Population Reduction, Not Science

Executive Intelligence Review July 18, 1997, pp. 29-32

by Marjorie Mazel Hecht 

      Environmental policy today is driven by population-reduction ideology, not science. Today's hot-button environmental issues would have flunked even the most cursory science (or sanity) test a half-century ago. There is no real scientific evidence behind the scare stories, just the Malthusian view that the Earth must be protected from greedy, resource-using human beings, of whom there are too many. From Malthus ideas, the scare stories and their consequences, such as banning useful pesticides, have been a very efficient means of directly or indirectly killing large numbers of people. Consider three examples: DDT, the ozone hole, and global warming.

      DDT is the ``mother'' of environmental hoaxes. The pesticide was banned in 1972 by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator William Ruckelshaus, for what he admitted were  political reasons.  Ruckelshaus chose to ban DDT, despite the fact that the EPA had held seven months of scientific hearings on DDT, and that the EPA's own hearing examiner had ruled on the basis of the voluminous scientific evidence presented, that DDT should not be banned.[1]

      EPA hearing examiner Edmund Sweeney stated at the time, ``DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man and these uses of DDT do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or estuarine organisms.'' The major scientific organizations testified on behalf of continued use of DDT.  In the past 25 years, despite the repeated lies about the dangers of DDT, the scientific evidence has continued to prove it safe. It does not cause cancer in human beings, eggshell thinning in birds, bird die-offs, or any of the other catastrophic effects attributed to it by the greens.

      DDT came under fire because, since its discovery in 1942, it had saved more millions of human lives than any other man-made chemical. Alexander King, the founder of the Club of Rome, a Malthusian organization, wrote in a 1990 biographical essay: ``My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.'' King was particularly concerned that DDT had dramatically cut the incidence of malaria and the death rate in the developing nations.

      Without the use of DDT, malaria is the world's leading killer  causing at least 100 million deaths per year. Nearly half the world's population is at risk from malaria. Most of the 200 to 300 million new malaria cases each year are among children. 

The Big Lie About the Ozone Hole

    There is no scientific certainty whatsoever that the very small
amounts of man-made chlorofluorocarbons are depleting the ozone layer. The so-called evidence is the product of computer models, based on chemical reactions never duplicated in the lab. Yet, the ozone-depletion theory was used to bring a 1987 international agreement, the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, that mandates the phaseout of a benign, efficient, and inexpensive refrigerant, which has been responsible in the past 50 years for saving lives by preserving the food supply and keeping it wholesome.[2] Ed. Note:  as well a provide a non-flammable refrigerant in a cicumstance where disastrous fires killing hundreds of people when flammable gases were used.  Now every home refrigerator is an incindiery time bomb.

      The individuals behind the Montreal Protocol--for example, Richard Elliot Benedick, the U.S. State Department's ozone negotiator who organized the Montreal Protocol, and who headed the State Department's Office of Population--admitted that there was "no measurable evidence of damage'' at the time the treaty was signed.[3]

      There still is no measurable evidence of damage. But as the phaseout of CFCs takes hold, and poorer nations cannot afford the more expensive replacement refrigerants, there will be a breakdown of the refrigeration cold chain, which protects crops after harvest and during storage and distribution, and mass deaths will occur. International refrigeration experts have estimated that the ban on CFCs would kill between 20 to 40 million people a year by the end of the 1990s, through starvation and food-borne diseases.

      As with the DDT ban, the population control lobby brags about its institution of the ozone hole hoax. For example, in a 1992 update of the Club of Rome's 1972 book "Limits to Growth," the authors devote an entire chapter to praising the Montreal Protocol, as follows: ``The world's nations acknowledged that they had overrun a serious limit.  Soberly, reluctantly, they agreed to give up a profitable and useful industrial product. They did it before there was any measurable economic, ecological, or human damage and before there was complete scientific certainty.''[4]

What Global Warming?

      Until the early 1970s, it was generally assumed that long-term
astronomical cycles, those measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, were the way in which an understanding of climate had to be situated.[5]  The 100,000-year cycles of Ice Ages are determined by the combinaion of the periodicities in the eccentricity, tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit. In between Ice Ages, there are roughly 10,000-year periods known as interglacials, when warmer climates prevail. Right now, the Earth is at the end of an interglacial, and most certainly entering a new glacial period.

      The Ice Ages of the past, and the coming Ice Age, have a timetable of their own, quite independent of man's industrial output of carbon dioxide.  No scientist who knows these astronomical cycles could be honestly worried about the ups and downs of local or global temperatures in time spans of years or even decades, or seriously concerned with short-term computer modelling and associated scare stories.

      How then, have we come to the point where an international climate treaty is on the table, buttressed by a ``consensus'' that flies in the face of the reality that, based on the last several million years of history, the world is inexorably moving into another Ice Age?[6] Again, we can look to a leading Malthusian activist, Dame Margaret Mead, for an explanation: Mead chaired a conference in November 1975 on "The Atmosphere: Endangered or Endangering.'' Mead told the assembled scientists:

      "The unparalleled increase in the human population and its demands for food, energy, and resources is clearly the most important destabilizing influence in the biosphere. We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a planetary scale. Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices: to drill a well, open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid fast-breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea, the whole planet may become endangered.  

