An Australian friend, Ernie Klassek, sent me a column last week on the subject of world population.
The column gives a reminder that years ago, there were widespread worries about overpopulation. I remember hearing a lot about this back in the 1960s and 70s.
Those worries turned out to be unfounded. Today one large chunk of the world---Russia---is actually losing population. Western Europe and the US rely on an influx of immigrants to maintain a healthy population size.
Back in the 70s, I took seriously the warnings about a threat of overpopulation. I didn't realize then that the problem of modeling the size of the world's population is very difficult. There's no way to make accurate predictions of population very far into the future.
Today the pet issue of the secular prophets of doom is climate change. I believe that today's warnings about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming will prove to be nonsense, just as the "population explosion" warnings have been. Modeling global climate is, if anything, even more difficult than modeling global population. Today's climate models reflect the preconceptions of their creators much more than they do the realities of the earth's atmosphere.
Tags:
climate change
Posted at: 02:00 PM | 0 Comments | Add Comment | Permalink
It has been a pleasant summer in southwestern Ohio. In particular, temperatures overall have been a bit cooler than usual.
Sherry told me this morning she had heard that so far it has been the coolest July on record for this region. A lot of hot air has been emanating from Washington, D.C., but apparently it doesn't reach all the way to Ohio.
How cool will it have to get before people figure out that "global warming" is not a problem? The world has lots of genuine problems, but human influence on temperature isn't one of them.
Tags:
climate change
Posted at: 10:25 PM | 0 Comments | Add Comment | Permalink
One of the great joys of an academic life is easy access to lots of great books.
In Ohio, all the college and university libraries belong to a statewide system called Ohiolink. Anyone with borrowing privileges at a member library has access to the whole system.
So when I hear about a great new book, chances are that it's in the system somewhere.
Some books I've been working on:
- God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World by David Rowe, the first academic biography of William Miller. After reading this excellent biography, I went back and checked out Rowe's dissertation on the Millerite movement in New York, which is also very good. I hope to complete an article on Miller over the next couple of months.
- Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine by Jonathan Schanzer. Schanzer has lectured at Miami a couple of times. He's quite an expert on the Middle East, and his book highlights one of the biggest problems in the Israeli-Palestine conflict: How can a peace be negotiated if there's no legitimate representative of the Palestines for the Israelis to negotiate with?
- The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon. Solomon is a Canadian...
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books, climate change
Posted at: 11:56 PM | 0 Comments | Add Comment | Permalink
