The... the... oceans are turning to acid!!!

For your Earth Day enjoyment, Pat Michaels has a nice essay on the latest green hoax.

Excerpts:

What with it being Earth Day and all, it’s a good time to reflect on the sorry track record of environmental apocalypse prognostication and make a little forecast of our own, namely that something called “ocean acidification” is going to be the latest, greatest threat to our survival. “This time we mean it”, my greener friends are saying. 

They’ve always meant it. 50 years ago, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an anti-pesticide tome that Al Gore cites as his inspiration (as I write this you can join the other dozen people watching Current TV, where Al is touting itahhgaain!). Carson conjured a birdless, cancer-riven world caused by increasing reliance on pesticides. 

The metaphor stuck. Federal scientists warned of an “aquatic silent spring” if acid rain remained unchecked. In reality, rainfall is naturally acidic, and there are plenty of spots on earth—including a small place called Asia—where there are very few controls on power plant emissions thought to contribute to it. There are still birds. In the eastern U.S., the white haze of summer (as opposed to the more natural blue haze—hence, Blue Ridge Mountains) is largely made up of acid rain precursors. And the birds tweet on. 

Should have been called the half-acid rain problem. 

Of course there was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “Population Bomb”, projecting massive worldwide famines in the 1970s. Doomsayers have yet to learn to delay the end until their dotage, although, judging from his recent letter to the Slovenian government, threatening mass extinctions if they build one power plant, NASA’s James Hansen appears to be coming pretty close. 

Instead of rising exponentially, as Ehrlich said they would, global birth rates dropped—by 50 per cent—and they are still going down. 

Related to the Population Bomb was the World Food Crisis. In the early 1970s, thanks to some bad weather here and some worse central planning in the quaint Communist world, global food stocks reached a very low value. Worldwatch’s Lester Brown said we could starve. He does that, or something like it, every year, in his “State of the World” books. College professors still buy them. 

We solved that the good-old American way, selling a massive amount of our wheat to the Soviet Union, jacking up the price, and then planting, in the words of President Nixon’s “colorful” Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, “from fencerow to fencerow”. End of crisis. 

Ah, forgot about Ozone Depletion. That was going to disrupt the Southern Ocean/Antarctic food chain, also causing mass starvation. No dice. 

Dupont’s patents on Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), ubiquitous refrigerants thought to be catalyzing the destruction of high-latitude stratospheric ozone, were about to run out, so they were only too happy to assist in banning it. Of course, they had a substitute...

I’ll leave global warming alone, having ranted on it enough. In this year’s Earth Day update, Gallup finds it—yet again—at the bottom of the list of people’s environmental worries. 

Which is why we have a new apocalypse, “ocean acidification”, caused, surprise, by dreaded carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels...

I often wonder how it is that so many people are duped by this crap. Generation after generation, people accept this junk science, despite the fact that quite analogous apocalypses have been proven frauds again and again and again.

I guess it's for the same reason that people still fall victim to Ponzi schemes and various financial scams.