World surprised to find that Paul Ehrlich is still alive (and calling for cannibalism, apparently)

From Newsbusters via Hot Air, we have more utter horseshit from Paul Ehrlich, who has been so badly discredited for so long it is amazing anyone even writes down what he says anymore. Nothing Ehrlich has predicted ever has come to pass -- and he has a pattern of foolishly predicting that his calls for doom-and-gloom will come true in just a few years, which, of course, makes it much easier to debunk his horeshit and mock him mercilessly -- but he's at it again:

Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist famous for his widely debunked book “The Population Bomb,” doubled down on his climate change and overpopulation fear-mongering with HuffPost Live on May 21. Ehrlich warned host Josh Zepps that the dangers of overpopulation are growing, blaming Republicans and the media for failing to take action. While hawking a new book called “Hope On Earth,” Ehrlich’s co-author Michael Tobias praised Ehrlich’s older, outrageously wrong predictions and said they underestimated the problem.
. . .

Ehrlich, after falsely predicting human “oblivion” 46 years ago, told Zepps humans must soon begin contemplating “eat[ing] the bodies of your dead” after resources are depleted (fava beans and a nice Chianti optional, apparently).

For those not familiar with Erhlich's, um, body of work:

Ehrlich is widely known for his 1968 publication of “The Population Bomb” which called for “population control” to prevent global crises from overpopulation. In this book he predicted that “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “[our children] will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the 1960’s are dead.” (Would that the politics of the 1960s finally die!)
Even HuffPost’s Zepps pointed out that Ehrlich’s previous predictions “didn’t eventuate.” Tobias quickly defended Ehrlich, though, saying his “projections, in fact were correct.” In fact, he “not only got it right, [Ehrlich and his wife], in some ways, underestimated.”

I must have missed the widespread famines of the 1970s. I guess disco distracted me, but I feel like I would have noticed if a prediction of "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" had proven to be an underestimation. On the other hand, The '70s is the decade when I started getting laid, so maybe it wasn't just disco that had me not paying attention.

Ehrlich is a complete hack -- and yes, one of his old colleagues, John Holdren, is Barry's national science adviser, which explains a lot -- and I'm pretty sure he only spouts this shit to get noticed. Ehrlich famously bet against economist Julian Simon in 1980 that the price of five commodity metals would be higher in 10 years. Ehrlich was wrong on all counts in inflation-adjusted dollars, and on three of the five in non-adjusted dollars. The Wikipedia entry on this contends that Ehrlich was basically right, because if the bet had been for 30 years, all five metals were more expensive. Over at Forbe's, though, a blog post points out that Simon wasn't lucky, he was right:

Simon won: but that’s not quite the end of the matter. With different commodities, or over different timescales with the same ones, Ehrlich could have. Which is something that Mark Perry notes here:

“It will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up, then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.”

For the underlying argument though this is the important point:

I’m not so sure that Simon was just lucky. If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates. Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative trend over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.

For Professor Perry shows us the all commodities index over the near century that we have data. And it is indeed declining. Sure, there are periods where the alarmists would win, but the general move over time favours the cornucopians.

Look, kids, people have been predicting calling for the starvation of mankind since Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century (if not longer) and they're always wrong. Our capacity to grow food is nowhere near its peak. Malthusians always predict based on their belief that people are too stupid to survive on their own and so the important choices -- like whether to have children, where to live, what to drive, etc. -- must be left up to the experts and, more particularly, government. Naturally, they always consider that they will be among the experts telling people what to do, and not on the receiving end of those directives, which they will, of course, not apply to themselves. Anybody checked Al Gore's carbon footprint lately. When these people start acting like they believe what they're saying, I'll start considering the possibility they might be right. Big Al's jetting around the world telling us how evil carbon dioxide is while creating tons of it doesn't have me convinced. As for Mr. Ehrlich -- is he growing food in his back yard? Yeah, probably not. Fuck him.

If, on the other hand, we are forced into cannibalism, I will have to work up some decent recipes. I see opportunities for food porn.