CLIMATEGATE
(1) THE LEBENSRAUM JOKE

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Lebensraum is space needed for survival.
Since there is not enough lebensraum to go around only the fittest survive, said the Nazi ideologues. Their doctrine brings to mind the joke about the space mission, sponsored by the United Nations to promote world peace. Three astronauts were assigned to the mission: a Russian, an American and a dark representative of the Third World. There was the proverbial failure and the imperative of ejecting one astronaut to save lebensraum for the other two. This unleashed a clamorous movement to save the obvious victim, and the vote of the majority prevailed. The survivors would be the winners of an intellectual contest. Since the representative of the Third World was known for his wide knowledge, the hard choice would be settled between the other two; a plague on both their houses. So the contest began with questions put to the Russian, the American and the Third World representative.
First Question: Who dropped the first atomic bomb?
The Americans, sneered the Russian astronaut.
Second Question: What cities were destroyed by atomic bombs?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, replied the American.
Third Question: Names & addresses of the victims?
The question put to the representative of the Third World was not answered. Ejection followed.
The Green activists of Europe damn progress as an illusion that led to plunder of the planet to serve wasteful consumption of too many. They want to shrink world population and economy, which they rate as excessive for the non-renewable resources of a finite planet. They have already had their way in Europe, with countries with declining populations and stagnant economies, and want the rest of the world to join them in a suicide pact.
Suicide is the right word, and not a metaphor. In its support there is an organization, VHMENT Voluntary Human Extinction Movement that preaches this openly. See www.vhment.org with its slogan: “May we live long and die out”. It means that they only want human reproduction to cease, and that in good time the planet would be saved by the natural death of all living humans. The dodge avoids charges of incitement to violence. In their view, mankind must extinguish itself in a magnanimous gesture to a tormented planet so as to return it to the natural beauty it had before it was defiled by human hand. Save the planet for whom? Save it for an audience of grateful crabs and cockroaches?
Others are in a hurry. It is the case of Theodor Kaczynski, better known as the UNABOMBER. A graduate of Harvard and Michigan universities, he started an academic career at the University of California – Berkeley. In 1971 he exchanged his career for the life of a hermit in a remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains, Montana. He was prompted to his deeds as a terrorist after seeing human encroachment on his surroundings. He never tried to enlist followers, a trait that for 17 years made it hard to track the perpetrator of mysterious bombings. Between 1978 and 1995 this lonely terrorist sent 16 homemade bombs to technological research institutes and the offices of airlines. The bombs killed 3 and wounded 23. In April 1995 he sent a letter to the New York Times promising to abstain from terrorism in exchange for publication of his manifesto, The Industrial Society and its Future in the New York Times or Washington Post.
This was done. Publication led to Kaczynski’s identification by people who had a recollection of his ideas in old letters; he was tracked, arrested, faced trial and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. The Manifesto, with 35 thousand words, does not have the incoherent language of a raving madman; it is well crafted and has the structure of the usual academic thesis with numbered sections and cross-references. It opens with the statement: the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Kaczynski justified the bombings as a way to draw attention to the erosion of the world by modern technologies demanding big organizations that grow at the expense of gradual stultification of man. The Green activists disassociate themselves from morbid personalities for political and public relations reasons, but if they want the inspiration of lucid text for writing a Suicide’s Note of the Western World they should read the Manifesto at: http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
With Europe in their pocket and a wavering America under Obama, the nightmare of Green activists is the economic expansion of China and India. Brazil matters little; its growth is at half the Asian rate and its population is less than one tenth of the combined populations of the Asian giants. Russia is on the way out, with a declining population and mired in the legacy of 70 years of Communism. The Greens fear that billions in Asia will rise to a better standard of living, be it at a level much lower than those of the West. They know it would be politically incorrect to label the Asian hunger for a better diet as the sin of gluttony but their mean spirit is present in worries over the launching of the Nano popular car, the least expensive on earth (US$2500) by Tata Group of India. They envisioned it as a harbinger of Doomsday, with Asian fleets of hundreds of millions of cars, demanding non-renewable resources and emitting CO2. The Lebensraum Doctrine once again shows its ugly head.
The giants India and China have weight and stature to reject the fate of the dark astronaut of the joke. Their economic rise will continue and they may some day dwarf the Western world, even if the sun stands still and the heavens fall. In my next article I will question the assumptions and tenets of the doctrine of Lebensraum.


