Any minute now I’m going to lay off blogging for a while, for health reasons. But I can’t pretend I’m going to find going cold turkey easy, especially not when there are stories like this around.

It concerns “wildlife expert” Chris Packham – presenter of some of the BBC’s most popular nature programmes including Springwatch and a new series called The Animal’s Guide To British Wildlife – and some deeply unpleasant remarks he made in the course of an interview with the Radio Times.

“There’s no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we’re not addressing the one single factor that’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever-increasing size of the world’s population. I read the other day that, by 2020, there are going to be 70 million people in Britain. Let’s face it, that’s too many.”

So what does he suggest we do about it? Get people to stop having children?

“Yes. Absolutely. I wouldn’t actually penalise people for having too many children, as I think the carrot always works better than the stick. But what I would offer them tax breaks for having small families: say, 10 per cent off your tax bill if you decide to stick with just one child. And an even bigger financial incentive if you choose not to have a family at all.”

What frightens me almost more than these remarks – whose loathsomeness I shall gloss in a moment – is the response of the Daily Mail’s readership. All right, perhaps the Mail’s online audience is not representative of the entire country, but I do think they’re probably close to embodying what the reasonable other person from Middle England thinks, and in this case what they seem to think is frankly bloody terrifying.

All right, so I don’t imagine many of us here would quibble with the most popular comment so far, with 1300 plus positive votes:

How about offering people nothing for not having children as well as not giving them anything when they have ten children? Let them pay for their offspring with their own money for a change. That might make a few people consider the population even if it’s the one in their own home.

This is in line with the very sensible remarks that once got Howard Flight into such trouble. And of course the Tory peer was quite right: it’s absurd to have a situation where the most feckless, unproductive sector of the economy is subsidised by the state to have children they would otherwise be unable to afford.

But here are the second and third most popular comments, with well over 1000 positive votes each:

He is quite right you know, the most eco friendly thing you can do is not breed.

Well done Chris I couldn’t have said it better myself. That is the main problem with this planet — too many people. We require a massive birth control programme, never mind growing more food and building more houses — cut back on breeding is the only answer.

There are so many things wrong with this attitude I don’t know where to begin. But why not let’s start with the plight of only children? Almost everyone I know who was brought up without a brother or sister wishes it could have been otherwise. I myself grew up in a family of seven, and while it’s true that I have never quite forgiven one of them for voting for Caroline Lucas in the last election I count the friendship and kinship of my wonderful brothers and sisters one of the greatest joys of my existence. I know there are many in China who feel much the same way: the tyrannical one-child policy, it is now being recognised, has not only led to much unnecessary unhappiness but is also leading to potentially disastrous economic consequences (especially in its battle for economic supremacy with India, where no such restrictions have applied).

Yet such is the misery that Chris Packham wishes to import to Britain. And to be fair, he is far from the only high profile figure who thinks this way. Very much of the same view is that famously nice, caring natural history TV presenter David Attenborough, concerned environmentalist the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt, actress Susan Hampshire, Gaia theory inventor James Lovelock, ex UN apparatchik Sir Crispin Tickell (the man who – briefly – persuaded Margaret Thatcher of the imminent perils of Man Made Global Warming) and chimp expert Jane Goodall. All of these luminaries are – with Packham – patrons of the Optimum Population Trust, an organisation which believes that the world’s growing population is “unsustainable” and which is dedicated to finding ways of reducing it.

The problem with the Optimum Population Trust – one of them anyway – is that its very existence is predicated on a vilely misanthropic view of the human species: that there are too many of us, that we do more harm than good.

And yes, superficially, this view of the world makes a kind of sense. It’s what I call an “I reckon” argument: the sort of argument you’d make in a pub, after a few beers, based on information you’ve established from a gut feeling so strong it doesn’t need any awkward details like facts getting in the way of your opinion. I mean obviously more people means less space, and more demand on “scarce resources”, so the more people there are the more trouble we’re in. Stands to reason dunnit?

This is exactly the kind of wrong thinking I address in my new book Watermelons. You’ll forgive me if I don’t come up with all the counterarguments here. (Read the bloody book!). But in a nutshell, it’s that this Neo-Malthusian pessimism – as warped and wrongheaded today as it was in the era of doom-monger Thomas Malthus (1766 to 1834) – is based on fundamental misconceptions about the ingenuity of the human species and about the nature of economic growth.

Sure if all populations did as they grew and grew was use up more finite “stuff”, then we would indeed have cause to worry. But they don’t: as populations increase in size, so they learn to specialise and adapt and find ever more ingenious ways of making more with less. That’s why, for example, the mass starvation predicted by Paul Ehrlich in his Sixties bestseller The Population Bomb never happened: because thanks to Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, crop yields dramatically increased while the area of land under cultivation remained unchanged. If you want to read more about this, I recommend not just my book, but also Matt Ridley’s superb The Rational Optimist or anything by Julian Simon (known as the Doomslayer because of the way he constantly confounded Neo Malthusian pessimism and  junk science).

The reason I have become so obsessed with “global warming” in the last few years is not because I’m particularly interested in the “how many drowning polar bears can dance on the head of a pin” non-argument which hysterical sites like RealClimate and bloggers like Joe Romm are striving so desperately to keep on a life support machine. It’s because unlike some I’ve read widely enough to see the bigger picture.

