Pope Benedict's Christmas address to the Curia

There has been a lot of discussion about Pope Benedict's Christmas speech to the members of the Roman Curia.
His speech is available on the Vatican web site in Italian and German, but not yet in English.
There is an unofficial English translation available from the English and Welsh dioceses. (A pdf reader is needed).

Most of the press comment has been about his references to gender studies. I had never heard of this, but the Pope is right on the ball, and we have gender studies right here, in river city. For example, at the University of Sydney and University of NSW. I think it is well worth the effort to read Pope Benedict's speech and look at the university course descriptions.

Limits to the population bomb

This week, PM Kevin Rudd announced his policy to achieve reduction in carbon emissions. It was greeted by tears and cries of dismay from the passionate environmentalists. They may be passionate, but they have a problem. A big proportion of the population doesn't believe them. The level of this disbelief is hard to know, because it is very sensitive to the way the poll questions are asked. The number of skeptics could be high or low or somewhere in between.

Now, I'm old enough to remember lots of environmental debates down through the years, and I have a theory that the environmental lobby has cried wolf so often that it has lost most of its credibility. We have reached a stage where, although almost all scientists agree humans are causing climate change which will have drastic effects in the next few decades, they are just not believed. We are supposedly living in the age of science, but it is common now to believe that the vast majority of scientists who talk about climate change are either incompetent or self-serving liars.

Why? How about these for reasons.......

The Great Barrier Reef is Doomed

For all of my adult life, the imminent destruction of Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been predicted, firstly because of uncontrollable spread of the Crown of Thorns starfish, and recently because of global warming. For example, in 1972 a book surveyed the spread of the starfish and their possible devastating results. But guess what? In 2008, researchers report that "THE potentially devastating crown-of-thorns starfish is in retreat on the Great Barrier Reef, with its numbers hitting a 20-year low". Well, blow me down!!!!

The population explosion is out of control

In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb which predicted that

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

It didn't happen.

Limits to Growth

In 1972, a book called Limits to Growth was published by the think tank The Club of Rome. I remember it well, because it was set as a text book for my undergraduate engineering course, and I had to write an essay on it. I passed, but I'm not so sure the LTG did. The book was based on a computer model of exponentially growing demand for resources and more limited supply of these resources. The book had pages and pages of graphs based on different assumptions, and from memory, some of them showed catastrophic drops in population in the 1980's due to exhaustion of resources. When some more optimistic assumptions were made, the catastrophe moved out by a few decades.

I seem to remember a quote (I can't remember by whom) about LTG along the lines of "we might be wrong, but even if we are, it is good to frighten people so they start doing the right thing".

I humbly suggest that was the dumbest thing anyone could have said. It does matter if you are right or wrong, and we can see now that, even when global warming is predicted by a much more credible and numerous group of scientists than the Club of Rome or Paul R. Ehrlich, people have become very suspicious of scientists who tell them the end is nigh.

The resource that is really limited is credibility, and the environmental scientists have squandered it.