Climate Change and the Horse Manure Catastrophe
One of the reasons of the success of the motor car in replacing horses was that cars didn’t leave solid waste behind. It would take almost a century to understand that the exhaust of motor vehicles is way more toxic and polluting than anything that the rear of a horse could produce. (Above, 1898 car ad).
The success of the Paris climate conference may have been only partial, but it has surely thrown into some disarray the anti-science party. For instance, at the National Review, they haven’t been able to criticize the Paris agreement with anything better than the old canard of “the horse manure catastrophe,” (see here for the origin of the story). Their recent piece on this subject is titled “Why Climate Change Won’t Matter in 20 Years” and it is penned by Josh Gelernter. It contains nothing new, but it is a slick and well-written piece that deserves some attention.
The central argument of the text derives from the horse manure pollution problem in the 19th century. Gelernter cites Michael Crichton and says,
What environmental problems would men in 1900 have predicted for 2000? Where to get enough horses, and what to do with all the manure. “Horse pollution was bad in 1900,” said Crichton. How much worse would someone in 1900 expect it to be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?”
From here, the text goes on listing the many changes that we have seen since that time and arguing that, today, it is impossible to predict what technology will be like in a hundred years from now, and that even 20 years from now climate change will not be a problem anymore.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
