Raining in their hearts: nuclear winter, population explosion, non-renewable resources, vanishing species - some of them are genuine problems, others are made up out of whole cloth.

ear winter, population explosion, non-renewable resources, vanishing species-some of them are genuine problems, others are made up out of whole cloth; all are easily exploited for fun and left-wing profit.

DOOM HAUNTS the end of the twentieth century. Cocktail parties in Georgetown, Santa Monica, and Manhattan are suffused with a finde-millennium air. The unwary party-goer will encounter fanatics determined to avert the apocalypse through the proper rituals. If only Americans will use cloth diapers, nonphosphate detergents, cosmetics not tested on animals, and eat environmentally sound ice cream (Rainforest Crunch) from Ben and Jerry's, then maybe a few righteous souls will survive the coming holocaust.

If anyone suggests that the end is not nigh, he is treated as though he had told a Southern Baptist convention that promiscuous homosexuality is not a sin. To remind people that most commodities are cheaper than ever before in history, that worldwide the human life-span grows ever longer, and that supplies of food grow ever more abundant is, well, impolite.

This atmosphere of catastrophe has been sustained by a cadre of professional doomsters. They have peddled their apocalypses in millions of books and scores of appearances on Donahue, Oprah, and Geraldo. They predict imminent nuclear, population, resource-depletion, environmental, biotechnological, and economic crises. Yet the planet still spins in its orbit and for the most part mankind continues to prosper.

These apocalypse boosters are intellectuals and policy-makers whose apocalyptic predictions are meant to frighten the public into adopting their leftist policy prescriptions. The pioneers of the genre, Doom and Gloom respectively, are Paul Ehrlich and Jay Forrester. In 1968, Ehrlich's The Population Bomb detonated into a best-seller. Four years later, the Club of Rome published the infamous Limits to Growth, based on Forrester's computer models. How do they look today?

End of the World Blues

LET'S TAKE a stroll down memory lane. In 1968 Ehrlich wrote: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Of course, massive famines involving hundreds of millions of people simply didn't happen. Sadly, far too many people, especially children, did die of starvation, but on nothing like the scale predicted by Ehrlich.

A neo-Malthusian, Ehrlich is enthralled by the eighteenth-century doctrines of the Reverend Thomas Malthus. In An Essay on Population, published in 1798, Malthus dolefully wrote that population grows at a geometric rate while food supplies increase only at an arithmetic rate. Thus population growth would always outstrip the food supply, ensuring that some portion of mankind would starve.

Yet in the two centuries since, Malthus's predictions have proved to be spectacularly off the mark. For example: Since World War II, world grain production tripled while the world's population doubled. The leftish World Resources Institute noted: "Over the past two decades, total world food output expanded, outpacing demand. As a result, in recent years, prices of major food staples in international markets declined in real terms." Between 1972 and 1986, the prices of rice, corn, sugar, beef, and soybeans all declined in real terms by about half; world prices for cereal grains dropped by more than half. When asked how this predictive failure came about, Ehrlich ruefully acknowledges, "I seriously underestimated the speed with which the Green Revolution would transform Third World agriculture and boost food supplies." Well, yes.

Economist Julian Simon, who has tangled with Ehrlich more than once, acerbically comments, "Every prediction that Ehrlich made has proved wrong." Simon asserts that "all trends relevant to human population are moving in a positive direction." There is more and cheaper food, more and generally cheaper mineral resources; and life expectancy has been increasing worldwide, indicating better health.

Even the trends in population growth that so alarmed Ehrlich have turned positive in the past two decades. Demographer Carl Haub of the non-profit Population Reference Bureau says the world's population will probably level off at 10 to 11 billion in the next century. "Most countries, including those in the Third World," Haub notes, "are evidencing demographic transitions to slower population growth." Indeed, industrialized countries in Europe and the U.S. are well on the way to zero population growth. The U.S. population will level off at around three hundred million. In the 1960s, just as Ehrlich was making his dire predictions, the world population growth rate peaked at 2 per cent; it has since fallen to 1.8 per cent-and continues to drop.

