Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Serial failed futurist Paul Ehrlich has warned that Australia will become a third world country, if we Australians don’t abandon one of our main sources of national income.
According to The Guardian;
Q&A: mining will turn Australia into a third-world country, says ecologist Paul Ehrlich
Ehrlich warns ‘you are destroying your life support systems here’ and says his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation will collapse in 50 years is based on ‘gut feeling’
Australia is “working to become a third-world country” through its economic dependence on mining natural resources for export and reliance on coalmining, according to doomsday ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
Ehrlich made the prediction on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, after dismissing the views of other panellists on the question of whether Australia was overpopulated as “mostly nonsense, unfortunately,” and before praising the economic theories of electronics retailer Dick Smith.
“Talk to your ecologist,” Ehrlich said. “You are destroying your life support systems here. You are working at it really hard. You are also working to become a third-world country, because your specialisation of course is to take your raw materials, like your coal, which will destroy the world of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and ship of as much of it unprocessed as you possibly can out to the rest of the world.”
Ehrlich told host Tony Jones, who seemed to be struggling to manage the octogenarian academic, that his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation would collapse in 50 years was based on a “gut feeling”, and freely admitted that a number of his predictions, such as the prediction the United Kingdom would be a small group of impoverished islands occupied by 70 million hungry people by the year 2000, hadn’t quite borne out.
Its good that Ehrlich is researching whether the rumbling of his digestive tract is a more reliable predictor of future events, than whatever he used to do. In fact, I must commend Ehrlich on choosing to study his own gut, rather than the entrails of slaughtered animals, to produce his forecasts – Ehrlich’s method seems a lot tidier and less wasteful than the ancient Roman method of fortune telling, and will in all likelihood produce predictions which are at least as reliable as an IPCC climate projection.
Serial nutter.
Yes, but with a commonly unappreciated real purpose. If you want to understand what Paul Ehrlich is really pushing read his 1989 book with Robert Ornstein called New World New Mind. Ehrlich lost the bet with Julian Simon, but his vision for a new type of education that would allow fervent belief in false narratives and politically useful misperceptions about how the world works has become the dominant focus in K-12 globally. In the US it goes by Common Core or more aptly now Competency-based education.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/ goes into the bet and how what is called double-loop learning is designed to neurologically restructure the brain over time. The McREL ed lab in Aurora, Colorado brags about using the same techniques to create ‘second-order change’ in students.
Ehrlich acolyte and protegee, John Holdren, heads the President’s Office of Science and Technology Promise. The League of Innovative Schools and the Digital Promise technology policy answer to him. Ehrlich remains on course to get what he wants until we understand his true agenda, what Foresight Knowledge is, and how his work with psychologist Albert Bandura has become so influential in education, influencing the Equity and Excellence agenda coming in under civil rights laws.
Scary! Like most of the bugs in Aus.
Yup just like this exemplar which I found on the New Zealand governments education site.
https://thedemiseofchristchurch.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/exemplar-3-2008-exam.pdf
Besides Australia WOULD BE a third world country WITHOUT mining!
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
I wholeheartedly agree….a complete nut job
In 1973 I went ( as young people tend to do) to a presentation by Suzuki. He said then exactly the same things about Canada, now I know where he got the meme from, literally word for word. Hey Ehrlich and Suzuki, we are living in abject poverty here in Canada! Yes we have problems but a third world country, my a.. and you both can kiss it.
Just happen to have a “selfie” of Paul “Suppository-Head” Erlich, engrossed in one of his celebrated gut-checks: “&”
#intestinal parasites
Probably true on this guy but you have to wonder about a country that exports coal and iron ore to China and imports Chinese steel. Same with cars and Japan. Same with Korea and offshore drilling, etc.
Australia is the most urbanized country in the world and prides itself for having a very socialized economy chock full of middle class welfare. I like Australia and live there part of the year but they only work hard at sports and BBQs.
Maybe you need to understand why its this way. The Unions have made manufacturing so expensive that all of the processing and manufacturing industries have gone offshore. Take a look at our car making industry, the government won’t pay each manufacturer over $300 million per year to stay here so they are all disappearing overseas. The average wage for car assemblers is about $90,000, by the time you pay for all the allowances that they get paid. They have also just declared Melbourne Cup day a public holiday. We had our own successful steel manufacturing businesses here, but steel manufacturing is seen as old dirty technology and we shouldn’t have it in our country, stupid labor and greens
+1. Erlich might be a card-carying ecotard, but he is on the money about our backward, she’ll-be-right-mate economic strategy.
