Science & Technology

Paul Ehrlich Goes Up Against "Well-Funded, Merciless Enemies" to Save the Earth from Certain Destruction. Again.

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By now, talking smack about environmental doomsayer and neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich should fall solidly under the heading "dead horse, the beating of." But Ehrlich is some sort of zombie pony: no matter how many times he is proven wrong, he rises again as a commentator, consulted and quoted by otherwise discriminating people. He was wrong about global starvation, wrong about pesticide-induced riots, wrong about race war, and wrong about nuclear annihilation. Now, naturally, he has taken up the cause of global warming.

Here are Reason, we have done our fair share of Ehrlich-bashing (and its converse, Norman Borlaug promoting). But the folks at Hot Air are taking another run at the old boy, driven to it by emails from Ehrich—recently dug up and made public by The Washington Times—arguing for a major public relations campaign against global warming skeptics, funded and organized by folks at the National Academy of Sciences. Here's Ehrlich:

"Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

The way the folks at Hot Air see it, anyone worried about global warming should take heart: Every catastrophe predicted by Ehrlich has failed to come to pass, so we're probably good to go.