Is Ehrlich right?

Question

"Laypeople frequently assume that in a political dispute the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, and they are often right. In a scientific dispute, though, such an assumption is usually wrong." - Paul Ehrlich

The complete article (Please read it through before answering):

http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/warming_earth/skeptics.htm

Answer 1

Is the quote correct? Probably, but usually doesn't mean always.

I must say however, Paul Ehrlich has time and again proved to be a bit of a nut:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's

and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve

to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

- Paul Ehrlich wrote that in the beginning of his 1968 The Population Bomb.

According to Ehrlich, the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 and the nation's (U.S.) population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999. And for England, Ehrlich said the following: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1975, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it." It's now 33 years later and nowhere near 90 percent of the rainforests have been cut.

Nevertheless, Ehrlich is still considered an expert by many (like Al Gore) and a few years back received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation for his writings about population and nuclear war.

So it is not surprising that he would prescribe to AGW, as it sure fulfills his need to promote a disaster.

Answer 2

http://www.socyberty.com/Activism/First-...

Answer 3

He is correct.  But the assumption on political disputes is wrong.  The idea that you can make a decision by splitting the difference is foolishness.  Those that promote this idea prey on laziness, and the reluctance to think.   What they are saying is you can make a decision without making a choice or thinking about it.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.  The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.  But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway.  In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.  In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.  In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.”

Answer 4

If big oil is lying to protect their interests, then why can you not make the claim that there are many in the climate science community that are lying to protect their grants?

The government sponsored Wegman report condemned the climate science community for the peer review process.  Politically motivated scientists peer reviewed like minded papers.  That was their finding.

Ehrlich's quote is not applicable to AGW.  Your hypothesis is not warming, but catastrophic warming.  So what is catastrophic warming?  To get catastrophic warming we need a strong positive feedback.  Does that exist?  Has the sun played any role in the warming trend?  To get catastrophic warming you have to assume no.  Even a minor one will change the forecast.  So if the sun has played a role, you get the truth  somewhere in the middle.   (For the record, I believe the sun has been the dominant factor in the warming trend)

Contrary to what the articles say, there are many papers that dispute the strong positive, if any, feedbacks hypothesis.  

There is two parts to the AGW theory.  Increase in greenhouse gases will cause temperatures to rise.  This is not in dispute.  But this increase will be small.  About one degree over 100 years.

There is a second and less talked part of the AGW theory.  This initial and non alarming increase, will be amplified to cause catastrophic warming.  The empirical evidenced does not support a strong positive feedback, and their is evidence to suggest a negative feedback.

Climate models demand that the troposphere warm at three time the rate of ground temperatures.  Warmer troposphere can hold more water vapour a more important greenhouse gas.  Depending on the satellite data you use, it is warming less or the same or the same as ground temperatures.   So the models are wrong.

The models also demand the continuous warming of the oceans.  Warming oceans emit more co2.  The empirical evidence shows that is not the case.  The oceans are starting to cool. So if the oceans cool, you get no positive feedback Prompting one modeler to change their forecast to no warming for the next ten years.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/edito...

As for the petition, they are right.  It  is a petition, but skeptics state it as a petition to politicians, and not as an article in a peer review journal.  There are also sixty signatories to that petition.  They mention that in your article, because they want to keep the converted.  This is proof, to you how misleading we are.  But in reality it is the alarmists who are misleading for their own political gain.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckt...

Answer 5

Objective science depends only on the facts that can be duplicated by anyone, every time.  The facts speak for the truth of the argument, not the politics, not a consensus, not the beliefs.

Global warming is a science that depends on people believing it to be real for it to be so.  This is an example of subjective science, not objective.