Wrong, professor

Professor Jared Diamond, promoting his new book Collapse, a look at the causes of civilizational collapse, speaks with the ABC's Mark Colvin:

MARK COLVIN: I was in Rwanda just after the massacres, and I remember talking to the UN general who was there at the time. He had predicted it. And he was very, very angry that he hadn't been listened to.

Is that something that always happens? Are there always Cassandras?

JARED DIAMOND: Well, there are always Cassandras, and the problem is of all those Cassandras out there, which are right and which are wrong?

But it's not only the case that there are always Cassandras. There are always super optimists who tell you that those Cassandras are all wrong and the world is going fine and we're getting richer and richer and happier and happier.

So somehow all of us have to make sense of the Cassandras and the super optimists.

MARK COLVIN: So you think that there were super optimists in Greenland, in Easter Island, in the Anasazi community?

JARED DIAMOND: I would expect so. It's in the past, so that I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that every society we know about today has its super optimists.

For example, the United States had a famous economist, a fellow called Julian Simon, who argued that environmental problems were negligible because – you Australians would especially enjoy this – he said because, after all, I am not worried about koalas in Madagascar – he thought that koalas lived in Madagascar – and if we run out of copper, we'll synthesise copper. Well, every beginning chemistry student knows that copper is an element, and by definition you can't synthesise elements.

The koalas in Madagascar error was pretty silly of Simon – have tried but can't find a source confirming Simon said this – but isn't really any big deal. Koala, lemur, they're both cute, furry arboreal critters. It's not like he said Icelandic elephants.

The synthesise copper thing is much more serious because it shows Simon had a fundamental misunderstanding of how the universe works. Actually, it's Diamond who has it wrong, at least according to someone who should know, Tulane's Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics:

[T]he doomsayer Paul Ehrlich accuses the late economist Julian Simon of a belief in ... large-scale alchemy and science fiction (Ehrlich 1981) because of Simon's claim that copper can be made from other metals. Even the total mass of the earth is not a theoretical limit to the amount of copper that might be available to earthlings in the future. Only the mass of the universe would be such a theoretical limit (Simon (1980); reprinted on page 52 of Simon (1990)). The biologist Garrett Hardin quoted ... every scientist [as saying] ˜My God, alchemy. We got rid of alchemy 300 years ago, and here's this idiot ... proposing to revive alchemy" (Hardin and Simon (1982); quote is on page 396 of the reprint of this article in Simon (1990)).

I was amused by these attacks on poor Julian Simon. Not only can copper be synthesized from other metals, it has been synthesized from other metals, and you can actually buy some synthetic copper on the open market! Zinc-65 decays, with a half-life of 245 days, into the stable isotope copper 65. Zinc-65 is regularly manufactured in uranium fission reactors because its decay yields a gamma ray useful for calibrating radiation detectors. But if you buy a picogram of zinc-65, then in 245 days, you'll have half a picogram of copper-65. So I bought some zinc-65 and sent it to Julian so he could have in his possession some of this scientifically impossible substance.

Let's see, who's the idiot, the optimist or the Cassandra who gets lumped in with Paul Ehrlich? (By the way, the Tipler extract is dated 1998, so it's not like it's a recent revelation.)