And this economic reliance on digging stuff up and shipping it out comes from a country that was the fourth to launch an artificial satellite (admittedly on an unused US missile left over from test flights near Woomera), was also fourth to build a stored memory electronic computer, developed the combine harvester in its modern form, invented flame ionisation detection, was one of the pioneers of refrigeration, held patents to enabling technologies used in Wifi and in the 1970s was the world’s tenth largest producer of cars.
When the hell did we lose the plot so completely?
Expat
Have a Go responds to your entry with Melbourne Cup having just been made a Public Holiday.
The Cup was first run in 1861 and such a success that a Holiday was declared in 1877.
This year a public holiday was held for the first on the Friday before the AFL Grand Final. It was not universally rwell received in the state of Victoria and was generally considered a medium success in city turnout for a Grand Final parade and people getting out and about. I can understand why people overseas would consider it weird that we have a state of Victoria holiday for a horse race and a footy final. The first one works spectacularly and is a massive sporting and cultural event while the latter is ridiculous. As a news event the race was won by a 100 to one longshot and ridden by Michelle Payne. The first female jockey to win the event labelled as the race that stops a nation.
Cheers to all
Expat,
As Have a Go indicates, in Australia it is cheaper buy back those products (as manufactured goods, plus transport costs) than it is to produce them here for a variety of reasons. High wages for union members that effectively negotiate themselves out of a job is only one factor but a very large one. The Government also now recognises that it is not represent good value to subsidise such manufacturers to produce competitively priced goods, when it is obvious that our tax dollars are used to pay to keep the pricing ‘competitive’. Either way we pay extra for a similar item, whether the money leaves our pocket on the showroom floor or via taxes. Someone did a study on this in the US a few years ago and found that the US Government pays twice as much in subsidies to US car manufacturers as the average wage cost per person in the industry. So effectively if they shut the industry down and paid the same guys to stay at home doing nothing, they’d save several billion dollars a year… But there is much to be said for retaining manufacturing capabilities.
We also lack economies of scale to produce many manufactured goods competitively on a world stage. The Asian economies have stolen a march on us there. And the US too.
And we are not ‘the most urbanised country in the world’. Apart from the city states, such as Monaco and Singapore, many European and Asian countries are more urbanised than Oz. But we are up there at nearly 90%.
And we also pride ourselves on being one of the most innovative countries in the world, with many ‘mod con’s’ having been invented here, like Erny says. But we are disappointingly risk-averse so hardly ever commercialise those products domestically, rather leaving more visionary monied types to swoop in and take our inventions overseas to produce them there. Rinse, repeat. 🙁
You left out an important aspect of the risk averse nature of the Australian culture.
There is an unhealthy obsession with real estate. Oz would have a much healthier economy if the billions tied up in McMansions were invested in productive assets. Primarily this is a result of a broken tax system.
Australia is the worlds biggest exporter of coking coal for steel making so nobody value adds to coal as well as them. Australia does indeed export coal and iron ore to China and then buy it back as steel because this is the cheapest way to do it which is called “economics”. They have middle class welfare instead of pay rises which would hurt business.
Australia is the cheapest producer so as the price falls the competition flounders and Australia picks up market share.
Erlich points the way to the future….just reverse everything he says.
Expat, another thing you ignored is the fact that Australia has a very restrictive set of design rules that have to be met for any vehicle sold here. Most are unique to Australia, which, with a 23 million population, means that manufacturers cannot achieve the economy of scale needed to be profitable. Thus, for decades our car industry has been heavily subsidised by taxpayers, but thankfully that will end in the next 2 years.
Serial nutter.
While I agree, it should be remembered that, despite being serially wrong about just about anything, there are a lot of people that listen to his words and think that he makes sense.
Sad, I know, that he has such ‘form’. That didn’t stop the RS taking him on board recently…
https://royalsociety.org/fellows/fellows-directory/
(search last name Ehrlich)
So much for ‘science’ when ‘The RS’ pulls him out of the water and one of his acolytes, Holdren, is now advising the US President upon matters of science.
If you are not worried then you are not paying attention.
No, wait – Australia is NOT a Third World country?
