The Holdren Bomb

Saturday, 27 December 2008 by bbbeard.

Well, Aurora Guy seems to think the appointment of John Holdren as Science Advisor is a step in the right direction. I have to say I have my doubts. Several articles have popped up in the last week discussing Holdren’s relation to Paul Ehrlich (of Population Bomb infamy). Now, I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for statements I made thirty-five years ago. But the articles raise some issues that I hope Dr. Holdren will clarify during his confirmation hearings, including recent statements he has made praising Ehrlich’s views.

John Tierney has been pointed in his criticism (”Flawed Science Advice for Obama?“, “Science Adviser’s Unsustainable Bet (and Mine)“). He details the story of the famous Simon-Ehrlich futures wager. In the picture he paints, Holdren is an opinionated ass:

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney also discusses the shabby jihad against Bjørn Lomborg undertaken — with Holdren’s contribution — in the pages of Scientific American, once a fine publication.

From the pages of the Atlantic, Ross Douthat takes Holdren to task for recent praise of The Population Bomb.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a “key insight” about population growth in Ehrlich’s book that’s anodyne enough to qualify as “elementary” and irrefutable. But there’s a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other “triage” methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Maybe Tierney and Douthat qualify as right-wing zealots in someone’s book. But I have a sinking feeling that science has not been liberated from politics by the coming of the Messiah. But scientists with a different political bias may be happy for awhile… fair’s fair.

Now, from my perspective, I associate The Pop Bomb with the Club of Rome and the fiasco of Limits to Growth. Of course, the Club of Rome has ignored its record of failures and moved on to climate change. Is anyone surprised? After all, if you have a perfectly good (pfft) planetary system dynamic model, already shown to exhibit divergent behavior on command, why not apply it to climate?

But seriously, I think that there is much to learn from the efforts to make the World3 model reflect reality. Lesson #1 is that it is relatively easy to generate divergent behavior when stabilizing feedback loops are left out of the model. It is reported, for example, that World3 has no implementation of economic substitution for resources as they become scarcer. Anyone familiar with standard microeconomic theory should understand this is a major defect — and also understand why there is no generalized model for substitution even today. Substitution is really hard to predict. If chestnut blight makes wood more expensive, people use… what, instead? Plastic for ladles, metal for building frames, electrons for newsprint — raising the price of all these goods, pushing consumption (and innovation) in a thousand different directions. None of this is in World3.

Likewise: anyone care to link to a list of flaws in general circulation models?

What do World3 and GCMs have in common? Beautifully complex models, nicely filigreed predictions, none have been validated. I wouldn’t design a car with such a model, much less make macroeconomic decisions with them.

So where does Malthus stand these days? Have I repudiated “Malthus was Right”? No, not so much. The Reverend was a man of great insight. To be continued in a future blog post….

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