this degree of levelization (sic) of the playing field is to cooperate, to exchange more,” he said. “We have all kinds of programs already in which U.S. graduate students and post-docs go to China and Chinese graduate students come here—direct exchanges, university to university.”

Holdren said such programs also exist with Japan, India, Brazil, and “a variety of European countries.”

“We intend to grow those programs because we think they are mutually beneficial and we intend to grow the cooperations (sic) in which we engage with other countries,” he said.

However, the top science adviser admitted that accepting this kind of level playing field also had its downside for the United States.

“On the other hand, there are some problematic aspects,” he said, “if, for example, it is so hard for scientists and technologists from certain countries to get into this country that kind of cooperation is impeded.”

“It’s a problem if everybody who we graduate from our universities who is originally from another country goes back—invite some of them to stay,” he said. “And we make it, in some respects, too hard to stay. Some people have suggested we should staple a green card to every Ph.D. in science and engineering that we give to a non-U.S. citizen. So again, like so many of the very good questions you folks are asking, this one has no really tidy answer, but we’re trying to work it on a number of fronts.”

Holdren is often called the science ‘czar’ for the vast swath of topics on which he is tasked to advise the president, including health care, the space program, bioethics, and more.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, his ideas for cooperation among nations in prior decades have included diverting large amounts of the U.S. Gross National Product (GNP) to countries in need of development aid.

In 1995, in accepting a Nobel prize on behalf of a large group of scientists, Holdren said investing about 10 to 20 percent of the GNP of developed countries in less developed ones was vital to a world of “durable security.”

Pointing to the conclusions of geochemist Harrison Brown in the 1950’s, Holdren said, “(T)he cooperative effort needed to create the basis for durable prosperity, and hence durable security, for all the world’s people would require an investment equivalent to 10 to 20 percent of the rich countries’ GNPs, sustained over several decades. In 1995, these figures do not seem far wrong, but they are said to be politically unrealistic: nothing approaching them has ever been seriously contemplated by the world’s governments. Until this changes, a world free of war…will remain just a dream.” http://www.pugwash.org/award/Holdrennobel.htm

Similarly, in his 1973 book “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” he suggested “de-developing” the United States to benefit other, poorer nations.

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and two co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation. Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses of overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries.”

“This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment,” he said.

Holdren has rebuffed the efforts of CNSNews.com and other media to discuss his former positions on multiple occasions, and he did not take questions from the press at the AAAS event.

The Holdren & Letterman lovefest ………….A deferential David Letterman didn’t breathe a word about Holdren’s radical views, his extreme published works, his phenomenally wrong-headed predictions, or his eugenics-obsessed intellectual mentors.

Instead, Letterman lectured his audience to “pay attention” to his “fun” and “informational” interview with Holdren.

Letterman grilled him on whether he felt “exhilaration or frustration” about his job advising the White House — which Holdren used as an opportunity to bash Bush/Cheney.

With furrowed brow, Letterman drummed up global warming fear, indignantly asserted that “Coal is the culprit,” and fretted that “My son might not have a chance to see snow!”…………….

Romney’s Troubling Appointments (Mitt's environmental policy team now works for Obama) …………….“"EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has taken most of the fire from Republicans as her agency rolls out a slew of controversial new climate and clean air rules. But McCarthy, the EPA assistant administrator of the Office of Air and Radiation, has taken on much of the heavy lifting of writing, structuring, and implementing the rules.

“Lisa’s the coach and Gina’s the quarterback” in the work of rolling out new clean air regulations, said Daniel Weiss, an energy and climate policy expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “She’s running the plays, improvising on the line.”

Another Romney environmental adviser in the effort to regulate “greenhouse gases” is now Obama’s Director of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. Dr. Holdren has some exotic views: …………..

Romney’s Advisers Met With Obama to Help Craft ‘Obamacare’ “Three of Mitt Romney’s advisers went to the White House at least a dozen times in 2009 to consult on the former Massachusetts governor’s health care plan that President Obama used as a model for his initiative -- now a federal law that all the Republican presidential candidates want to repeal.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday he was "not in a position to comment on specific meetings." But in a remark that won't help Romney in his pursuit for the 2012 Republican nomination, Earnest repeated that Obama took cues from the Massachusetts legislation.

"You've certainly heard the president himself say that there were a number of very good ideas included in the health care plan that then-Gov. Romney put in place in Massachusetts that were incorporated into the Affordable Care Act and so it’s clear that these are some ideas that we were interested in incorporating and we did incorporate.

"But in terms of individual meetings and who participated and what the goal of them was, I don’t have that information,” he said.”……

Gina McCarthy - Gina McCarthy, the chief EPA clean air regulator, also worked as an environmental regulator for then-Governor Romney. Her role now is as point guard (nyuk) in the Obama Administrations fight to make coal fired electric generating plants extinct.

June 15, 2011: Al Gore praises Mitt Romney on climate Mitt Romney on Wednesday got a big thumbs up for his stance on global warming from a source that likely won’t help him at all in the GOP primary: Al Gore.

The former vice president and Nobel Prize winner praised Romney for not heeding right-wing calls to reject the science behind climate change.