The whole world will become a third world dump, if we do abandon mining.
Hey Paul; EVERYTHING comes out of the ground; well everything that we own anyway.
g
Well at least he is man enough to admit that his prediciton is only based on a “gut feeling.”
My “gut feeling”, after a dodgy takeaway, will be some fallout.
““gut feeling.””
tape worm !
90% though? Why put a number on a gut feeling? Might as well wear a sign “Idiot. Ignore him.”
Everyone will have to put up with his BS for another year about.
Will the USA ever stop allowing these nut case from obtaining important Government Positions??
“Will the USA ever stop allowing these nut case from obtaining important Government Positions??”
Only when we stop electing nutters to the highest offices in the land! As long as serial welfare types are allowed to vote we will have a non-stop chain of nutters!
Unfortunately there are too many with too little understanding of how the world works and look to imbeciles like him for guidance. The USA and Australia used to be guided by what was good for each country. Now they are led by the nose into areas that have no financial or social advantage.
We have been too successful and at the top of Masloe’s triangle all you can see are our arses as we struggle to full actualisation.
We need a complete new thought pattern based on wealth creation by the only method there is, selling manufactured stuff that others want to buy. With fully automated factories and software we don’t give away to the Chinese/Indians. The west needs to ensure that nuclear energy is developed where it was invented and not in China as that appears the only way forwards.
“Why put a number on a gut feeling?”
What’s next?
p-values based on gut feeling?
Guts can tell us a great deal about what the future holds.
“The seven towers of Agamemnon tremble. Much is the discord in the latitude of Gemini. When, when cry the sirens of doom and love. Speckly showers on Tuesday.”
Manicholas — Laughing out loud. I post stuff like that occasionally — Eugene WR Gallun
Eugene, thank you but I cannot take the credit…it is from a very funny essay which was discussed here a few weeks back.
If his prediction is based upon a gut feeling, perhaps a bit of haruspicy is called for; will Ehrlich volunteer for the ritual reading of entrails? It could be the only thing that he is good for and the results will probably be more correct than all of his failed predictions.
You would think that someone would get tired of being constantly, consistently wrong, but not Ehrlich. The man has no shame and no one really calls him or Holdren on their miserable track records
Ehrlic and Holdren are just the paid mouth pieces of the aspiring rulers from the UN. Nobody would have the courage to tell lies and proven wrong so often if there wasn’t some form of monetary retribution involved!
Truly, completely insane.
Looks more like Jed Clampett every day. “Jethro! get out of that see-ment pond and shift this pile o’ money.”
But Uncle Jed, Granny sez I kin have a heap of her possum pot pie for lunch!
Well, Faversham to ya!
The quality of the intellectual left is epitomized by Paul Ehrlich — Eugene WR Gallun
The difference is that Paul Ehrlich is wheeled out as a comedy routine for the Left.
Donald Trump stands for the leadership of his party.
At least Trump is a builder. It sounds like Ehrlich hasn’t a clue where natural resources come from–they’re either grown, mined, or extracted. I wonder if Ehrlich would like to demonstrate a decade of getting along without any metals whatsoever–where would he live? In a cave? I can show him how to make stone implements if he’s interested in eating.
He would announce that chipping flint and making fires with flint is pure evil, too. 🙂
Trump is no conservative, and neither are most Republicans.
Trump know how to get attention. He is no fool.
Ehrlich is either a bedwetting fool, or a lying liar extraordinaire.
Since he seems to believe what he says, the evidence would indicate “fool” in Ehrlich’s case.
The man is perhaps the least optimistic person ever born, has a seeming black hole in his brain regarding the history of technology, believes himself to be wise and insightful in the extreme, but is a truly clueless nitwit instead.
Trump is a loud mouthed narcissist who believes he is never wrong and is someone who has no experience on how to run a government. Same as the guy we got in the White House now. Why would anyone want more of the same just because the color is different.
It is likely the case that everyone who seeks to be Preezy of the United Steezy is dangerously narcissistic, so that one goes without saying, but cancels out.
And only people who have been Governors can claim to have actual experience running a government, unless a Mayor runs. So I am not sure that must be a litmus test.
Being loudmouthed…who cares?
Believing he is never wrong?
I am not so sure of that…he freely admits he would delegate responsibilities and much decision making.
The best business leaders all learn to do this, or they do not get far. No one can successfully micromanage
large institutions or enterprises.
