NOTE:  The photo above is an illustration of what the earth would look like if ALL of the ice on earth melted and the worst fears of the climate change doomsayers came true:  About 4% more of the earth’s surface would be covered by water than is true today.

I would take the aged scientist Frank Fenner’s predictions of imminent doom more seriously if his fellow scientists hadn’t been making the same predictions for 400 years — and have a near perfect record of being wrong.

Apparently Fenner, a 90-year-old microbiologist, calmly told The Australian newspaper recently that the human race faces extinction within 100 years due to… wait for it!… overpopulation, famine and, yes, climate change.

“We’re going to become extinct,” Fenner told the newspaper jovially. “Whatever we do now is too late.”

At least Hollywood is more original: In the film 2012, which I found entertaining if a bit tedious, the extinction comes from a new kind of Flood: all the land masses are covered by a massive melting of the earth’s ice. The problem is, such a scenario is scientifically impossible. If all the ice on earth did, in fact, melt, it wouldn’t come close to covering all of the land masses.

According to William Johnston, melting the 29.3 million cubic kilometers of grounded ice would produce 26.1 million cubic kilometers of water and raise the levels of the oceans about 66 feet — enough to swamp small low-lying islands but which would leave most of the earth untouched.

Johnston estimates we would have 128 million square kilometers of land compared to 132 million square kilometers today.  So much for Hollywood!

Back to Fenner. How does he know that “over-population” is going to do us in? After all, scientists have been complaining about “over population” since the days of the British economist Thomas “the End if Near” Malthus in the early 1800s when the earth’s population was about 978 million. Here is Malthus’s “scientific” prediction:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Chapter VII, page 61.

Of course, other scientists have made equal fools out of themselves. Paul Ehrlich, of course, the author of The Population Bomb, famously predicted:

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1970

“When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1971

“Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1976

“Human-induced land degradation… affects about 40% of the planet’s vegetated land surface… [and is] accelerating nearly everywhere, reducing crop yields.” – Paul Ehrlich, 1997

I dunno. Doom and gloom certainly seems to make people money. Al Gore’s personal net worth went from $1 million when he left office in 2000 to $100 million today. As the Democrats demonstrate almost daily, there is a sucker born every minute.

The post Frank Fenner: Another Crackpot Prediction of Doom first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I just finished reading Leo Damrosch’s magisterial 2005 biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Rousseau’s vision ties in, or doesn’t tie in, with the problems of modern urban society. (Full disclosure: My wife hates Rousseau because he forced his lifelong mistress, Therese Levasseur, to give up their five children to foundling homes and then had the temerity to instruct women on why they should breastfeed their children and raise them according to his precepts.)

Rousseau, born in Switzerland in 1712, was basically a professional vagabond and loafer who ran away from his home in Geneva at the age of 16, was almost entirely self-taught, and who earned his living through menial jobs, copying musical manuscripts and writing books that both titillated and outraged most of Europe. Rousseau’s basic argument is that “civilization,” far from being an engine of progress and advancement, is actually a corrosive, even destructive force.

Rousseau was original in that he went against what everyone believed about social advancement, the value of science and art, technology and so on. Things aren’t getting better and better as the Enlightenment philosophes taught; they actually getting worse and worse. And nothing is getting worse quite like human beings themselves — who, Rousseau taught, are slowly degenerating from centuries of living in cramped, ugly cities, bad nutrition and the demands that social life imposes.

Rousseau was thus the world’s first hippie.

He championed a more “natural” lifestyle free from the artificial constraints and absurd duties that society demands. Much of what the modern world believes about human beings — from the importance of child-centered education to an emphasis on “authenticity” and natural foods — comes from this strange and highly original thinker.

Although denounced by both Protestant and Catholic religious authorities for his departures from Christian orthodoxy, Rousseau remained, to the chagrin of his agnostic friends, an obstinate believer throughout his life; and his vision of an original “wholeness” and perfection in nature is a kind of secular version of the creation story in Genesis.

Rousseau, like Christian theology, believed that mankind was created good… but that, through the actions of men and women, that natural perfection became disfigured. Here is how Rousseau explains it in his strange book on education, Emile:

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

Powerful stuff! I’ve always thought that our (my!) modern obsession with health can be seen in a Rousseau-like light, as a kind of primal “therapy” to correct the imbalances, weaknesses and deformities that our indolent modern lifestyles have bequeathed to us.

Rousseau was well aware that his “natural man” may never have actually existed… and that in reality primitive life may have been the way Thomas Hobbes described it as being (brutish, nasty and short)… but he imagined what human beings might have been like free from the artificial conveniences of cities and bad food.

He imagined “natural man” as strong, free, healthy, honest and direct. As imagined in his strange romantic novel Julie, Rousseau wanted to help people to get back, in a sense, to Middle Earth, to a time before the furnaces of Mordor destroyed the natural beauty of Man and his environment. Who can’t sympathize, at least a little, with this primeval longing?

More later…

The post Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a Return to Eden first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.