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20. september 2007
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On economists vs ecologists:
"Yes, Dr. Lomborg thinks like an economist instead of a climate scientist, and he doesn't have a degree in climatology. His argue that his lack of climatological expertise makes him an unreliable guide for foreseeing the consequences of a warmer world, but I think these critics are ignoring history. They claim to be taking in the big picture, to be foreseeing great trends over the next century, but they're missing one of the most valuable lessons from the past half century: when it comes to getting the big picture right, when it comes to preparing for environmental catastrophes, economists have a better track record than the scientists who specialize in analyzing environmental trends.
The classic example is the "population crisis" of the 1960s and 1970s, when biologists like Paul Ehrlich were convinced humanity was about to suffer massive famines and devastating shortages of energy and other resources because the growing population would exceed the planet's "carrying capacity." This concept seemed obvious to biologists who study ecosystems, but economists realized there's a big difference between animals and humans: Humans are remarkably adaptable and creative. When confronted with shortages and environmental problems, they have a long history of coming up with solutions — new methods of farming, new and cheaper sources of energy, cleaner technologies — that leave them better off in an environment that's less polluted. . When the economist Julian Simon pointed this out and predicted that humanity wouldn't run out of food or energy or other resources in an article in the journal Science, the journal was widely criticized by ecologists and other scientists for publishing the work of an ignorant outsider. Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, said that economists like Dr. Simon were members of a "space-age cargo cult." Trying to explain to these economists that commodities must inevitably become more scarce and expensive, the Ehrlichs wrote, "would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.""
Paul Ehrlich, like the Paddock brothers, celebrated as they were at the time, proved wrong. Julian Simon, the late economist and famous doomslayer, was totally correct.
I have this strange feeling of deja vu, but I can't really put my finger on it.
Link via Instapundit.
8:40:41 PM 
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Velociraptors, the smart and lethal dinosaurs made famous by the movie Jurassic Park, apparently had feathers.
Evidence of feathered dinosaurs has been found in recent years, and now velociraptor can be added to that list.
"Finding quill knobs on velociraptor ... means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove," Alan Turner, lead author on the study and a graduate student of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and at Columbia University in New York, said in a statement.
Feathers appear to have originally evolved as temperature control, and then only later became useful for flying. Birds are the only living descendants of the dinosaurs.
8:32:37 PM
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© Copyright 2007 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2007; 17:26:34.
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