From your comments, might one infer that you think the only wise choice is a former governor?
I want someone who is going to clean house…many of the other arguments I have heard amount to just insisting that the way things are is how they must be.
BTW, I am not endorsing Trump…just observing and offering my thoughts on the current state of the process.
Bunk. Ehrlich’s mini-me has been corrupting science policy and counsel for most of this Administration. Trump stands or falls on his own. Gratuitously trying to compare a life-long parasite like Ehrlich with someone who actually has to at the end of the day produce something is not useful.
For Tom:
What??? Modern European Australia is a mining boom-bust economy. Always has been, always will be. Now with Turncoat in the drivers seat (Truck! Will summat save us?), we are set to cross the finishing line to the race to bottom. Canada or the UK may pinch it tho…
If Corbyn gets anywhere near power the UK is a dead cert.
jbenton2013:
Your post implies that it is possible to do worse than Cameron, but I doubt that.
Richard
There really is no level of disdain great enough for our modern day Parson Malthus. This man has provided the justification for the murder of more millions than Hitler ever dreamed of.
His gut feeling is more of an Irritable bowel syndrome.
Why such nutters ever get any attention? The very same people that fight astrologers tooth and claw give credibility to slackers that suck out predictions from their toes. Argh!
The oracle of Delphi in Greece was the telephone psychic of ancient times: People came from all over Europe to call on the Pythia at Mount Parnassus to have their questions about the future answered.
The study, reported in the August issue of Geology, reveals that two faults intersect directly below the Delphic temple. The study also found evidence of hallucinogenic gases rising from a nearby spring and preserved within the temple rock.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0814_delphioracle_2.html
Some of the predictions were surprisingly accurate – according to legend. Croesus, the richest man of his time, performed a kind of scientific test on oracles, when he had messengers go out to all of them and ask what he would be doing on a certain date. Delphi got the only correct answer – cooking a tortoise in a pot. (Bold choice. I wouldn’t think of the richest guy in the world doing his own cooking.)
http://io9.com/5965349/what-really-caused-the-oracle-at-delphi-to-utter-mad-prophesies
I will go with the Pythia of Delphi and hallucinogenic gas versus Paul and ‘his gut’. At least she got ONE prediction right.
Ehrlich is just another anti-capitalism, anti-industrialisation, anti-human moron. Unfortunately, there are heaps of them.
His best before went 30 years ago and his gut feeling diarrheous interests no-one. Neext!
Further. Australia WILL be a 3rd world country. It does not refine raw materials like oil and iron ore. Oil is no longer refined in Aus. In 2016 car making will stop. Most industry has stopped in Aus. The only thing making Aus going is Govn’t and housing. And when people are out of work and cannot afford housing, what happens? Bubble. Burst. Recession. D’oh!
Thanks, Patrick! This are the consequences of Australia’s trade and industry mandarins enacting suicidal policies for 40-odd years, and we’re getting worse. Our agriculture debacle. The wastage of reservoir water to “save” “dying” rivers [whose natural state is to degrade in dry spells] denies irrigators from producing up to 40% of our national agricultural output. Australia will remain a net importer of food for the foreseeable future – a situation so absurd, but true, as to defy commonsense. http://newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=57118
Seems you Ozzies have adopted the California water management schem
I am not an Aussie, yet. I have not had the required lobotomy.
Never heard anything so ridiculous. of course, a country should exploit its main resource. that is what nations are build on.
Talking about resources, BP says that the world is not going to run out of oil and gas anytime soon. So it looks like all those doomsayers harking on about Peak Oil were wrong. See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11971280/The-Earth-is-not-running-out-of-oil-and-gas-BP-says.html
Yes, I have calculated that the volume of all of the oil ever produced would be a hill about the size of a single large mountain.
Compared to the size of the Earth, even Mt. Everest is of a size which, proportionally speaking, is to the Earth as a billiard ball is to a bacteria.
(Ok, I admit that I am referring to a rather large bacteria, but a real one.)
And another thing…Thailand has BETTER internet performance than Aus. Romania BEATS aus by shed loads… Ok lets ignore geography for a while, Aus is a lottle bit big. Yes New South Wales *IS* bigger than Texas (US). But we’re “first world” right?