CLIMATEGATE
(2) THE LEBENSRAUM FALLACY

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The Lebensraum doctrine of Green activists rests on three tenets they accept with an act of faith:
• We are running out of space. World population is already excessive on a limited planet and cannot grow without dire effects.
• We are running out of means. The planet’s non-renewable resources are being depleted by consumption at a rate that renders economic expansion unsustainable.
• We shall fry. Carbon dioxide emitted by human economic activity causes global warming that shall make the planet uninhabitable.
When such tenets are quantified, the contrast between true and false stands out sharply.
Is overpopulation a grave problem? The sum of urban areas of the United States is equivalent to 2% of the area of the country, and to 6% in densely inhabited countries such as England and Holland. And there is plenty of green in urban areas. If comparison is limited to land covered by buildings and pavements the occupied land in the whole world amounts to 0,04% of the terrestrial area of the planet. With 99.96% unoccupied the idea of an overcrowded planet is an exaggeration. Population forecasts are uncertain but the most accepted ones foresee stability of world population to be reached in the 21st century. According to some, world population may begin to decline at the end of this century. With so much elbowroom it is untenable that world population is excessive or shall ever become so.
Strictly speaking, no natural resource is non-renewable in a universe ruled by the Law of Conservation of Mass. In popular form it holds that “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, all is transformed.” Human usage is not subtracted from the mass of the planet, and in theory all material used may be recycled. The possibility of doing so depends on availability and low cost of energy. When fusion energy becomes operative it will be available in practically unlimited quantities. The source is deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in water, in a proportion of 0.03%. One cubic kilometer of seawater contains more energy than can be obtained from combustion of all known petroleum reserves of the world. Since oceans hold 3 billion cubic kilometers of water, energy will last longer than the human species.
There is no growing shortfall of resources signaled by rising prices. Since the middle of the 19th century The Economist publishes consistent indices of values of commodities and they have all declined, over the period, due to technological advances. The decline has been benign. The cost of feeding a human being was 8 times greater in 1850 than it is today. In 1950, less than half of a world population of 2 billion had an adequate diet, above 2000 calories per day. Today, 80% have the diet, and world population is three times greater.
There is a problem with the alleged global warming. It stopped in 1998, after having risen in the 23 previous years, and unleashing a scare over its effects. Since 1998 it has been followed by 11 years of declining temperatures, in a portent of a cold 21st century. This shows that there are natural forces shaping climate, more powerful than manmade carbon dioxide and anything mankind can do for or against world climate. The natural forces include cyclical oscillation of ocean temperatures, sunspot activity and the effect of magnetic activity of the sun on cosmic rays. All such cycles are foreseeable, but there is no general theory of climate with predictive capacity. What knowledge exists comes from one hundred fields, such as meteorology, oceanography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, etc. with partial contributions to the understanding of climate.
Devoid of support of solid theory and empirical data, the mathematical models that underpin alarmist forecasts amount to speculative thought that reflects the assumptions fed into the models. Such computer simulations offer no rational basis for public policy that inhibits economic activity “to save the planet”. And carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the nutrient needed for photosynthesis that supports the food chain of all living beings of the planet.
Stories of doom circulate daily. Anything that happens on earth has been blamed on global warming: a Himalayan earthquake, a volcanic eruption, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, tribal wars in Africa, heat wave in Paris, recent severe winters in North America, the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, known for five centuries, the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods in Bolivia.
Global warming is not a physical phenomenon; it is a political and journalistic phenomenon that finds parallel in the totalitarian doctrines that inebriated masses deceived by demagogues. As Chris Patten put it: “Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off”. In the view of Professor Aaron Wildavsky global warming is the mother of all environmental scares. “Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.” Their dream is the hippies’ lifestyle of idleness, penury, long hair, unshaven face, blue jeans, sandals and vegetarian diet, imposed on the world by decree of Big Brother, and justified by the Lebensraum fallacy. The murky source of the fallacy is the theme of the next article.
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CLIMATEGATE
(3) SOURCES OF LEBENSRAUM THOUGHT

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The Lebensraum trademark carries the curse of “Made in Germany”. Once again, Europe is the bastion of an anti-liberal and anti democratic ideology, as if the 20th century “scientific” tyrannies were not enough. Green activists are now engaged in the demolition of achievements of two centuries of an Industrial Revolution that redeemed four fifths of mankind from dire want. It is fitting to stress again that in 1850 the cost of food to sustain one human life was eight times greater than it is today.