Twenty-two years after The Population Bomb, the fact that none of Ehrlich's predictions have come true has in no way harmed his career or his credibility. He was recently awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize by the Swedish Academy and received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Ehrlich has repackaged his baleful predictions in a new book, The Population Explosion, published just in time for Earth Day.

How could Ehrlich be so wrong and why do so many people still believe overpopulation is a real problem? They have been seduced by what I call the "biological fallacy." He treats human beings as if we were just a clever herd of gazelles. Writes Ehrlich, "To ecologists who study animals, food and population often seem like two sides of the same coin. If too many animals are devouring it, the food supply declines; too little food, and the supply of animals declines."

Harvard demographer Nick Eberstadt responds: "One of the reasons that Ehrlich's been so wrong in his few solid predictions is that he has no understanding of or sympathy for the economic process that human beings engage in." In nature, gazelles uncontrolled by predators do occasionally overrun their pasturage and then starve when they run out of grass. Humans, unlike gazelles, have proved extraordinarily proficient at expanding the pasturage. Humans are uniquely productive creatures; unlike other species, we can increase the supply of resources available to us. And we have done so. Since 1750, the gross world product has increased more than 1,700-fold while the world's population has risen only sixfold. Let's see a gazelle herd do that! When in Rome ...

AT ABOUT the same time Ehrlich began preaching population doom, international businessmen and academics styling themselves the Club of Rome embarked upon the task of meditating on the predicament of mankind." The group stumbled upon MIT management professor and computer genius Jay Forrester. Using his "systems dynamics" approach, Forrester whipped up a quick computer program for the Club which proved that the "predicament of mankind" was just terrible and the end nigh.

Forrester left the popularization of his ideas to two acolytes, Dennis and Donella Meadows, whose gloss on Forrester's own World Dynamics became the huge best-seller The Limits to Growth. This spectacularly wrongheaded book popularized the notion of nonrenewable resources. With a boost from the temporary success of the Arab oil embargo, The Limits to Growth sold millions of copies in twenty languages. Its dire forecasts were further bolstered by President Carter's Global 2000 report issued in 1980.

The Limits to Growth's predictions boil down to plain old-fashioned Malthusianism. According to Forrester and the Meadowses, economic growth is forever limited by depletion of non-renewable resources, inadequate food supplies, overcrowding, and pollution. If one limit doesn't stop economic growth, then surely another will. Eighteen years later, how have Forrester's predictions stood the test of time?

On non-renewable resources, Forrester has proven to be solidly wrong. In 1972, Limits to Growth predicted that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and natural gas by 1993.

Not quite. The U.S. Bureau of Mines now estimates that, at current rates of production, world reserves of mercury will last twenty years, tin 24 years, zinc 21 years, and copper 41 years. And these estimates don't take into account that modern manufacturing techniques are coming to rely less and less on such metals. The World Resources Institute estimates that between 1970 and 1987 the average price of all metals and minerals fell by more than 50 per cent. Proven reserves of petroleum are now expected to last fifty years, and natural gas will last 58 years at 1986 production rates. For all these minerals, new reserves are being added each year. Asked about these figures, Forrester dryly noted, "I think in retrospect that Limits to Growth overemphasized the material-resources side."

Forrester argued next that overcrowding" would limit growth. In 1970, he estimated the world's population density at 69 people per square mile. By 1989, world population density had grown to 97 people per square mile. Note, however, that the population density in the tidy little country of the Netherlands is 1,123 per square mile. West Germany's is 637, and Japan's, 937. Clearly overpopulation has not made these countries poor. The much poorer Brazil has a population density of only 43 per square mile-75 per cent of the U.S. figure. At a peak world-population figure of ten billion, the average density would be 192 per square mile, far less than the current average density of Japan, France, Great Britain, West Germany, or the Netherlands.

