Obama’s science advisor hates science
Second update: I have to revise my assessment—made after reviewing his publication history—that Dr John Holdren is 'something of a crackpot' (now over the fold).
This transcript shows that Holdren is a publicist for fashionable apocalypses with little sense of proportion or respect for evidence that might get in the way of his hyperbole. He could reasonably ask, of course, to be excused for the mad exaggerations of his twenties. But to cling, today, to a baseless claim of 30 years ago that climate change could kill a billion people by 2020 shows a reluctance to accept inconvenient evidence that can only be the enemy of scientific enquiry.
Holdren's behavior matches that of another U.S. civil servant who—substituting notoriety for his diminishing authority—now imagines himself to be the Cassandra of coal. The Senate has confirmed Holdren's nomination as Obama's Science Advisor.
In remarks that could come direct from the dogmatists in the Curia, Prof. Holdren shows that he prefers the "public discourse" that is science (and democracy, for that matter) to be a chorus.
"The few climate-change 'skeptics' with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all... It has delayed - and continues to delay - the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge." extract from: John HoldrenHis claims about the lack of an evidentiary basis for 'skepticism' are simply wrong. See this summary from climate researcher Prof. Robert Carter, in the Journal of the Ecomnomic Society of Australia (.pdf, about 1.8mb)
Update:Thanks to Luboš Motl I've just learned about Holdren's publication history. You can, too, at Google Scholar. Holdren's most cited publication is a 1971 'Science' article on 'catastrophic' poplulation growth, co-authored with the ignominious Paul R Erlich. The 'deck' quote is as subtle as his recent pronouncements on climate: "Complacency concerning this component of man's predicament is unjustified and counterproductive". Holdren has a couple of other journal articles on this long-forgotten catastrophist subject, several, more recent, in the same vein on climate change and earlier on nuclear weapons strategy and nuclear energy policy. Nothing, it seems, on plasma physics, the subject of his science PhD.
It seems, alas, that Dr Holdren has the qualifications to be something of a crackpot.
Posted on 02/17 at 07:05 AM.
Your comments
IanC
So John Holdren now believes that “when you provide health care for women, opportunities for women, education, people tend to have smaller families on average. And it ends up being easier to solve some of our other problems when that occurs.” It is to be hoped that his evidence to the US Senate hearing on this point has been read with satisfaction by Sir John Maddox, the former editor of Nature.
In 1972 Maddox’s book The Doomsday Syndrome was the subject of a hostile review in The Times by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, in the course of which the US-based experts took Maddox to task for advancing the views that Holdren now accepts:
“The most serious of Maddox’s many demographic errors is his invocation of a ‘demographic transition’ as the cure for population growth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He expects that birth rates there will drop as they did in developed countries following the industrial revolution. Since most underdeveloped countries are unlikely to have an industrial revolution, this seems somewhat optimistic at best. But even if those nations should follow that course, starting immediately, their population growth would continue for well over a century - perhaps producing by the year 2100 a world population of twenty thousand million. And that population would probably still be increasing by more than 100 million a year since there is every sign demographic transitions do not lead to stationary populations but to populations growing at 0.5 to 1 per cent a year” (The Times, 26 June 1972).
Nearly forty years on, there is every sign that demographic transitions can and do lead to declining populations. The annual growth in the global population has never reached 100 million, and most demographers believe that it never will. Holdren and Ehrlich did not merely make some bad predictions: their claims were demonstrably false on the evidence of demographic data that were readily available at the time.
Ian,
What a blessing it is to have a long memory. Of course you’re right about the evidence for ‘demographic transition’. I’m surprised to learn (from the Wikipedia article) that the model dates to 1929.
I was going to say that it’s uncanny how the language of the malthusians of the 1970s is echoed by the CO2 catastrophists today: “even were we to slow emissions dramatically we could not be sure of avoiding the ‘tipping point’ etc etc.”.
But then, they’re the same people making these wild claims; at least in Holdren’s case.