Add these whoppers to the Paul Ehrlich Hall Of Fame!
May 3, 2008
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23635753-5001030,00.html
[.]
Academics spend the rest of their time making ridiculous predictions.
The UNSW's Daniel Tarantola, a "leading professor of health and human
rights'', told the press this week: "Climate change will trigger a chain
of events which is likely to increase the stress on society and result
in higher vulnerability to diseases including HIV.''
Global warming causes AIDS!
Makes sense, I suppose; increased temperatures and humidity will turn
the whole planet into a giant San Francisco bathhouse.
Presumably at another point during Tarantola's "chain of events''
something will occur to convert all of us into promiscuous gay men. That
must be what they mean by climate "change''.
Tarantola's goofy prediction follows a time-honoured academic tradition
of goofy predictionism.
Academic Joseph Froomkin was honoured by Time magazine in 1965 with the
publication of his prediction that computers would bring a 20-hour work
week and a mass leisure class.
Good call, Froomy; today, even academics sometimes put in longer hours.
In a helpful exercise, the Washington Policy Centre last month published
a list of historical academic predictions, including:
"CIVILISATION will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is
taken against problems facing mankind.'' (Harvard biologist George Wald,
1970.);
THE world will be "11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about
twice what it would take to put us into an ice age''. (University of
California ecologist Kenneth Watt, 1970.);
"BY the year 2000 ... the entire world, with the exception of Western
Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine.'' (University of
North Texas Professor of Environmental Philosophy Peter Gunter, 1970.);
and
"IT is already too late to avoid mass starvation.'' (Stanford and
Harvard academic Denis Hayes, 1970.)
Something weird must have been in the water 38 years ago, and it wasn't
drowned polar bears.
Consider those predictions the next time you hear some academic telling
you the world is about to end.
Of course, Australian academics yield nothing to their US cousins when
it comes to wayward predictionitis; in 2005, the ABC reported
palaentologist Tim Flannery's prediction that "the ongoing drought could
leave Sydney's dams dry in just two years''.
Rain began tumbling down exactly two years following Flannery's
prediction. Last month saw 13 consecutive rainy days and our dams were
fuller of water than Flannery is full of ... predictions.
So academics aren't much good at divining the future.
Maybe they're better at analysing recorded data and known events.
Then again, here's a report from Monday's Sydney Morning Herald: "Cars
are no more fuel-efficient today than they were in the 1960s, a
transport expert says. In research for the Garnaut climate change
review, Paul Mees, of Melbourne University, has used Bureau of
Statistics figures to show fuel efficiency has remained practically
unchanged since 1963.''
Excuse me, but anyone who believes modern cars (loaded with aircon,
power steering, air bags and gobs of horsepower produced by relatively
small engines) are less fuel efficient than vehicles produced in 1963
has been inhaling fumes - and not from anything equipped with a
catalytic converter and efficiently combusting clean unleaded petrol.
The rate of accuracy achieved by academics, on the other hand, is indeed
unchanged since 1963, when Paul Keating - had he pursued an academic
career - would have been in his second year at university.
He did well to dodge a degree.
So did we. Imagine Keating - always a confident fellow - further boosted
by academic arrogance.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a
25-year Rise" New York Times, March 27, 1933
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