As Nick Eberstadt notes: "People are always looking for the Iron Law of Population. Well, because population means creative, active human beings, there's no more of an Iron Law of Population than there is an Iron Law of History." If Forrester were correct, Brazil would be much richer than France and West Germany.

Forrester's fourth limit to growth is pollution. If none of the others halt a profligate humanity, then we will surely choke on our own wastes. This theme is a perennial favorite of doomsters even though the quality of air and water in the United States has improved markedly over the last twenty years. For instance, Lake Erie, which both Ehrlich and Forrester pronounced dead, is once again being fished commercially.

Yet, despite these predictive failures, Forrester remains unshakably convinced that what his computer is telling him is correct. Asked to assess The Limits to Growth, Forrester proudly asserted, "I think The Limits to Growth was an excellent piece of work that is becoming more true every day."

Having Their Cake and Eating It Too

IN 1983 Jeremy Rifkin warned: "People want healthier babies, more efficient plants and animals, a better GNP, and more security for their offspring. All of which biotechnology promises." Oddly enough, however, Rifkin, a New Left veteran of anti-Vietnam agitation, was warning against this new scientific threat.

In the early 1970s, biologists discovered ways to transfer (recombine) genes from one organism to another. Initially a few biologists had doubts about the safety of recombining genes. The New York Times Magazine even published a fanciful article in which cancer-causing bacteria escaped a biotech lab and infected the general population. Rifkin saw his chance and seized it. He began organizing protests, gaining the support of the National Council of Churches and politicians like Senator Albert Gore (D., Tenn.). He filed and won several lengthy law suits to halt biotechnology experiments. Last fall, Vanity Fair credited Rifkin with sparking the "Great Awakening" to environmental concerns among the anguished of Hollywood.

Despite the fears of Andromeda strains being cooked up in biology laboratories, no one has gotten so much as a sniffle from any biotech product. In fact, millions have benefited from the scores of new diagnostic tests (including the diagnostic test for A-TDS), and thousands of diabetics now use genetically engineered human insulin. Yet Rifkin relentlessly presses his campaign against a branch of technology that can do so much to heal the environment he idolizes.

His successes include halting the first field-test of bacteria bioengineered to prevent crops from freezing. Most recently he has seared several major supermarket chains, including Kroger and Safeway, into withdrawing milk produced from cows treated with bovine somatotropin (BST). BST boosts milk production and is completely harmless to human beings. Nevertheless, two states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have banned BST for at least a year and bioLuddite Rifkin can claim some of the credit. (So can Wisconsin farmers alarmed at the prospect of falling milk prices.)

Rifkin objects to biotechnology on semi-mystical grounds: "Humanity seeks the elation that goes with the drive for mastery over the world. Nature offers us the sublime resignation that goes with an undifferentiated participation in the world around us." This theme of resignation to a sovereign nature, threatened by man, is one that grew stronger as the 1980s progressed.

But man posed an ever greater threat to nature in the scientific imagination of Carl Sagan. In the early 1980s, Sagan, host of PBS's Cosmos, introduced the notion of nuclear winter, later popularized in Jonathan Schell's book The Fate of the Earth and ABC's portrayal of the aftermath of a nuclear war in The Day After. Sagan's computer model showed that even a limited nuclear exchange would plunge the world into a smoke-filled hell from which it would never be able to recover. Hence, the superpowers, starting with the United States, should disarm until the number of nuclear weapons dropped under the threshold that would supposedly trigger nuclear winter.

Unfortunately, the only way to test Sagan's findings would be to blow up the world. The debate is largely on the level of "my model for the end of the world is better than your model." Subsequent studies have shown that a nuclear exchange would be likely to result in a nuclear "chill" but nothing like the arctic temperatures that Sagan's initial model predicted. (But lest I be accused of favoring nuclear war, please take note that the consequences of nuclear war would be horrendous, nuclear winter or no.)

