Renowned Climate Scientist Says China’s One-Child Policy Was The “Most Effective Climate Policy Of The Last Decade”

Distinguished IPCC climate scientist Professor Hans von Storch wrote what to me appears to be a very twisted and disturbing statement at his Klimazwiebel blog. I’m really quite surprised by it.

Von Storch writes he got correspondence from a friend, who asked him how he personally thinks people can contribute to reducing climate change. HvS provides his “brief and spontaneous” answer by writing that a single person can’t really do anything and that technology needs to be developed to reduce CO2 emissions, and to do it economically.

So far so good.

He then writes that people installing solar panels on their rooves, though with good intentions, is in fact ineffective symbolism, and indeed is only merely spreading the illusion that one is doing something good. If anything, feel-good people are in fact impeding the development of truly effective approaches.

Then come his last two sentences, which I have translated below:

Die globalen Emissionen sind im letzten Jahr laut IEA um 3.2 % gestiegen. Ich glaube, das entspricht der jährlichen Emission von Deutschland, um und bei.
Die wirksamste Klimapolitik der letzten Jahrzehnte war die 1-Kind Politik in China, die der Welt ca. 400 Millionen CO2-Emittenden und Emittenden-Vermehrern erspart hat.

IN ENGLISH:

According to the IEA, global emissions last year climbed 3.2%. I believe that corresponds to the annual emission of Germany – roundabout.
The most effective climate policy of the last decade was the 1-child policy in China which saved the world from approx. 400 million emitters and emitter-reproducers.”

Denial of human life as an effective climate policy? Is he being cynical or has he totally lost his marbles?

I can only assume he is being cynical and is indirectly criticising what has been ineffective “climate policies” so far. (Personally, I don’t see how anyone can say “climate policies” have been ineffective when global temperatures have not risen at all over the last 10 years. Where’s the failure?).  Cynical or not, that 1-child statement goes way too far. Unusual coming from a man who dislikes extreme views from either side.

It would be disturbing enough if HvS were just another climate scientist trying to get attention, but he is much more than that. He is professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Geesthacht, and a member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics. He is one Germany’s leading climate scientists.

And when the world’s leading scientists run loose and start spewing about the virtues of mass population reduction in scientific terms, then the rest of us really need to worry. Dangerous politicians have a nasty habit of gravitating in their direction.

Strangely, HvS wrote his short essay in German, and not in the usual English which one finds more often at Klimazwiebel. Perhaps the elimination of 400 million people just seems to come across better in the more authoritarian German.

Cynical or not, it’s time for the professor to retire. In the very least he’d be wise to call his statement a mistake and to retract it.

 

27 responses to “Renowned Climate Scientist Says China’s One-Child Policy Was The “Most Effective Climate Policy Of The Last Decade””

  1. marchesarosa

    I dsagree, Mr Gosselin. Not replicating themselves is the greatest impact alarmists can possibly have on the rate of anthropogenic CO2 production! A huge reduction in the carbon footprint they are leaving to posterity!

    You assume the limitation of population growth is of necessity via some draconian imposition by a totalitarian state but billions of people worldwide are voluntarily and effectively controlling their fecundity and some states already have a birthrate below replacement level. Good! They made a CHOICE.

    China certainly took the bull by the horns and got its population growth under control but every silver lining has a cloud behind it and the one child policy is now impacting severely on the welfare net formerly provided by larger families. The price of China’s one child policy today has to be universal and generous social security provision for the elderly, the sick and the unemployed from the public purse.

    1. TexCIS

      Dear Marcherosa,
      You want to limit the number of children in a family, and wish to substitute “universal and generous social security provision for the elderly, the sick and the unemployed from the PUBLIC purse.”

      Where, pray tell, does the money for the “public purse” come from? PEOPLE supply the public purse. Where do people come from?

      If you’re not supporting elderly with children from within the family, you have to support them with children from OTHER families (the “public”). Your only other option is to let them die. I suppose that’s the next “green” recommendation, when they find out we don’t have enough children to support our borrow-now-pay-(way)-later socialist programs.

  2. ArndB

    You see it correctly!
    It is shocking!!

  3. DirkH

    Well, German scientists and red-green loons actually DO see man exclusively as a burden on the planet. I have never encountered one of them praising man for his ingenuity. They never see a potential in humans, only a drain on precious resources. Von Storchs utterance was an honest expression of his believes – that man is a harmful plague; I am quite sure of that.

    Maybe this mentality goes back to the Dark Ages and earlier when survival in Germany was so hard you would just send useless eaters (the old and the weak) “ins Moor” (into the peat bogs).

    Civilisation is a relatively young phenomenon in Germany. And it seems not complete.

    1. Mindert Eiting

      Dirk, vicar Malthus was English. He was very concerned about overpopulation especially of people he considered the lower class.

      1. DirkH

        The British Y chromosome (and half of the other chromosomes) is of Germanic heritage. The Angeln and Sachsen killed the male celtic population after invading and took their women. The Normans came later and only wiped out the aristocrats, not the general population, to become the next aristocracy.

      2. DirkH

        And when I said “relatively young” I mean “compared to the Indian culture”…
        2000 years ago there were only swamps here. (But that again makes me wonder about Meltwater Pulse 1 A when the North Sea turned from an inhabitated country into sea… I wonder what perished there.)