This alone stand as testimony to our new PM’s workaday credentials – his previous portfolio was as ‘minister for the internet’ – where his promised $28 billion super fast FTN, has blown out to an impressive $56 Billion and change.
Failed as an opposition leader, failed as a communications minister, failed as a global warming advocate, failed as leader of the republican movement – but is apparently a great salesman – who has never worked in that role in his entire life.
A natural born narcissist!
Thanks, ahld! Turnbull gave us a disastrous “[no] water” policy : “Malcolm Turnbull, then minister for environment and water in the Howard government. His Water Act 2007 deregulated the supply of water in the Murray-Darling Basin, allowing financial institutions and companies to buy and trade water….farmers have to buy water from non-water users, speculative water barons, who are holding back on selling water in order to force up the price during this crippling drought. … Water that previously cost around $80 per megalitre (approximately what is held in a swimming pool), is now fetching $300 per megalitre, a ruinous impost for struggling irrigators who are battling historically low prices for basic commodities like milk, meat and fruit imposed by [their buyers] Australia’s supermarket duopoly” http://newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=57118
Malcolm Turnbull – ex Goldman Sachs & still working for Banksters for New World Order.
& aaahhhh… like father, like son:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-14/malcolm-turnbull-overthrows-tony-abbott-becomes-australian-pm
Sounds like some one here.
Well, he has a point. Third World countries do export raw materials, instead of processing them locally for higher value addition. And if Australia encouraged domestic use of coal, the country wouldn’t have to cater to unreliable power sources like wind turbines, right?
Do I need a /sarc here?
classic was this week when the power from Vic crashed and SA blacked out
because?
the greentards got the Pt Augusta powerstation near shutdown n replaced with?
wind/solar
ditto our smelters in whyalla n Pt Pirie,run down and being run outta town
and Geelong
and the alcoa plant in portland
et
etc
so we DID process n export but thanks to a$$holes like ehrlich we now dont
that pos should be BANNED from setting foot in aus!
figures the dimwits at ABC promote n support him.
Speaking of power outages, re the German joke of renewable energy:
“In 2014, production was stopped more than 70 times to maintain electricity supplies to domestic consumers. Although renewable energy is cheap when the sun shines and the wind blows, it cannot be stored for calm, cloudy days. To keep the power lines humming for ordinary households, large industrial users can be disconnected from the grid for up to one hour at a time.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/02/germanys-planned-nuclear-switch-off-drives-energy-innovation
Do not mock Mr Ehrlich. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012 so he must be a supremely credible scientist!
(sarc)
Being “honoured” by that lot is not something of which I would feel proud.
If I had a shred of respect (born of past deeds only) remaining for that institution, the knowledge that they have honored this charlatan has just erased it.
+1
…and a successful economy would doubtlessly be one in which people made their money from one another by selling books and talks containing completely erroneous predictions about the near future…
I see it now. The perfect utopia. Nobody would live in want or scarcity. All our problems would be solved. Forget mining or making stuff or growing crops. We don’t need all that stuff.
All we need are more shitty predictions. It’s actually amazing to witness just how lucrative a shitty prediction can be.
Give a man a fish and he can eat today – teach a man to make unfounded but attention grabbing predictions and he can live forever in luxury like Paul Ehrlich.
I take it you mean a successfull GREEN economy?
I nominate ‘Frog as today’s internet grand prize winner!
The ignorance of economics is truly funny….
Sad but funny
Paul Ehrlich: Australia will become a “third world country” if we don’t abandon Mining, oddly I thought the ‘green dream’ was to turn back the clock on the modern world until it returned to what was in practice not the mythic rural ideal they dream about , but what we see right now in the worst of ‘third world’
He must be learning, although on a curve so glacially slow it’s movement must be tracked by time-lapse photography.
Having seen that peoples the world over actually, and to his surprise. distain the idea of reverting to stone age barbarism and deprivation, he must have decided to incorporate this revelation into his gloomy-gus pronouncements.
” distain the idea of reverting to stone age barbarism and deprivation,”
With the exception of Islam of course, perhaps Erlich is a closest Islamist???
Does anyone know of a single prediction of Often-Wrong Ehrlich that has even come close to reality?
Tim Flannery would give him a run for his money.
Am not sure either could run…maybe if their ice cream was melting and only if it was from New Zealand.
Are you talking of the same Tim Flannery whom our CBC has elevated to near-god status. He has been interviewed at length (and approvingly, or course) in the programs “Ideas” and “The Sunday Edition”.