Hostility against the victory of science and technology over famine and disease can only be understood as misanthropy, a hatred that conceives mankind as a pest that destroys Earth and blasphemes goddess Nature. This belief, so widespread in Europe, is held by Green Parties, the last refuge of orphans and widows of Communism. They now seek the limitation and rationing of the production and use of fuel, a control that would give Green activists power over every aspect of every citizen’s life, everywhere. Green activists unleashed the current panic over global warming as their main instrument to further their grab for power. They blame global warming on manmade carbon dioxide generated by economic activity, and write into law the damning of a harmless gas as a pollutant, when it is the nutrient that nourishes all that lives on earth.
But Nature refuses to endorse their designs. World temperatures have fallen since 1998, after having risen in the previous 23 years, a measured fact that rendered global warming an awkward name. It is now called climate change, a label that fits any contingency, and has its justification as a publicity trick. When a product falls into disrepute, a switch of brand name is common commercial practice to reverse sagging sales. There was no need to change the villains. They are still the big bad oil companies and the coal miners.
Nobody stated the case of Green activists against science and technology with greater lucidity than Theodor Kaczynski in his UNABOMBER Manifesto. His witch’s brew had been fermenting since the 19th century Ernst Haeckel and the 20th century Richard Walther Darré, German thinkers who respectively coined the words Ecology and Organic Farming. They are not the only sources of Lebensraum doctrine, but they are emblematic of a maze of twisted thought that inspired Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Haeckel was a biologist who studied populations and the interaction of living beings with the environment, a subject he called Ecology. He observed that populations expand until they reach the limits of Lebensraum in a struggle for existence in which the fitter species displace the weaker species. Such thought unfolded into Eugenics and the Pan-German geopolitics of the 20th century that held that the Drang nach Osten — the march toward the East, is the manifest destiny of the German people. Under inexorable scientific laws, the Nordic race was bound to conquer and annihilate the inferior races that occupied limited Lebensraum.
This was the central idea that shaped Nazi doctrine and action. Application of the doctrine fell, among other followers of Hitler, to Darré, first as the propagandist and organizer of the Nazi Party in rural Germany and later as minister of agriculture for ten of the twelve years of the Third Reich. Darré was a mentor of Heinrich Himmler, future leader of the SS, who got to know Darré at a Back-to-the-Land Movement rally in 1928. That year, Darré published the first of three books: The Peasantry as Life Force of the Nordic Race, followed by Blood and Soil and A New Nobility from Blood and Soil. In these books, Darré held that the peasant was the backbone of the Germanic nation and needed protection to ensure the survival of his farming. This included support of small peasant holdings, land conservation and organic farming, an application of the “bio-dynamic” theories of Rudolf Steiner. Darré was fired. His insistence on Organic Farming and his rejection of modern farming methods stunted the food supply of wartime Germany. At the Nuremburg trials, Darré was sentenced for his role in planning Nordic colonization of Polish lands.
To be fair, Germans are not the only ones to further Lebensraum doctrine in its present form. In recent times help came from the Anglo-Saxon side. In a long line of fellow travelers, two stand tall: Alexander King and Paul Erlich.
King, a renowned scientist, was captain of the Anglo-American scientific team at the time of World War II, co-operation that also gave the world DDT, and the hope of eradicating insect-transmitted diseases, until it was cut short by environmentalists. Two decades later he was co-founder of the Club of Rome that sponsored the Limits to Growth study (1972). With 12 million copies sold, it is arguably the most influential publication to spread belief in the tenet that a limited planet cannot support unlimited economic growth. In his memoirs King let slip a senile remark: "my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem."
King was aided and abetted by entomologist Paul Erlich, who leapt into fame as author of the 1968 bestseller Population Bomb. The book predicted that: "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death". The battle to feed was lost and nothing could be done to avoid mass famine. The radical action he advocated included blockading food supplies to countries that refused to implement state control to make population fit the Lebensraum of the world. John Holdren can arguably be added to the list as co-author, with Erlich of Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. Compulsory abortion, use of water supply to sterilize populations,
The lesser breeds without the Law must be kept in their place by famine and disease. That is the grim bottom line of the Lebensraum creed of Green activists and their Nazi forerunners.
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