Via iHateTheMedia, here are a few of the predictions made on the first Earth Day. Don’t these sound like the predictions today that fail, like the 50 million climate refugees by 2010 followed by the moving of the goalposts to 2020?
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
and this classic:
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
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Ideally, there should be dates posted on when each comment was said.
in 1964 i was driving from wells nevada to los angeles and as i went by the sign that said “next gas station 80 miles” the ecologists on the radio were screaming that at the current rate of construction we would pave over the entire United States in 12 years.
i looked to the left and there was nothing but snow and brush for about 100 miles, i looked to the right and the same thing was evident.
it is now ~ 46 years later and it hasn’t happened yet.
for those who beg to differ consult google satellite maps.
C
‘Greens’ have a distorted world view. All their analyses are based on the imaginary world which they think exists and not on the real world which does exist. So, their predictions are not merely wrong but are usually the opposite of what is likely to occur in the real world.
I keep telling people to believe the exact opposite of anything a ‘green’ says. Sometimes, very rarely, believing that exact opposite will prove to be wrong, but this is more than compensated by the many, many times it proves to be right.
Richard
The Golden Hansen Award Winners are……
The Suzuki No-Foundation Prize for this year is…..
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Brown-Fifty-days–to.5747301.jp
Is nice to have an historical perspective of their hysterical precedence.
The end has been nigh for 40 years and nothing has happened…….. loons.
The term for Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, James Hansen, latterly Keith Farnish et al. is “Thanatist”– more than mere doom-sayers, they “love death more than life.” Viewing humanity as “a mass of seething maggots” (Holdren, 1974), they abominate Norman Borlaug’s seminal Green Revolution which refuted Malthusian catastrophism root-and-branch; sabotage coal, oil, nuclear energy economies by vicious Luddite means; espouse centralized Statist apparats with the explicit goal of physically exterminating “excess” global populations.
“Earth Day,” declared by a convicted murderer on Vladimir Ulyanov aka Lenin’s birthday to compete with Easter Sunday, celebrates not Light and Life but Darkness and Death. Radical extremists who embrace this evil hate peace and prosperity, hate humanity, and they want you dead.
These people should all be contacted (those that survived the famines that is) for comments on the statements they made 40 years ago and for explanations of what steps were taken that avoided these tragic predictions.
Anthony, you might add the date of the first earth day…
…I think it was 1970??
dunno
REPLY: But you can’t use Google?
In telling stories these are called whoppers.
We had the good sense to ignore those predictions then. I wonder where logic and common sense have gone since 1970.
Is it due to a belief in the infallibility of computers? Most people have no idea how computers work, or that they can be made to spit out anything the programmers want them to. The computer models, as complex as they are, are only a reflection of the beliefs and misconceptions of the people writing the code, but I think that fact is not understood by most people, especially the most vocal alarmists who seem to be the least informed.
Too funny.
The only slack I might cut these guys is mentioned in Ken Watts’ last “prediction”. In 1970, the climate had been cooling for nearly 30 years and wheat harvests in Canada and USSR were declining, so there was at least some justification for the gloom-and-doom scenarios of mass starvation.
Fortunately, warming started at about that time (the Great Pacific Shift – or whatever it was called – PDO went positive) and humanity was saved by warming.
Oh, the Green Revolution helped a bit too.
How is it possible for the current Catastrophists to read a list like that without looking in the mirror and saying, “You know, I might be wrong.”
What are the odds that it was a coincidence that Earth day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday AND the very first celebration of Earth day coincided with Lenin’s 100th birthday?
Anybody a stat expert???
I think it would be useful to award points for people who make alarmist statements. Add them to a list that includes their name, organisation, the date of the statement, and the statement itself (and a URL).
Each week, sort the list in descending order of the number of points and publish the top 20 names (or maybe more).
The points for each alarmist statement should be reduced each month.
Paul Ehrlich: “One of the most amusing things about The Population Bomb is that is was much too optimistic a book.” (2009)
He must really be experiencing an alternate reality.
Trouble is some of the same people jump on the AGW bandwagon when it suits them…
kramer says:
April 22, 2011 at 2:36 pm
“What are the odds that it was a coincidence that Earth day is celebrated on Lenin’s birthday AND the very first celebration of Earth day coincided with Lenin’s 100th birthday?
Anybody a stat expert???”
Oh come on, it’s 1/(365*100) if we assume that the probability of declaring Earth Day is equally distributed from the birthday of Lenin to when it was declared.
DirkH says:
April 22, 2011 at 3:00 pm
“Oh come on, it’s 1/(365*100) if we assume that the probability of declaring Earth Day is equally distributed from the birthday of Lenin to when it was declared.”
To be fair, we should ask: How probable is it that any one of those meaningless celebratory days is declared on the 100th birthday of an arbitrary autocrat. To compute this, we first need the number of meaningless celebratory days; let’s use this list of UN celebratory days; it has 72 entries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_Nations_days
And we need a list of autocrats; i found this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictators
I’m too lazy too count them but it’s on the order of 100 in the time interval we’re interested in; so the probability of a Meaningless UN celebratory day declared on the 100th birthday would be
72*100/(365*100) = 72/365 = 0.197
So it’s perfectly possible that it happened by chance.
The modern environmental movement of anti-Capitalism, anti-industrialism, anti-Americanism, and anti-anything-that-improves-life-ism is constructed like a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Most over used phrase: “If present trends continue”
If NH spring time trends continue the oceans should be at a full boil by about September or October. We’re all gonna die.
I remember my computer language professor back in 1970 was excited about a population computer model. I believed it was created by the Club of Rome. It tracked five values: population, pollution, industrial growth, resources, and food. The model predicted that if we did nothing, the human population would increase to 16 billion, and we’d have a die-back of 15 billion. If we conserved our resources, then the model predicted the human population would increase to 26 billion, and we’d have a die-back of 25 billion. The only way to prevent a die-back was to roll the population back to 1 billion.
The Club of Rome is definitely at home in the global warming/environmental movement–computer models and all.
Jim
I sure hope these “experts” never start saying the future looks great. ;->
Latitude says:
April 22, 2011 at 2:21 pm
REPLY: But you can’t use Google?
==================================================
actually no, not today
Gooble has some waterfall thingy going on and it’s locking me up….
…so I decided to switch to Bing and keep it there
;-P grouchy
What happened to that ‘twenty-four (?) months to save the planet’ schtick? How’s that going?