Ian M
“Does anyone know of a single prediction of Often-Wrong Ehrlich that has even come close to reality?”
In 1968 he correctly surmised that eating the egg salad, which had sat in the sun all day, may not be such a wise idea.
Since then…nada.
And ever since that moment he has relied on his gut instinct, versus logical thoughts which he must mistrust for some strange reason.
As an old fart, and one who attended a second tier Australian university in the late sixties, I have a clear recollection of Ehrlich along with the pronouncements of the Club of Rome.
My lecturer in Economic Geology, in 1969, was a Californian PhD who proclaimed (not just claimed) that the world will exhaust its petroleum reserves in 30 to 40 years!
Ehrlich, like my lecturer, were (and are) deniers of the ability of humankind to not only adapt but innovate solutions to problems facing humanity.
This is reason enough for me to reject the mantras of the various Green/Socialist/Hippie groups who insist on working without the safety net of reason. They will be hurt by the eventual fall.
People like Ehrlich never get hurt by the “eventual fall”. They somehow always manage to weasel out of the blame. Look at Flannell-face. Still making a motsa off the old global warming fraud.
Damn, Flim Fannery was just on the CBC here in Canada yesterday touting a litany of record global warming records occurring throughout Ausieland over this last year. Record droughts, heat waves, violent storms, endangered Barrier Reef etc.
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/The+Sunday+Edition/ID/2678093470/
Given his track record that sounds like a solid reason to step up mining.
Yep.. not one thing this moronic cretin has ever got correct.
Yet somehow he passes for “intelligence” to the far left / ABC.
Makes sense I suppose.
So the fifth biggest world economy (UK) should have been an impoverished group of islands with 70 million hungry people 15 years ago? We mighty very well have been if we had relied on windmills and solar cells to power our homes, farms and industry.
“Gut feeling” just about sums up leftie “science”; a load of cr*p going in totally the wrong direction to be spewed from the mouth at any opportunity!
+100
Gut feelings – like the confidence levels that some climate scientists have in the forecasts of the climate models.
If you shut down your manufacturing, mining, and other industry, you will no longer be able to make the things you need. You will need to buy those things from other countries, which may not have your best interests at heart. When you can not make the things you need, you essentially become a third world agrarian country. And in short order, you will have the agrarian third world economy and society to match. That happens when you can no longer afford to buy the things you need.
I read “The Population Bomb” when it first came out. It scared the hell out of me, I was just a kid at the time. After just a few years, it was apparent to me that he was fantastically wrong, and that what he was really up to was scaring people, especially children.
After that episode, I have always felt that the man needs to be skinned.
“When you can not make the things you need, you essentially become a third world agrarian country.”
That’s providing you haven’t built all over your farmland. We are either building houses or solar farms on farmland which doesn’t seem the best solution to shortage of housing and energy. Either way we are losing farmland and water catchment at the same time.
… you become a third world agrarian country.
Isn’t that the logical, long term, outcome of adherence to “sustainability” movement standards. As such, It should be characterized as a good thing in the eyes of goofballs like Erlich.
Ehrlich has lost none of his arrogance and learned nothing from being so incredibly wrong.
When confronted with his prediction of:
“freely admitted that a number of his predictions, such as the prediction the United Kingdom would be a small group of impoverished islands occupied by 70 million hungry people by the year 2000”
he actually stated that he “was correct, except for the hungry bit”.
What a moron.
Journalists are always fascinated when a big name gives gloom and doom predictions. At some point they start drooling for more, as if dire and implausible prediction could not be too unbelievable to be taken seriously. You need to get the name first, but after that, you can basically claim anything, like famously West Side Highway will be under water, or Greenland will splash the sea and make a tsunami. It is interesting how incredible changes to credible and communicable.
And then, he’s forgotten. 30 years later someone sees the prediction, smiles and turns the next page.
Kind of says something about journalists, ya think?
After decades of predictions which have failed miserably, you think the guy might give the prediction game away.
Thank goodness he wasn’t around to prevent the development of the wheel.
Paul Ehrlich is a reverse Cassandra , he is always wrong, but people keep believing him.
“reverse Cassandra” – canard’s ass?
I think Canard’s ass is an inside out Cassandra.
Well, he does wear his guts on his sleeve…
Menicholas – you win.