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I ran across the illustration above on my favorite contrarian website, Wattsupwiththat.com, and decided to share. The media feed us a constant diet of gloom and doom and disaster, and only those with a sense of history understand this is a bit of a Golden Age (75 years ago the American and British armies were locked in the greatest land battle on World War II’s western front during a terrible winter).
Many of you will reject it merely because it comes from the Global Warming Policy Forum, which contains no Chicken Littles and sees no falling sky. But check the footnotes for the sources of the measured progress. The ten-year periods covered do not exactly match up, and course the decade really ends with 2020, not 2019. Perhaps the most important is the major drop in the percentage living in desperate poverty (thank energy supplies) and the incredible reduction (over a longer period of time) of deaths from natural disasters.
The article is also worth reading. Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist and makes the case many of his predictions from 2010 are coming to pass. An excerpt:
Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago,” was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.
This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us.
Likewise their American extremist cousins.
— SDH
