The Rational Optimist (52 page)

p. 300 ‘says Greg Easterbrook’. Easterbrook, G. 2003.
The Progress Paradox
. Random House.

p. 300 ‘Lester Brown predicted’. Various sources for these Brown quotes, including Smil, V. 2000.
Feeding the World
. MIT Press, and Bailey, R. 2009. Never right, but never in doubt: famine-monger Lester Brown still gets it wrong after all these years.
Reason
magazine, 12 May 2009: http://reason.com/archives/2009/05/05/never-right-but-never-in-doubt. See also Brown, L. 2008.
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
. Earth Policy Institute.

p. 301 ‘by William and Paul Paddock’. Paddock, W. and Paddock, P. 1967.
Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?
Little, Brown.

p. 301 ‘William Paddock was calling for a moratorium’. Paddock, William C. Address to the American Phytopathological Society, Houston, Texas 12 August 1975.

p. 301 ‘
The Population Bomb
’. Ehrlich, P. 1971.
The Population Bomb.
2nd edition. Buccaneer.

p. 301 ‘
The Dominant Animal
’. Ehrlich, P. and Ehrlich, A. 2008.
The Dominant Animal
. Island Press.

p. 302 ‘wrote the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1943’. Schumpeter, J.A. 1943.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
. Allen & Unwin.

p. 302 ‘
Limits to Growth
’. It should be noted that the authors of
Limits to Growth
have argued since that they only wished to illustrate what might happen if exponential use continued and no new reserves of these minerals were discovered, which they realised was unlikely. But this is a highly generous reading of both their mathematics and their prose. ‘There will be a desperate arable land shortage before the year 2000’ and ‘The world population will be 7 billion in 2000’ sound like predictions to me. Even in more recent updates, the main prognosis remains that civilisation will – or should – collapse for lack of resources in the current century: ‘Humanity must draw back, ease down, and heal if it wants to continue to live.’ See Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L. and Randers, J. 1992.
Beyond the Limits
. Chelsea Green Publishing; and Meadows, D.H., Randers, J. and Meadows, D. 2004.
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
. Chelsea Green Publishing.

p. 303 ‘school textbooks soon parroting its predictions minus the caveats’. See Bailey, R. 2004. science and public policy.
Reason
: http://www.reason.com/news/show/34758.html.

p. 303 ‘In 1990 the economist Julian Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager’. Simon, J. 1996.
The Ultimate Resource 2
. Princeton University Press.

p. 304 ‘
Life
magazine promised its readers’. Quoted in http://www.ihate themedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009.

p. 304 ‘Professor Bernd Ulrich said it was already too late for Germany’s forests’. Mauch, C. 2004.
Nature in German History
. Berghahn Books.

p. 305 ‘The
New York Times
declared “a scientific consensus”’. Easterbrook, G. 1995.
A Moment on the Earth
. Penguin. See also
Fortune
magazine, April 1986.

p. 305 ‘When asked if he had been pressured to be optimistic, one of the authors said the reverse was true’. Mathiesen, M. 2004.
Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate
. Universe Star.

p. 306 ‘The activist Jeremy Rifkin said’. Miller, H.I. 2009. The human cost of anti-science activism.
Policy Review
, April/May 2009. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/41839562.html.

p. 307 ‘Ebola outbreaks’. Colebunders, R. 2000. Ebola haemorrhagic fever – a review.
Journal of Infection
40:16–20.

pp. 307–8 ‘The proportion of the population infected with HIV is falling’. http://data.unaids.org/pub/GlobalReport/2008/JC1511_GR08_ExecutiveSummary_en.pdf.

p. 308 ‘Hugh Pennington’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/573919.stm.

p. 308 ‘the number of deaths has reached 166’. See http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/figures.htm

p. 308 ‘no extra birth defects at all’. Little, J. 1993. The Chernobyl accident, congenital anomalies and other reproductive outcomes.
Paediatric Perinatal Epidemiology
7:121–51. The World Health Organisation concluded in 2006 that: ‘A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to better reporting, not radiation.’ See http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/pdfs/pr.pdf.

p. 308 ‘The evacuation of the area has caused wildlife to flourish there to an extraordinary degree’. Brand, S. 2009.
Whole Earth Discipline
. Penguin.

p. 309 ‘As one commentator concluded’. Fumento, M. 2006. The Chicken Littles were wrong: bird flu threat flew the coop.
The Standard
, 25 December 2006.

pp. 309–10 ‘you are far more likely to get the flu from a person who is well enough to go to work than one who is ill enough to stay at home’. Wendy Orent. Swine flu poses a risk, but no reason to panic.
Los Angeles Times
, 29 April 2009. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/29/opinion/oe-orent29.

p. 311 ‘in the words of President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren’. Holdren, J., Ehrlich, A. and Ehrlich, P. 1973.
Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions
. W.H. Freeman and Company, p. 279.

p. 311 ‘in the words of Maurice Strong, first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7314.

p. 311 ‘in the words of the journalist George Monbiot’.
The Guardian
, 18 August 2009.

p. 311 ‘When they speak of retreat’. See http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/08/folie-a-deux.html.

