Luke T. said:
I also agree with Crichton about dire predicitons not coming true. All my life, there have been doom and gloom predictions from environmentalists and psychics. It is hard to tell the difference between the two. They both have about the same hit rate. So any more "the sky is falling" predictions are a real hard sell to me.
I think there's a real "boy who cried wolf" aspect to the predictions of environmentalists. In the 60's and 70's, they shot their wad, and if they were right, we'd all be dead by now.
Instead, things are better than they've been in a long time The Thames river and Lake Erie have fish in them, and they have the normal number of eyeballs. This was not true when I was a kid.
Of course, it could be argued that some of the improvement has been due to the pressures of environmentalists, and there has certainly been some of that, mostly to the good (with a few exceptions like wildfires due to overzealous prevention of forest fires).
Yet a the same time, I think that due to ignorance or stupidity, environmentalists have largely voluntarily given up their credibility, by having no sense of when they should shriek at the top of their lungs and when they should not. Which is quite dangerous, because there are certainly environmental considerations that do need to be dealt with, but there's no way to distinguish them from the rest by the shrieking. When you shriek at the top of your lungs, people tend to tune it out.
A low point in public perception of environmentalism came when Carl Sagan, an otherwise mostly sane individual, elected to play press-release science about the Iraqi oil well fires using a 30-cell, one-dimensional atmospheric transport model that completely ignored convection. This bugged me, because at the time I was working at one of the leading centers for atmospheric and oceanic transport models. We were the first to demonstrate that spiky updrafts did occur in thunderstorms and that oil spills posed a significant threat not only to the surface but to fairly deep coral reefs, and we were the
only group correctly to predict the direction of travel of an oil spill off Tampa Bay while it was happening. But nobody, including environmentalists, seemed to care at all.
