Climate catastrophism suffered a Category 5 event with the recent confessional by Ted Nordhaus, among the world’s foremost prophets of doom, that he had it wrong all along. The models that forecast runaway global warming, Nordhaus writes in The Free Press, assumed simultaneously soaring populations, booming economies and flatlining technological improvement which, Nordhaus has belatedly recognized, simply can’t all occur at the same time.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