        What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial, but effective warnings.  Warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals which flee the hurricane. Only by making clear how physically interdependent are the people of all nations, can we relate measures taken by one nation, to measures taken by another, in a way that will draw from the necessary capacity for sacrifice, of which human beings, as a group, have proven capable. 

        It is therefore a statement of major possibilities of danger, which may overtake humankind, on which it is important to concentrate attention.''  Scientists who attended that conference warning about a coming Ice Age, such as Stephen Schneider, left the conference promoting global warming. Since then, the global warming propaganda has continued to be ``artificial,'' yet very effective in scaring populations and governments so much about a hypothetical danger that they are willing to accept the imposition of measures that will actually kill millions of people. It is absolutely certain that the proposed cutbacks in emissions from energy generation and industry will stifle development, lower living standards, and increase the environmentalist death toll.

      The current negotiations on carbon dioxide emissions are based on a much ballyhooed scientific consensus' put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This group, in its 1995 report, stated, ``The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.'' The IPCC backed up this statement by citing a series of journal articles. Examination showe none of the cited studies support the IPCC suggestion! [7]   According to Ann Coulter, “Global warming is good business. The federal government funds 99.5% of climate research to the tune of about $4 billion each year."  Ed Note:  Then, the government seicntists accuse objectors of being "money grubbing deniers in the employ of oil companies."

The Green Transmission Belt

        Each enviro-hoax has been launched into the popular orbit with a media barrage, large amounts of foundation funding, and government and private grants for those scientists who are willing to go with the politically correct flow.[8] In print, on the air, and on the screen, news and opinion reports play up the scare. The lies and misinformation are repeated so often, that even the unwitting recipients of the propaganda begin to believe it. With DDT, the barrage was so successful, that EPA administrator Ruckelshaus was able to cite ``public perception'' as playing a more important role than scientific evidence in making his decision to ban DDT. From that point on, ``perception'' and not truth became the operative concept in environmental policy. Ed Note:  And, that is very much the case today, ten years later.

      Today, the term ``scientific consensus'' has been added to the green arsenal. The hoaxes are defended by citing body counts of the scientists who are for it. At Congressional hearings on global warming, for example, an EPA spokesman put up a chart that listed on one side, hundreds of scientists who allegedly backed global warming, and on the other side, the three scientists who were testifying that day against the hoax. This idea that scientific truth lies in majority opinion is accompanied by an atmosphere of intimidation and harassment for those scientists whose research goes counter to the prevailing ideology, or who criticize any aspect of a hoax.

       Many environmentalist groups rode their way to million-dollar budgets and fame on one or more hoaxes. The Environmental Defense Fund, for example, made its name by promoting the DDT scare in the early 1970s.  In the 1980s, the Natural Resources Defense Council hired a public relations firm to convey the Alar scare into a money-and member-maker for the organization. The World Resources Institute received millions of foundation dollars in the 1980s, specifically to promote the ozone and global warming scares. 

1. For background information on DDT, see Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, ``The Ugly Truth About Rachel Carson,'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Summer 1992, and Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, ``Malaria: The Killer That Could Have Been Conquered,'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Summer 1993. 

2. See Rogelio A. Maduro and Ralph Schauerhammer, {The Holes in the Ozone Scare: The Scientific Evidence That the Sky Isn't Falling} (Washington, D.C.: 21st Century Science Associates, 1992). 

Ed Note:  "The Ozone War" by Dotto and Schiff

3. Richard Elliot Benedick, {Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet} (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 1-2. 

4. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, {Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future} (Post Mills, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 1992). 

5. For a historical review of climate science, see Laurence Hecht, ``The Coming (or Present) Ice Age,'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Winter 1993-1994. 

6. The story of how the shift from an ice age scare to global warming was accomplished is told in Robert E. Stevenson, Ph.D., ``An Oceanographer Looks at the Non-Science of Global Warming,'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Winter 1996-1997; and Rogelio A. Maduro, ``Orbital Cycles, Not CO2 Determine the Earth's Climate,''  {EIR,} May 16, 1997. 

7. Hugh W. Ellsaesser, an atmospheric scientist with 43 years of experience, has analyzed the IPCC pronouncement and the scientific studies upon which it is based in ``What Man-Induced Climate Change?'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Summer 1997, p. 61. Another aspect of the fraud, including howcertain scientists ``adjusted'' their data to fit the global warming ideology, can be found in Zbigniew Jaworowski, Ph.D., ``Another Global Warming Fraud Exposed: Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase,'' {21st Century Science & Technology,} Spring 1997. 

8. Oceanographer Robert E. Stevenson gives a first-hand view of the funding process on global warming in the article cited in footnote 6.