I bet the professor gets a kick out of it though... he finally gets to go to Mars and write a new constitution. Do I hear a new TCS article coming on.

There are way too many wacko environmentalists. If nothing else, attending a *very* liberal university in Indiana taught me that...
You don't have to look any further than the recent wildfires in Colorado and Arizona to see what kind of harm bad environmentalist policy causes. And don't forget about the practices of ELF and ALF, whose attempts to "save" the environment usually leave it worse off.
And the Kyoto treaty is, simply, crap, and should be on the big list of things the U.S. should stay far, far away from - along with the U.N. and the ICC.

The environmental movement is the last refuge of the hard core left in both the US and Europe. Marxist-Leninists who are trying to lead us proletarians to a truly modern future. ELF, ALF, WWF all fear mongers and, terrorists.

Okay, I've just GOTTA ask: are you the same Demosthenes as runs the "Shadow of the Hegemon" blog?

Very curious.

Sadly, no. I'm just a civilian (read: non-blogger) who has an unhealthy obsession with politics.

Its just as easy to predict for 2050,
End to War
Cold Fusion
Hover cars
Global prosperity
Victory over Cancer, AIDS, etc.
Its just as possible as the WWF report, by which I mean "Not Bloody Likely"!

Oh, I forgot,
cigarettes that are healthy
no-hangover alcoholic beverages
Ahhhhh!

Bravo Stephen.

WWF predicts End of World in 2050?

Didn't they just fail in their last prediction?

If the world is going to end in 2050, then why worry? I'm gonna buy another SUV, use wood instead of natural gas on the outdoor barbecue, and stop using the "set back" feature on my thermostat (it's just a damn headache). I may even smoke cigars more often.

Because, as you say, if the world's going to end in 2050, ain't nothin' we can do to stop it.

Too bad these enviro-schmucks take creative writing courses. This would all be so much easier, and less time consuming if we could just use "liar, liar, pants on fire" and be done with them.

Although I guess there is the satisfaction of taking their house of cards junk-science wailing apart piecemeal vice just shaking the table.

Steve,

I addressed this in a post yesterday, but not with your details on population or your humor. I loved the paragraph about the Barry White albums. Classic.

Robert

*sigh* It really is a thing of beauty, verging on (dare I say it?) Lilekesque. A swift and furious takedown is a gorgeous thing.

Slightly OT, what's the deal with so many blogospherians being from Indiana?! I am consistantly amazed at the proliferation of Hoosiers out here. Is it the political climate? The absence of decent coffeeshope in which to rant? Perhaps the lack of daylight savings time? Just curious.

Political inclinations not withstanding, the fact remains it's gettin' hot here on the surface. Right or wrong becomes neither here nor there after dead or alive. I've been wrong before (really), but it wasn't important then. I hope I'm wrong now but I really don't trust public media. If you're not a scientist, shut up. Spin docs don't change facts, they just screw things up for everyone else.

Mr. Finley:

I must take exception to: "If you're not a scientist, shut up." I am a scientist, and I must say scientists pull too much of that, either claiming expertise well outside the reach of their credentials, or within their field telling non-experts, keep quiet, you don't know what you're talking about.

Look, if you argue with me on my intellectual turf, and you're wrong, my expertise should make it that much easier for me to refute your claim. It shouldn't disqualify you from making an argument in the first place.

If I were to sat exactamundo to anything, I'd say it to this.

Bob Finley mentions that it is getting warmer. Actually, it is not that simple. The global climate fluctuates a lot. It was much warmer when the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. (That was a golden age.) Then it was colder back when some enterprising revolutionaries dragged heavy canon across the frozen Potomac to help General Washington stick it to the British. Now it is warmer again; but, is that a real trend? Look a little deeper into time. For the last few million years the Northern hemisphere has had a cycle of ice ages. It goes roughly 10 to 12 thousands years of warmth followed by 70 to 80 thousand years of ice. We are 10 thousand years into a warm period now. Time for an ice age perhaps? The CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere may be just holding off the inevitable cold for a while.

Well...there isn't a lot to do in Indiana - have you ever been here? - so politics is our outlet. I actually thought everyone was from CA, CO, or NY, from the way things sound.
Just to be consistent with the topic, ELF and ALF are huge in Indiana - or at least at Indiana University it is. Not only are they terrorists in the purest sense, but they are counterproductive at best. Just last year an ALF group that objected to animal testing set a bunch of minks free from a lab, where they were promptly run over on the highway. Oh the irony...
You're doing a great job, Steve - and best of luck with the wedding. :)

Good rant, Steve, and thanks for the link to the Reason article - it's a good one, with some very interesting possible solutions.

I can't help but point out, though, what Bailey doesn't acknowledge. The privatisation of marine resources (including fisheries), or at least the apportioning of responsibility for their conservation is straight out of the UN's Law of the Sea agreement, which the US sabotaged in the 70's by refusing to participate. Sound familiar?

Is it getting warmer? We have downright spotty surface temperature measuremants of questionable reliability for Asia, Africa, South America, and, oh, yeah -- the 70% of the planet covered in ocean. The data for those areas form twenty years ago is even worse. We have good data going back twenty years for, maybe, 15% of the surface of the Earth.