One thing I’ve learned in this wide reading is how obsessed so many of the key thinkers in the green movement are with the notion of “overpopulation.” As one of their favourite think tanks, the Club of Rome, puts it: “Earth has a cancer and the cancer is man.” This belief explains, inter alia, why the “science” behind AGW is so dodgy: because the science didn’t come first. What came first was the notion that mankind was a problem and was doing harm to the planet. The “science” was then simply tortured until it fitted in with this notion. [Climatism Bolded] 

I do not share this view. Indeed, though I believe that while people like Chris Packham (and Prince Charles; George Monbiot; Al Gore; David Attenborough; Robert Redford; Mikhail Gorbachev; Ted Turner; et al) may believe what they do for the noblest of reasons, their ecological philosophy is fundamentally evil. And I do mean evil. Any philosophy which has, as its core tenet, the belief that mankind is the problem not the solution cannot possibly be one that pertains to good, can it?

This is why I have been fighting this Climate War so hard for so long. And why I have no compunction whatsoever in calling the people who promote that repellant philosophy by the names they deserve. The ideological struggle that is being fought now over the issue of “Climate Change” (and related, quasi-Marxist weasel concepts such as Sustainability) may not yet involve the bloodshed caused in the wars against Nazism and Stalinism, but the threat it poses to individual freedom and economic security is every bit as great. But there aren’t enough of us fighting this war on the right side – and I’m knackered.

Continue Reading »

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Read more of James Delingpole’s cracking work here – James Delingpole – Telegraph Blogs

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Club Of Rome quotes via The Green Agenda :

“The greatest hope for the Earth lies in religionists and
scientists uniting to awaken the world to its near fatal predicament
and then leading mankind out of the bewildering maze of
international crises into the future Utopia of humanist hope.“
– Club of Rome,
Goals for Mankind

“In Nature organic growth proceeds according
to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is
missing from the process of growth and development of
the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for
sustainable growth and world development based on global
allocation of all resources and a new global economic system.
Ten or twenty years form today it will probably be too late.”
– Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and
it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely.
Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well 
suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature
of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected
representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”
– Club of Rome,
The First Global Revolution

“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that
fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order
and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.
Perhaps only a new and enlightened humanism
can permit mankind to negotiate this transition.”
– Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence
more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome,
Goals for Mankind

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UPDATE

via wattsupwiththat

Extract from :

IPCC Climate: A Product of Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics Built On Inadequate Data

The climate debate cannot be separated from environmental politics. Global warming became the central theme of the claim humans are destroying the planet promoted by the Club of Rome. Their book, Limits to Growth did two major things both removing understanding and creating a false sense of authority and accuracy. First, was the simplistic application of statistics beyond an average in the form of a straight-line trend analysis: Second, predictions were given awesome, but unjustified status, as the output of computer models. They wanted to show we were heading for disaster and selected the statistics and process to that end. This became the method and philosophy of the IPCC. Initially, we had climate averages. Then in the 1970s, with the cooling from 1940, trends became the fashion. Of course, the cooling trend did not last and was replaced in the 1980s by an equally simplistic warming trend. Now they are trying to ignore another cooling trend. Continue Reading »

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Club Of Rome Related:

• Club Of Rome – “The First Global Revolution” (Archive)
• The Road to Copenhagen Part I: The Club of Rome
• CLUB OF ROME VIDEO – The Original MIT Modellers of Human Pollution Doom – LAST CALL trailer – YouTube
• Abel Danger: club of Rome – the data doesn’t matter – all heretics will be punished – do you believe?
• Unraveling the Club of Rome (part 1) | Recycle Washington
• The Green Agenda
• IPCC Control Calculations of Annual Human CO2 Production For Political Agenda – Dr Tim Ball
• The Creator, Fabricator And Proponent Of Global Warming – Maurice Strong | CACA
• THE CLUB OF ROME Official (www.clubofrome.org)
• The Creator, Fabricator And Proponent Of Global Warming – Maurice Strong | CACA

Beware the eco-friendly buzzword “Sustainability”:

• The Real Agenda Behind UN “Sustainability” Unmasked
• As of 2011, 238 Australian Councils were operating the UN’s ‘Agenda 21’ program through ‘ICLEI Oceania’ – Ironbark Sustainability: About ICLEI Oceania, Low Carbon Australia and Ironbark Sustainability
• Excellent explanation of sustainability: What Is Sustainability?
• UN Agenda 21 Links | CACA
• The United Nations “Agenda 21” and “ICLEI” in one easy lesson
• United Nations Agenda 21 : The Death Knell of Liberty | CACA
• Shock News : UN Wants To Ban Private Property And Create “Human Habitat Settlement Zones” | CACA

Climatism Links:

• NATURE STUDY Confirms Global Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago | CACA
• Scientists talking about no warming
• Peer into the Heart of the IPCC, Find Greenpeace | CACA
• UN-Settled Science
• 44th Pacific “Sinking Islands” Extortion Forum | CACA
• 97% of climate models say that 97% of climate scientists are wrong | CACA
• Bureaucratic Dioxide
• A cooling consensus
• Modelling Climate Alarmism
• GLOBAL WARMING THEORY – Circular reasoning at its best
• Obamaclimate and Europe’s Green Energy Basket-Case | CACA
• The Truth About the Global Warming Agenda by Former NASA Climatologist | CACA