Chapter 10

p. 313 ‘It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning’. Wells, H.G. ‘The Discovery of the Future’ Lecture at the Royal Institution, 24 January 1902, published in
Nature
65:326–31. Reproduced with the permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.

p. 313 Greenland ice cap temperature graph. NCDC. See ncdc.noaa.gov.

p. 314 ‘says the environmentalist Jonathan Porritt’. Ecologist Online April 2007. See www.optimumpopulation.org/ecologist.j.porritt.April07.doc.

p. 315 ‘Paul Collier’s phrase’. Collier, P. 2007.
The Bottom Billion
. Oxford University Press.

p. 316 ‘life expectancy is rising rapidly’. As of this writing, life expectancy is still falling in South Africa, Mozambique, and of course Zimbabwe.

pp. 316–7 ‘Paul Collier and his colleagues at the World Bank encountered a storm of protest’. Collier, P. 2007.
The Bottom Billion
. Oxford University Press.

p. 317 ‘would by now have given Zambians the income per head of the Portuguese’. Moyo, D. 2009.
Dead Aid
. Allen Lane.

p. 317 ‘these conclusions were later dashed by Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the International Monetary Fund’. Rajan, R.G. and Subramanian, A. 2005.
Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?
NBER Working Papers 11513, National Bureau of Economic Research.

p. 318 ‘the recommendations of the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo’. Moyo, D. 2009.
Dead Aid
. Allen Lane.

p. 318 ‘As William Easterly puts it’. Easterly, W. 2006.
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
. Oxford University Press.

p. 318 ‘the example of insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets’. Easterly, W. 2006.
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
. Oxford University Press.

p. 321 ‘consistently the most successful economy in the world in recent decades’. Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S.H. and Robinson, J.A. 2001.
An African Success Story: Botswana
. MIT Department of Economics Working Paper no. 01-37.

p. 323 ‘developers leave the poor to build their own slums’. Boudreaux, K. 2008. Urbanisation and informality in Africa’s housing markets.
Economic Affairs
, June 2008: 17–24.

p. 323 ‘a Cairo house owner will build up to three illegal storeys on top of his house’. De Soto, H. 2000.
The Mystery of Capital
. Bantam Press.

p. 323 ‘the end of a long, exhausting and bitter struggle between elitist law and a new order brought about by massive migration and the needs of an open and sustainable society’. De Soto, H. 2000.
The Mystery of Capital
. Bantam Press.

p. 324 ‘Bart Wilson and his colleagues set up a land of three virtual villages inhabited by real undergraduates’. Kimbrough, E.O., Smith, V.L. and Wilson, B.J. 2008. Historical property rights, sociality, and the emergence of impersonal exchange in long-distance trade.
American Economic Review
98:1009–39.

p. 324 ‘well crafted property rights are also the key to wildlife and nature conservation’. Anderson, T. and Huggins, L. 2008.
Greener Than Thou
. Hoover Institution Press.

p. 324 ‘fish off Iceland’. Costello, C., Gaines, S.D. and Lynham, J. 2008. Can catch shares prevent fisheries collapse?
Science
321:1678–80. (doi:0.1126/science.1159478).

p. 325 ‘De Soto’s assistants found that to do the same in Tanzania would take 379 days’. Institute of Liberty and Democracy. 2005. Tanzania: the diagnosis. http://www.ild.org.pe/en/wnatwedo/diagnosis/tanzania.

p. 326 ‘Bamako in Mali could build upon its strong musical traditions’. Schulz, M. and van Gelder, A. 2008.
Nashville in Africa: Culture, Institutions, Entrepreneurship and Development
. Trade, Technology and Development discussion paper no. 2, International Policy Network.

p. 326 ‘Micro-finance banking, mobile telephony and the internet are now merging’. Talbot, D. 2008. Upwardly mobile.
Technology Review
, November/December 2008: 48–54.

p. 326 ‘opportunities to the poor of Africa that were not available to the poor of Asia a generation ago’. Rodrik, D. (ed.). 2003.
In Search of Prosperity
. Princeton University Press.

p. 327 ‘a study of the sardine fishermen of Kerala in southern India’. Jensen, Robert T. 2007. The digital provide: information (technology), market performance and welfare in the South Indian fisheries sector.
Quarterly Journal of Economics
122: 879–924.

p. 328 ‘demographic dividend’. Bloom, D.E. et al. 2007.
Realising the Demographic Dividend: Is Africa Any Different?
PGDA Working Paper no. 23, Harvard University.

p. 328 ‘charter city in Africa’. www.chartercities.com.

p. 329 ‘The weather is always capricious’.
Newsweek
, 22 January 1996. On the web at http://www.newsweek.com/id/101296/page/1.

p. 329 ‘Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent’.
Newsweek
, 28 April 1975. On the web at http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm.

p. 329 ‘that the last three decades of relatively slow average temperature changes are more compatible with a low-sensitivity than a highsensitivity model of greenhouse warming’. Lindzen, R.S. and Choi, Y.S. 2009. On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data.
Geophysical Research Letters.
In press. Schwartz, S.E., R.J. Charlson, and H. Rhode, 2007: Quantifying climate change – too rosy a picture? Nature Reports Climate Change 2:23-24, and Schwartz S. E. 2008. Reply to comments by G. Foster et al., R. Knutti et al., and N. Scafetta on Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth’s climate system. J. Geophys. Res. 113, D15105. (doi:10.1029/2008JD009872).

p. 329 ‘that clouds may slow the warming as much as water vapour may amplify it’. Paltridge, G., Arking, and Pook, M. 2009. Trends in middleand upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data.
Theoretical and Applied Climatology
. (doi: 10.1007/ s00704-009-0117-x).

p. 329 ‘that the increase in methane has been (erratically) decelerating for twenty years’. M.A.K. Khalil, C.L. Butenhoff and R.A. Rasmussen, Atmospheric methane: trends and cycles of sources and sinks,
Environmental Science & Technology
41:2131–7.