“Good for Mitt Romney — though we've long passed the point where weak lip-service is enough on the Climate Crisis,” Gore wrote on his blog. “While other Republicans are running from the truth, he is sticking to his guns in the face of the anti-science wing of the Republican Party.”

Earlier this month, Romney told a New Hampshire town hall meeting that he believes climate change is happening and that man-made emissions are a cause.

"I don't speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," Romney said. "I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer.

"No. 2, I believe that humans contribute to that," he continued. "I don't know how much our contribution is to that, because I know there's been periods of greater heat and warmth than in the past, but I believe we contribute to that. And so I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you're seeing."....

Obama’s Science and Technology Adviser: ...Holdren is often called the science ‘czar’ for the vast swath of topics on which he is tasked to advise the president, including HEALTH CARE, the space program [NASA], BIOETHICS, and MORE.

***************************************************************************

…..Under the Kerry-Lieberman bill, international offset credits could be given to countries that reduce deforestation as detailed in Sec. 756(c ) of the bill, while Section 5004 calls on the Secretary of Agriculture and the administration of the Environmental Protection Agency to create a program “to provide assistance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in developing countries, in accordance with this title.”

Funding for that program would have to be appropriated by Congress at levels requested by the administration.

In his July 3, 2008 interview on “Democracy NOW!” Holdren said incentives to reduce deforestation would be a part of the solution, along with “real limits and real charges” on greenhouse gas emissions. He argued, however, that such charges would not be economically ruinous, but would instead create jobs.

“The moment we put real limits and real charges on carbon dioxide emissions, we will see a surge of innovation that will discover even better ways for reducing those emissions,” he said. “We will see new jobs and new wealth created as we convert our energy economy to a clean one rather than a dirty one. We will see new jobs and new income created in sustainable uses of tropical forests rather than cutting them down.”

“The notion that this is going to be unaffordable and an economic catastrophe to address this problem is just wrong,” said Holdren. source

[John P. Holdren collaborated with Paul and and Ehrlich on “The Population Bomb” The Heinz Award As scientists, authors and educators, Paul and Anne Ehrlich have for 30 years devoted themselves to enhancing public understanding of a wide range of environmental issues, including conservation biology, biodiversity and habitat preservation.

The basis of the Ehrlichs' work has always been their science, and they have compiled an important body of scientific research over the years. But it is their environmental advocacy - particularly in the area of population - for which the Ehrlichs are most well known. Paul Ehrlich made a memorable debut on the world scene with the publication of his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, warning that the Earth's resources could not indefinitely support the planet's growing population. In a 1990 sequel, The Population Explosion, Paul and Anne Ehrlich provided an unflinching update.

Setting forth challenging but prescient work was to become a hallmark of the Ehrlichs' careers. Several decades ago, they did it again, becoming the first to raise the alarm about a possible resurgence of infectious diseases - another controversial theory now taken seriously.

Paul Ehrlich, currently Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and Anne Ehrlich, senior research associate in the biology and policy coordination center founded by the couple at Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, have never suggested that population issues represent the whole of the planet's problems. In fact they have been forceful advocates for broadening the agenda of the environmental movement to include such issues as biodiversity, poverty, consumption, carrying capacity, energy supplies, agriculture and food, global warming, nuclear weapons, international economics, environmental ethics, and sustainable development.

The Ehrlichs have displayed rare leadership in seeking to translate meaningful science into workable policy. Far from being prophets of doom, they are spirited optimists, whose unrivaled contributions have flowed from a belief that the future is still ours to make.

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In 1990, Teresa Heinz met Senator Kerry at an Earth Day rally. This was the only reported time they met before Senator Heinz died in an airplane crash on April 4, 1991. In 1992, they met again, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They were married May 26, 1995. Teresa Heinz, the wife of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, is the chairman of The Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. The New York Times has called her “one of the nation’s leading philanthropists”. Named by Utne magazine as one of 100 American visionaries (“people who could change your life”), she is recognized as one of our premier environmental leaders. She has been a long-time and tireless educator and advocate on behalf of women’s health and economic security. A PHILANTHROPIC INNOVATOR

John P. Holdren Another collaboration with the Ehrlichs: “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment” [1977 textbook, “Ecoscience: Population, Resouces, Environment” -- In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls, including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended "the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences" such as access to birth control and abortion.] TAKING IT GLOBAL:

March 10, 2011--NYT OpEd Celestrial Storm Warnings by John P. Holdren is the science and technology adviser to President Barack Obama and John Beddington is the chief scientific adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron.

Stanford Ed: Paul Ehrlich: President, Center for Conservation Biology Bing Professor of Population Studies

Those Death Panels can't be far behind.

John P. Holdren - Obama's Science and Technolgy Adviser:

- John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.

Holdren’s deep-seated belief of the human “predicament” as a zero-sum game–America must lose for other countries to win–was also stated by him two years before: “Only one rational path is open to us—simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDC’s), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, “Introduction,” in Holdren and Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology, 1971, p. 3.

“We find ourselves firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp. We hold this view not because we believe the world to be running out of materials in an absolute sense, but rather because the barriers to continued material growth, in the form of problems of economics, logistics, management, and environmental impact, are so formidable.”

- Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 954.

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