“In the event that I were reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”—Prince Philip of England, patron of the World Wildlife Fund, environmentalist
“World population must be stabilized, and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”—Jacques Cousteau, famous oceanographer, producer of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, environmentalist
“A total population of 250–300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”—Ted Turner, founder of CNN, patron of the United Nations Foundation, environmentalist
“… my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem” by saving millions of lives—Alexander King, founder of the Club of Rome, environmentalist
Humans “are a plague on the earth” and “behind every threat [to wildlife] is the frightening explosion in human numbers.”—Sir David Attenborough, documentary filmmaker behind Life on Earth and many more, senior manager at BBC, environmentalist
“We have grown in number to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease.”—James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, author of Ages of Gaia and The Revenge of Gaia, environmentalistThink such views are only at the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement? Think again.
Every person quoted here is highly respected in the mainstream environmental movement. And the litany could go on and on. Biologist Paul Ehrlich calls people, in his book titles, The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion and compares us with cancer. Demographer Kingsley Davis, who coined the term “population explosion,” calls us the “population plague.” Prominent Associated Press environmental reporter Seth Borensteincalls us “people pollution.”
With such attitudes toward people dominant among leading environmentalists, it’s no wonder that environmental organizations have become notorious for trampling on people’s rights to life, liberty, and property.Whether by driving indigenous peoples off their native lands (killing some Ugandans and Hondurans, among others) to form nature preserves or plant “carbon offsets,” letting malaria kill 1 million people a year, or using compulsory sterilization and forced abortions to fight population growth, as China has done with its one-child policy and President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren has recommended, environmentalism as a whole—regardless of exceptions among individual environmentalists—has earned the name “fatal cult of anti-humanism,” as Robert Zubrin put it in the subtitle of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Anti-Humanism.
The Green movement’s anti-humanism doesn’t spring from a vacuum. It’s rooted in the environmentalists’ dominant worldviews, theologies, and ethics, which affect both their identification of environmental problems and the solutions they offer—and, all too often, infect even Christian environmentalists’ thinking.That’s why it’s so important for you to help your friends recognize and understand environmentalism and its alternative, godly dominion. And you can do that by giving or lending them our 13-part, 4-DVD series Resisting the Green Dragon and James Wanliss’s outstanding book Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death.
The Bible teaches that we are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), crowned with glory and honor (Psalm 8:5), and given dominion, as God’s representatives, over the Earth (Genesis 1:28).
Rather than embracing environmentalism’s misanthropy, we should celebrate people. Not the population bomb, but the population bloom; not people pollution but the people solution; not the human cancer but the human answer!
Auliya says
Firstly, your argument is like saiyng people died before guns were invented so guns cannot kill people. We know the climate changes on its own, mainly down to eccentricities in the earths orbit and axial position, but the current trend is not due to these factors, its due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.And what scientists are concerned about, is changing conditions on earth significantly from the conditions which have allowed humanity to flourish. No one is saiyng the earth will end, or doomsday is coming.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. says
Your analogy is mistaken. We’re not saying that since climate has changed naturally in the past it can’t be changing anthropogenically now. We’re saying that since climate has changed naturally in the past. those who think it’s changing anthropogenically now must overcome the null hypothesis. That is, since it has changed naturally in the past, by equal or greater magnitudes and at equal or greater rates, the fact that it’s changing now is not in itself evidence that its changes now are entirely, mostly, significantly, or even partly anthropogenic. Theoretically, it could indeed be any one of those, but one must offer empirical evidence that the causes now differ from the causes in the past. Basic physics tells us that CO2, an infrared-absorbing gas, impedes the movement of some infrared (heat) from Earth’s surface out to space, thus causing the atmosphere to be warmer than it otherwise would be. Fine enough. But basic physics also tells us that if you drop a rock and a feather at the same time from the same height they’ll land at the same moment–unless there are complicating factors like air (in which case the feather will fall much more slowly and will likely drift some distance horizontally along the way) and wind (in which case the feather might blow up into a tree and never come down). So, should adding CO2 to the atmosphere warm it, in the absence of complicating factors (feedbacks)? Yes. How much? Basic physics (the Stefan-Boltzmann equation of black-body radiation) tells us that for a doubling of CO2 concentration, Earth’s atmosphere, at the surface, should warm by about 1 to 1.2 degrees C (though recently Australian climate scientist David Evans has been publishing some articles arguing, plausibly, that this exaggerates the pre-feedbacks warming to about six times what it ought to be). So what do the complicating factors (feedbacks) do? Do they increase the warming, decrease it, or neither? The computer models on which the UN IPCC depends incorporate assumptions, especially about cloud feedbacks, that lead to its estimating that doubled CO2 would raise global average temperature by about 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C, i.e., that the feedbacks increase that initial warming. But on average the models predict twice the warming actually observed over the relevant period; 95%+ predict more warming than observed, not less, indicating that the errors are not random but driven by some kind of bias (whether intentional and dishonest or unintentional and simply mistaken) incorporated into all of them; and none predicted the complete absence of statistically significant warming over the last 18 years and 9 months, according to the satellite data (our most reliable because most representative and least contaminated). This means the models are wrong. Empirical studies increasingly indicate that warming from doubled CO2 is more likely in the range of 0.3 to about 2 degrees C, meaning that the feedbacks could actually reduce rather than increase the initial warming. Considerable empirical research remains to be done, over a considerable time, to narrow the range of probably warming from added CO2. But what we do know is that at present the models themselves, because they are so systematically wrong, provide no rational basis for any predictions about future temperature and therefore also no rational basis for any policy to address it.
You wrote, “climate changes on its own, mainly down to eccentricities in the earths orbit and axial position.” That is true, over extremely long periods (the Milankovich cycles), but over shorter periods, measured in centuries or decades, the changes are driven much more by solar cycles (in both total solar irradiance and solar magnetic wind) and ocean cycles (Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino Southern Oscillation), and perhaps also by oscillating cycles in polar ice advance and retreat (a new theory recently raised by one scientist).
You continued, “but the current trend is not due to these factors.” Not due to Earth’s orbit and axial tilt cycles, largely right–those are much too long and slow to explain what we’ve observed over the last 36 years (the period of satellite temperature measurements), 65 years (the period over which IPCC says human activity has caused most of the warming of about 0.7 to 0.9 degree C, depending on the database one consults, and depending on the credibility of those data), 165 years (roughly since the end of the Little Ice Age), or the last thousand years (since the midst of the Medieval Warm Period). But while orbit and tilt cycles don’t explain those changes, solar, ocean, and polar ice cycles, singly or together, must have explained the changes pre-1950 (before which our CO2 additions hadn’t been enough to have observable warming effect according to the IPCC) and could explain all or part of the changes post-1950.
Consequently, your conclusion, “it[‘]s due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions” does not follow logically. Some or all of the post-1950 warming COULD be due to AGHG emissions, but COULD and IS are different things. And the correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global average temperature suggests that temperature leads and CO2 follows, rather than vice versa, which is the opposite of what’s needed to pin the warming on CO2. Meanwhile, there are better correlations, with the appropriate sequence, between solar and ocean cycles, on the one hand, and temperature, on the other, suggesting that they’re the more likely drivers recently.
Finally, you write, “scientists are concerned about … changing conditions on earth ….” Some are, some aren’t. In the end, though, while in politics if you want to find out who won an election you count votes, in science you don’t count votes, you study the data, and that trumps votes.
Thanks for your comment. I invite you to read our most recent major paper on this subject, “A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger,” at .