We have troposphere data for the entire planet that uses the same equipment and data collection methods for the whole planet though. This data shows no warming overall, but it does show warming in the 15% we have surface data for, where it is remarkably consistent with the surface readings.

Finally, warming won't exceed the Medieval Warm Period temperatures for sixty years under the most pessimistic warming models, giving us decades to conduct more measurements before having to consider social changes seriously.

So come back in twenty years and tell me if we have warming. The data doesn't prove it yet and we have plenty of time.

The Law of the Sea wasn't even finished until 1982, so it would have been very hard for us to sabotage it in the '70s. (But, yes, we refused to ratify it.)

It is true that Part V the Law of the Sea establishes the Exclusive Economic Zone theory, which has been subsequently adopted by the U.S. and the rest of the world for managing waters out to the 200 nm limit, whether LoS signatories, ratifiers, or non-signatories, and allows those privatization solutions.

On the other hand, Part VII Section 2 renders the solutions nations have established within their EEZs difficult to implement on the high seas; in the case of Part IX (esp. Article 137), it renders them impossible to implement on the seabed.

So, as it is, the U.S. actions in totality has made it possible for property rights to be extended in the EEZs, while leaving open the possiblity to extend those solutions to the rest of the sea at a later date.

It is amusing how often the global warming advocates make appeals to authority. "If you are not a scientist, shut up" being a crude version of the logical fallacy.

However, the UN's IPCC has discredited itself on several occasions by misrepresenting the science or outright ignoring the science around climate change. Dr. Fred Singer and John Daly have pointed out several instances of this involving the IPCC's reports.

Demosthenes:

I had two brothers attend IU unscathed by any liberal ideas. Of course they were accounting types; I think the accounting department is pretty politically neutral. Until now, that is.

I'm a Boilermaker, myself. That was so long ago, I remember when you beat us at football once. I also remember open frat parties. Little 5 is still the best party I've ever been to; been to three of em (I think. It's still a little fuzzy).

Thanks, David.
Actually, the rest of the college grads from my family are all Boilermakers too - so I've been harassed from time to time, as I'm sure you can imagine.
I think I came out of the liberal experience for the most part unscathed, despite coming from the Polysci department. But you're right - the business school is the one sector of IU that tends to, in general, be more conservative than the rest of the campus.
I wouldn't worry about IU beating PU at football again, uh, ever, but you could definitely use another Drew Breese. And beware of our mad basketball skills...who needs Jeffries, anyway?

Some women have to walk 2 or 3 hours from home to pick up enough twigs to cook the evening meal. How well do you think these people treat forests?
If the standard of living in the United States was cut in half, a billion people in the third world would starve to death.
I ain't a sciientist, I are an Engineer, and anyonew who tried to sell me on the computations that "support" this three worlds thingy would be laughed out of the building.

Demosthenes:

Can you give a time frame for graduation of yourself and/or your brothers? I'm just curious if there's any overlap. My older brother graduated 1982, I graduated 1983 and my younger bro graduated 1985. Bros were both Kappa Sigs. I lived in dorms all 4 years...and liked it.

Boilermakers tend to gravitate to IU for the parties. I sort of remember breaking a sliding glass door with my head while chatting with Jim Everett... One more reason why I can never be President.

Sorry David, no overlap. I just graduated in May of this year...we do have some pretty wicked parties though.
The whole global warming issue is such a load of crap that I can't believe "scientists" say it's happening. As if they know what the temperature of the earth was 6 billion years ago (or however old it supposedly is); as if it is necessarily human behavior that's causing it (if it's happening); and as if it could be stopped. Crackpot science...this is what is being taught in our public schools. Ain't it grand.

Well I woould encourage any global warming nit-wit to come to England and talk to a non-academic about the weather. It was predicted to be the hotest summer in 10k years but some wonk, instead we have a max 3 days of summer. Right now its in the 50s and grey, fixing to rain, aka normal London summer weather.

Next thing will be, omg the earth is cooling! And explanation for the shift: man is causing the planet's natural cycle to speed up.

Nice blog. I enjoyed a frosty vodka martini as I was reading it. Then I remembered how brilliantly Julian Simon wrote about these issues. How about some helpful links to Simon-related sites?

Sergio,
That's easy --
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/
Gary

Meanwhile, back on topic: Why hasn't anyone pointed out the obvious flaw to the Grand WWF Plan? The COST of launching several BILLION people into space to colonize those planets that don't exist would be astronomical. Look at the price per pound of just putting a satellite in earth orbit. Now tell me who would pay to move 2/3rds of the earth's population off planet? No one. And why bother trying? Anyone that could afford to leave could just as easily afford a decent life right here on earth. and the billions of poor people? They can't afford to even fly stand-by. The WWF had better hope they are wrong on this one. The real answer is ugly indeed.

Not that the WWF isn't totally full of granola, but the argument that we won't colonize space because we can't afford it is invalid. The cost of launching a satellite today provides absolutely zero insight into what it would cost to move large numbers of people off the planet, because we currently have zero economies of scale in space transportation. If sent people into space in the same volume as we currently put them in airliners, it wouldn't cost a lot more per person (perhaps three or four times as much). And we move enough people in airplanes every year to depopulate the earth at current growth rates.