Welfare Scientists

Scientists are marching on Earth Day to, among other things, protest "proposed U.S. government budget cuts under President Donald Trump."  The US government is $20 trillion in debt; cuts need to be made.  Scientists are also troubled by "attacks on science."  Modern 'science' frequently deserves to be challenged.  The Replication Crisis entirely justifies the falling status of science in the public mind.  The pressure to publish or perish has led to a lot of junk getting published.

 

Generally speaking, government should get out of funding science.  If citizens are unwilling to fund research voluntarily, why should the government coerce them to do so through their tax dollars?  Let them do crowdfunding.  Perhaps scientists could sell shares in the eventual profits to be earned from the research.  When scientists want money from government, I always think on a particular scene from Ghostbusters:

 

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've WORKED in the private sector. They expect *results*.

Dr. Raymond Stantz

 

You're scientists.  It is beneath you to be marching for handouts.

Gaia Day

In 1798, Thomas Malthus proposed that population growth would eventually outpace agricultural production and result in famine.  At the time he proposed this, the population of the world was around 1 billion people.  Today, the population is in excess of 7 billion.

 

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in which he warned that mass starvation was just around the corner on account of overpopulation.  At the time, the world population was around 3.5 billion.  In 1990, he wrote a sequel called The Population Explosion in which he called for controls on population.  At the time, the world population was just over 5 billion.  In 1994, he offered an ideal population of the earth, targeting between 1.5 and 2 billion people.  Of course, the population was nearly 6 billion by then.

 

On this day in 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated.  Mother Earth was in trouble because of the pollution of mankind.  Prophecies of doom were provided.  Some of the most extreme can be found here.  Mass starvation and an ice age caused by polluting smoke stacks were inevitable by the 1980s.  The soil would become incapable of growing anything, the sky would darken to where only half as much sunlight could filter through, and humanity might be at risk of extinction.  These apocalyptic predictions are laughable today but somehow don't reflect negatively on the equally apocalyptic modern claims.

 

When Apocalypticism is espoused by religious cranks like Harold Camping or ancient Central American calendars, the claims are viewed with appropriate skepticism.  When 'scientists' make such claims, skepticism is suddenly painted as denial.  Despite having predictions of doom proved wrong time and again, the Earth Day Religion is still treated with more respect than its apocalyptic cousins.

Welcome to the Apocalypse

When former Vice President Al Gore attended the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006 to premiere his propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, he declared that, unless drastic measures were taken regarding greenhouse gasses, the earth would reach a point of no return in ten years.  It has now been ten years.  The doom is now unavoidable.  The ice caps will melt shortly, the polar bears will drown, and NYC will sink into the Atlantic Ocean any second now.  Okay, just a few more seconds.  Hmm.  Well, the standard deviation of the ten year prediction must allow for leeway.

 

Obviously, the claim was just fear-mongering, an effort to convince the electorate to approve 'drastic measures' that would include more money and power to government.  The people didn't bite and now, ten years later, the scam is clearly revealed.  Of course, there will be an excuse.  Perhaps it has already been offered and I have missed it.  Gore's Frying Pan Earth notion has been replaced by Obama's more vague Climate Change.

 

This has been the modus operandi of the environmental movement since the first Earth Day in 1970.  Here is a list of some of those initial predictions.  Note that none of them came to pass.  The catastrophes scheduled for 1975 haves still not occurred even 40 years later.  Global cooling changed to global warming and now it is climate change.

 

If only the government could take more of our money and infringe further on our property rights and freedom, I'm sure the issue could be solved.