In Washington? Never happen.

One of the “stealth issue advocates” discussed in the book is John P. Holdren, the Harvard physicist who is awaiting confirmation as Mr. Obama’s science adviser. As you can see in his confirmation hearing in the Senate, he’s a smart and articulate scientist, and says he has abandoned some of his previous neo-Malthusian stances, like his support for “population control measures” and his belief that 280 million Americans would likely be “too many.”

But I share Dr. Pielke’s concern about some of the debating tactics used by Dr. Holdren and his allies. Dr. Holdren began his career collaborating with the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, a master of the apocalyptic forecast and the contemptuous argument from authority.

When the economist Julian Simon published an article in Science in 1980 questioning ecologists’ gloomy predictions of resource scarcity, Dr. Ehrlich dismissed him as a member of “space-age cargo cult.” Explaining to economists like him that commodities must inevitably become more scarce and expensive, Dr. Ehrlich wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.” He criticized Science for even publishing the article and wondered how it passed peer review: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?”

Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Holdren were was so confident in their expertise that they accepted Dr. Simon’s challenge to bet about the future price of natural resources. They wagered $1,000 — and lost decisively. But that loss didn’t diminish the neo-Malthusians’ contempt for the other side when Dr. Simon’s arguments were updated in 2001 by Bjorn Lomborg. As Dr. Pielke notes in his book, Dr. Holdren joined in an unusual effort by scientists to denounce Dr. Lomborg as unscientific. Dr. Holdren accused Dr. Lomborg of “complete incompetence,” complained that Dr. Lomborg had “wasted immense amounts of the time of capable people,” and labeled his ideas “dangerous for the future of society.”

I've noted the bizarre antics of both Ehrlich and Holdren in old posts. It speaks volumes about Obama that these are the kinds of people that he has brought to town with him. What a mess.

Update: An Inconvenient Democracy

Is there any respite from this dreary despotic nonsense? Here and there, a few authors of sufficient independence of mind can be found who have broken with green orthodoxy in significant ways. The first of note is Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, whose brilliant new history of the population control movement, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, is useful not simply on its theme but for the light it sheds on the political corruption that inevitably accompanies these world-saving enthusiasms. The "population bomb" can be seen as a precursor to the global warming crisis of today: as far back as the early decades of the 20th century the population crisis was put forward as the justification for global governance and coercive, non-consensual rule. . .

One reason why enthusiasms and programs maintain their forward momentum in the face of changing facts and circumstances is the culture of corruption that inevitably comes to envelope self-selecting leadership groups organized around a crisis. . .

For population experts this was the beginning of constantly expanding opportunities. The budgets, the staff, the access were all increasing even more quickly than the population growth their programs were meant to stop. There was "something in it for everyone," Population Association of America President John Kantner later recalled: "the activist, the scholar, the foundation officer, the globe-circling consultant, the wait-listed government official. World Conferences, a Population Year, commissions, select committees, new centers for research and training, a growing supply of experts, pronouncements by world leaders, and, most of all, money—lots of it."

Sounds rather like the moveable feast that is the IPCC's annual meetings, often held in hardship locales such as Bali, to press ahead with anti-global warming efforts. The magnitude of the traveling circus of the climate campaign has come to dwarf the population crusade. Prior to the arrival of climate change as a crisis issue, the largest single U.S. government science research project was the acid rain study of the 1980s (the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project, or NAPAP for short), which cost about $500 million, and concluded that the acid rain problem had been vastly overestimated. (Public opinion polls in the late 1970s rated acid rain the most significant environmental problem of the time.) Today the U.S. government is spending multiple billions each year on climate research—so much through so many different agencies and budget sources that it is impossible to estimate the total reliably.

With so much money at stake, and with so many careers staked to the catastrophic climate scenario, one could predict that the entire apparatus would be resistant to new information and reasonable criticism. This is exactly what happened in the population crusade. When compelling critics of the population bomb thesis arose—people who might be called "skeptics," such as Julian Simon—the population campaign reacted by circling the wagons and demonizing its critics, just as global warming skeptics today are subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks.

What a mess.