In honour of this week's screaming match about the environment

COP26 is going to lead to an awful lot of insistences that we’re all gonna die, right now, unless we - well, unless we do whatever it is that the person screaming demands. Kill the use of fossil fuels, send $100 billion a year to the despots of poor countries, stop eating red meat, return to the life patterns of medieval peasantry and so on.

We’ve also been told this a number of times before, memory isn’t what it once was but we’d start with an estimate of at least 25 times so far, given that that appears to be how many COPs there have been.

At which point a small examination of another warning of environmental disaster. This comes from the New Scientist of 2007 and has been added to varied school curricula along the way. It’s not just some passing error. George Monbiot, just to name one, was using it as a reference to bolster his argument.

…both indium and hafnium – which is increasingly important in computer chips – could be gone by 2017, and terbium – used to make the green phosphors in fluorescent light bulbs – could run out before 2012.

Indium did not run out in 2017, terbium is still available despite that posited end date of 2013 and the idea that hafnium will ever run out at anything like current consumption volumes is a gross absurdity.

The thing about science is that when an hypothesis meets reality it’s reality that wins, not the idea. The process of science is to examine hypotheses (yes, we know hypothethi is wrong but rather fancy it all the same) and, where reality does disagree with them, change the idea so that it does accord with the facts the universe is presenting to us.

What went wrong here is explained in full in this (free) book. The short answer being that those who made the prediction had no knowledge of metals, minerals, mineral reserves, mineral resources, extraction techniques or even the definitions of most of them. All certain handicaps to trying to measure the availability of metals, minerals, the relationship between them and reserves, resources and so on.

We do not say that every assertion made this week in Glasgow will be as idiotic as our example here. But every one does need to be subjected to the same scepticism. For that is actually the scientific method, that assertions are tested against reality and it is always reality that wins.