  4. Ric Werme

    I like to point out to my “green” friends (i.e. not members of the Green Party) that the most polluting thing they can do is have a baby. For some reason, I don’t seem to have many green friends. 🙂

    1. klem

      Lucky for you. Mind if I try that?

  5. DirkH

    German teachers say polar bears live in the Antarctis.
    http://www.primolo.de/node/8532
    “Eisbären sind in Not, weil das Eis in der Antarktis immer mehr schmilzt. Ab 2030 wird es in der Antarktis wahrscheinlich kein Eis mehr geben”

    1. DirkH

      They also say an IR lamp and a glass sphere work like CO2 in the atmosphere.
      http://www.primolo.de/node/8387

      Lysenko-style falsities to indoctrinate kids from the youngest age.

    2. Ulrich Elkmann

      They teach it; nobody knows if they believe a thing they’re saying.
      30 Years ago, they taught that socialism was the bee’s knees and Ronald Raygun and Maggie Setscha were evil incarnate (both in the east and the west), 70 years ago, they taught … something different; 100 years ago, Emperor Bill was a Nietzschean ubermensch (they never bothered to check what Nietzsche thought of the Hohenzollerns); they taught that Herr Grass wrote Important Literature; they taught that Eugen Drewermann and Dorothee Sölle were the only important theologians; they taught Global Cooling, the end of oil and set theory as the future of applied mathematics. Seems there is a Law of Bogosity at work here that requires a certain percentage of blatant humbug at all times.

  6. Pointman

    Yes, a great policy. A small downside is that there are estimated to be about 200 million “illegal” children / young adults. Being illegal, their employment choices are limited to sweat shops, criminality or prostitution.

    Pointman

  7. GregO

    Shocking but not surprising. Is not Climate Science just another refuge for one-world authoritarians, extremists, kooks and crackpots? Recall that the mother of Man-Made Global Warming was the Imminent Ice Age which would exacerbate the real crisis – overpopulation and famine.

    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/10/13/dan-gardner-the-nation-killing-famine-that-never-was/

    If HvS doesn’t do a better job of sticking to his field of expertise, he risks going down in history as just another malevolent, chicken-little, intellectual dwarf.

  8. klem

    When I was a kid back in the 1960′s and 70′s the UN said that we’d have 20 billion people by the year 2000. That was unacceptable, if we didn’t do something about it there would be famines, war and death. We came in around 6.5 billion and today we are at 7 billion. They are still saying that 7 billion is unacceptable and if we don’t do something about it there would be famines, war and death. I’ve been hearing this same thing for 40 years now.

    I think if we had 3 billion they would still say it was too high. More famine, wars and death.

    I think for these people, population scare is the gift that just keeps on giving.

    Ever notice that they always say the population is too high but they never say what a safe population number might be.

    If 20 billion was too high and 7 billion is still too high, what is the right number?

    1. DirkH

      Oh, they do; check the Optimum Population Trust of which David Attenborough is a member or Ted Turner’s 100 million quote or the inscripture of the “Georgia Guidestones” , a monument created by an unknown “philantropist”; I think that one says 500 milllion.

    2. Mindert Eiting

      A good series of articles and comments about Malthusianism can be found on Spiked-online or http://www.spiked-online.com/site/issues/C164/

  9. mbabbitt

    I vote for “lost marbles”.

    1. Bernd Felsche

      Oh no. Not Elgin! 🙂

      Sorry, could not resist.

  10. Bernd Felsche

    Voltaire said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

    1. DirkH

      The Warmist Endarkenment…

  11. Bernd Felsche

    Premature posting … Voltaire was a friend and regular guest of Frederick the Great during 1740’s; the age of enlightenment. The latter instigated the draining of expansive moors, swamps and flood-plains in Brandenburg, Saxony and surrounds, providing arable land for production of food, as well as dry land for building the cities of Potsdam and Berlin. (There’s still a Dutch Quarter of note in Potsdam and Oranienburg to the North of Berlin, marking where the immigrant workers settled after the initial drainage works.)

    An unintended side-effect was that the faster-running waters of the drainage canals and the larger rivers into which they fed, reduced the size of breeding grounds for insects which carried diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, etc., the “tropical” diseases which were endemic to the region even during the Little Ice Age. Diseases of towns and cities such as cholera prevailed into the early 20th century; waste water management being difficult in the low plains.

  12. Pierre Gosselin: Renowned Climate Scientist Says China’s One-Child Policy Was The “Most Effective Climate Policy Of The Last Decade” | JunkScience.com

    […] No Tricks Zone Share this:PrintEmailMoreStumbleUponTwitterFacebookDiggRedditLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Climate Change, IPCC and tagged climate hysteria, dioxycarbophobia, hatred of humans, misanthropy, weather superstition. Bookmark the permalink. ← Bjorn Lomborg on the Rio Green Summit: Poverty Pollutes […]

  13. Franz

    Hans should lead by example {-snip].

  14. Renowned Climate Scientist Says China’s One-Child Policy Was The “Most Effective Climate Policy Of The Last Decade” | Foundation Life

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  15. Anthony Williams

    Population-scare statistics and the population-control agenda seem to be based on the world’s cities, which cover a minute proportion of the earth’s land-surface. Travelling 500 miles by car through Zambia recently, a country with adequate rainfall and fertile soil, I was struck by its enormous emptiness. I was also struck by an increasing Chinese presence in that land.

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