Back in the spring of 1990, I was a young-ish professor, sitting in the convocation ceremony of a wannabe-ivy league college in West Virginia. It was a beautiful place, founded in the 1840s, with classic architecture set in the riotous Appalachian forest. But it struggled to compete for students. Like many small colleges, it admitted a large percentage of “learning disabled” kids from wealthy families – “full pays” of an exorbitant tuition – in order to subsidize smart middle-class kids. That was a win-win all around, because officially “learning disabled” students didn’t count against a college’s standardized testing scores (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.).  The one-third or one-quarter of the students who were smart-and-subsidized pushed up the college’s scores, while the dumb-but-wealthy got to purchase a “prestigious” degree. 

    Colleges are expensive to run, especially given the expectations of wealthy families, so the pursuit of prestige is never-ending. One device in that pursuit is awarding doctoral degrees honoris causa to any random celebrity who can be convinced to attend a convocation and wow the parents. So there I was, sitting in a self-congratulatory convocation ceremony, watching an honorary degree being awarded to “population expert” Paul Ehrlich. It was surreal.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich became a celebrity in 1968, thanks to his doomsday prophecy, The Population Bomb, screaming that the world faced mass starvation, commodity shortages and economic collapse by the late-1970s.  This was inevitable, he argued, because people multiply faster than their capacity to feed themselves. 

He was wrong. The world’s population is still growing (until 2060), yet malnutrition is still falling to millennially small levels. In the Old Stone Age, everyone was hungry and many starved. Today, hunger is now isolated to regions suffering from war, anarchy or socialism (like newly hungry Venezuela).  

    Despite all the “Small World” propaganda, on a human scale, the Earth is really, really big.  Yes, there are now seven billion people, but there are also 8-16 trillion trees – not counting grasslands. So, through the 1980’s, a legion of economists and demographers (like Roger Revell, Robert Sassone, Mark Perlman, Peter Bauer, Nick Eberstadt, et.al.) debunked the whole notion of a “population explosion.” As any anorexic knows, the first victim of malnutrition is fertility.

Oxford’s Colin Clark showed that the world’s already-plowed land could support 35 billion on an American diet, or 105 billion with healthier Japanese fare. Economist Jacqueline Kasun showed there’s no relationship between population and pollution; dense populations (like Holland) handle waste better than unpopulated regions like slash-and-burn Amazonia. Julian Simon (Resourceful Earth) showed that inventive humanity responds to local commodity shortages (like the Paleolithic knife-flint shortage) with new materials (like bronze). Population growth has made everybody better off. To repeat, any starvation now is the result of war, anarchy or tyranny (like socialist Venezuela).

    So there I was, in an academic gown and a stifling convocation hall, in May 1990, over a decade after The Population Bomb was proven wrong, watching my college president award Paul Ehrlich an honorary doctorate for his “tireless work” in alerting the world to the imminent population explosion. Ehrlich humbly accepted the degree, then delivered an impassioned speech about the critical need for government-enforced population control, as in China and India – a policy guaranteed only to produce an explosion in the bureaucratic population.

    This experience left me with life-long questions. How can an objectively disproven doomsday theory maintain any academic credibility? Do academics care about truth? Why do people always buy into the imminent catastrophe industry – the 1970’s Ice Age or today’s Global Sauna? I already knew that “Catastrophe” makes headlines, while “No Catastrophe” does not. In the newsroom, years later, I also learned that news coverage consists in gracefully sliding a 300-word story into the well-worn ruts of the catastrophe, scandal or tragedy de jour, so people do not need to think. The Media does not communicate truth. It sells headlines.  

    Now, science’s job is discovering truth, but it can do that only within the limits of the Scientific Method. The great philosopher Karl Popper made it clear that science can only provisionally prove theories that are falsify-able. Any theory is scientifically meaningful, only if it can specify what observation or result would prove it false. For example: the theory, “All swans are white,” can be disproven if we ever find a subspecies of black swans. The theory remained meaningful and provisionally true… until we discovered black swans in Australia.

    Now, most statements are meaningful, even when they’re not scientifically meaningful. For example: “I exist.” Scientific observation can measure my biochemical reactions, but it can’t really “prove” that I’m really here. No matter. Science is extremely useful, but – like architects and actors – it needs the occasional slap from common sense.

    So what happens, when a joker like Paul Ehrlich proposes an hypothesis like “the Population Bomb,” and then future events and real number-crunching say No?  But then Pop Culture and Public Policy keeps chugging right along, as if it were Unquestionable Truth? The HUMA – the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration – is funding the research, and then translating grey scientific hypothesis into black-and-white, expensive public policy.  

    No scientific hypothesis can generate public policy, all by itself.  To become policy, it must be ground through a Precautionary Principle Translator. The PPT takes a possibility, translates that into a catastrophe, and that catastrophe licenses drastic “precautions” requiring the urgent growth of the Administration.  For example:

Aztec Astronomer: “There will be an eclipse of the Sun on this date.”  

Aztec General:  “How do we know the Sun will come back?”

Aztec Astronomer: “Well, the Sun really isn’t going anywhere…”

Aztec General: “So, you’re telling me, we need to make sure the Sun returns.”

Aztec Astronomer: “Well… I’d need a grant for further research to prove that.”

Aztec General: “So, just as a precaution, we should sacrifice another 10,000 Toltecs.”

Aztec Astronomer: “Well, yes, if you do that, I can guarantee the Sun will return.”     

And yes, scientists can be bought. In the early 1980’s, Rumor Has It, Conservative Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher worried about UK dependence on Arab oil. So in 1984, her science adviser Sir Crispin Tickell began working meteorology conventions, promising “research support” for anyone proving that human oil consumption is heating up the world. He then wrote Maggie’s 1988 Royal Society and 1990 World Climate speeches, legitimizing massive “greenhouse gas” policies. Only in the late 1990’s did Maggie regret what she’d started.  

I can’t vouch for this story, because I wasn’t there. But this I know:  Whenever someone defends something as “settled science,” it’s not science. It’s public policy.