Comments on: Matt Ridley says we are apocalypse junkies

By: Victor

Victor — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 19:17:18 +0000

This is a somewhat misleading representation of the development of food and metalprices, you should look at it in 1 graph and see that trends are still in place.
Please visit Goklany’s revisit of the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet with nice graphs long timescales.
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well-being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-i-revisiting-the-julian-simon-paul-ehrlich-bet/#more-9145

Overall not a convincing article.

By: Craigt

Craigt — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:35:14 +0000

Matt

it never baffles me, a true believer must keep their religion alive so they purposely don’t use their brain, never look deeply into the facts and will never use logic, reason or common sense. The ideology de jour, the catechism, must be defended at all cost. These paleolithic simian brains are like fundamentalist creationists, no matter what evidence you proffer, they have a reason, or will falsify data, to keep their neolithic linear brained faith alive.

As a Techo-progressive I see in: yours, Simon’s, Lomborg’s, Kelley’s, Kurzweils, Diamandis’ evidence an upholding of Marx’s evolutionary ideas of the need for the evolution of the productive material forces. It is the modern left that are revisionist anti-Marxists. Fuller coined the term Ephemeralization, Kelly: the Law of Increasing returns, Kurzweil: the Law of Exponential returns, complexity theory/economics supports you guys 100%. The future is on your guys side, only by creating a self fulfilling prophesy of a legally enforced draconian precautionary principle can the Green neo-communists bring about their resource scarcity dystopia.

Loved your book, keep up the great work!

By: Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:02:38 +0000

As it happens, I do think that CFCs very probably cause ozone loss. Always have. However, I am sometimes wrong about things, so I might be wrong about that and I correctly reported that there are some who doubt it.

I was not wrong about commodities, though. see this chart:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S4AmqnxCqXI/AAAAAAAAM1A/eYRQcCkYlcc/s1600-h/commodities.jpg

and Mark Perry’s conclusion about it:

“If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates.

Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative slope over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.”

and I was not wrong about food prices either:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/08/peak-oil-climate-change-and-the-threat-to-food-security/#more-48870

How anybody from the climate-alarm camp can argue that the recent spike in food prices might be evidence of running out of food, when we turned 40% (!!) of US grain into motor fuel last year to satisfy green campaigners, baffles me.