One can be forgiven for harboring the suspicion that Sagan's nuclear-winter findings were timed just a bit too conveniently. In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration was planning to modernize the United States's nuclear arsenal to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union's sustained nuclear buildup throughout the 1970s. Sagan's "scientific" findings were clearly designed to derail that effort. And they declined with the rest of the peace movement's hysteria as Reagan's policies produced Soviet accommodation and arms-control agreements.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another

FINALLY, we arrive at the latest apocalypse--global warming. In June 1988, Goddard Institute for Space Studies meteorologist James Hansen testified before Congress that he had detected a worldwide warming of about 1*F since 1880. He linked the warming to the "greenhouse effect" caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced by--what else?-industrial civilization. Of course, in the 1960s and 1970s, the doomsayers had been warning of an impending ice age and blaming the impending chill on industrial civilization too. They then claimed that human activity was putting so much dust in the atmosphere that it was cooling the planet. There's just no pleasing some people.

In America, no crisis is without its literary popularizer. Bill McKibben's overwrought book, The End of Nature, spelled out the horrors that purportedly will attend the imminent increase in worldwide temperatures.

But McKibben's ignorance about the natural world becomes stunningly obvious when he writes: "The certainty of nature-that God's creation or Darwin's or whoever's will provide for us bountifully, as it always has [italics mine]-is what frees us to be fully human, to be more than gatherers of food." This is the sheerest claptrap. Until nature was at least partially tamed, humans were only gatherers of food. Mankind has since risen from caves and mud huts to build cathedrals, cities, art museums, libraries, computers, universities, and space stations. McKibben ignores the howling deserts, the frigid wastes, the plagues, the floods, the earthquakes, and the swarms of devouring locusts that are also part of nature. For him, nature is a replay of Bambi.

According to McKibben, the "greenhouse effect" spells the end of nature. Earth is doomed to heat up by as much as 10 degrees as a consequence of heedless economic growth and industrialization. He now predicts rising seas, longer droughts, more powerful hurricanes, and hotter weather. The theory is that carbon dioxide released by burning coal and oil traps the sun's heat like a greenhouse instead of letting it radiate back into space. But is Earth really warming up?

"We have no evidence whatsoever that greenhouse warming has begun," asserts MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. The skeptical Lindzen points out that most of the warming" found in James Hansen's data occurred before 1940, when carbon-dioxide levels were much lower. Temperatures steadily declined from 1940 until the mid 1970s. Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute notes, "When you look at the record of climate you see this kind of fluctuation going on all the time, and to say that a few warm decades mean something significant is just ridiculous." After all, one hundred thousand years ago Chicago and New York were beneath a couple of thousand feet of ice.

The one part of the world for which we have superb temperature data-the 48 contiguous states-shows absolutely no warming trend over the past 96 years. Well, what about the hot summer of 1988? As a matter of fact, it was the third hottest summer on record. However, the whole year of 1988 was only the 17th hottest year. The first and second hottest summers-years, for that matter-were 1934 and 1936. The summer of 1989 was only the 46th hottest. Two of the coldest winters on record occurred in the past decade. And so on.

Even if the carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere does cause some greenhouse warming, many meteorologists believe that clouds may counteract the effect and lead to cooling. Richard Lindzen believes that greenhouse-warming estimates of 10 degrees have been grossly exaggerated. He says: "I personally think it very unlikely that we will see more than a few tenths of a degree centigrade [rise] from greenhouse warming over the next century."

McKibben, like the long line of apocalypse abusers who preceded him, urges humanity to shrink from the Promethean fire of technology and to reject economic growth. We are called on to discard our distinctive capacity for reason. We should humble ourselves, becoming just one species among others, accepting equality with viruses, slugs, and rats.

But McKibben sadly predicts: "Our impulse will be to spurn the doomsayers and to press bravely ahead into some new world." We must hope so.