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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Of course we are all going to die. Its just a question of when.Personal insecurity mixed with self loathing is a potent combination.The cult IMO should celebrate earth day by having themselves buried up to their necks in mother earth, I will dig them up later, honest.
I have one prediction to make – knuckleheads like Paul Ehrlich and the others quoted above will continue to make dire predictions of the future of the planet, all of which predictions will prove to be incredibly stupid, wrong, and ultimately the fodder for humorists.
“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
This “classic” quotation does reflect the published scientific concensus on climate change at this point.
According to this survey study, most studies during the 70s on the climate (42 to 7) predicted eventual warming.
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
On computer models, a quote:
“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
— Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
’nuff said 🙂
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???”
Gareth Says
It’s also Mayday when people traditionally danced around Maypoles or rolled cheeses. Maybe Earth day commemorates how predictions get tied up and knotted creating a cheesy stink?
I was around for the first earth day handing out environmental literature in Calgary. Back then (aside from overpopulation and the presumed devastating effects of proposed SST’s) the primary concern was CAGC (cooling). It was coal fired electricity generation that was going to cause CAGC and I remember getting into arguments with fellow “environmentalists” when I proposed nuclear power as the solution.
There’s a box in my workshop filled with 40 year old books with all the doom an gloom predictions of how the world was going to end before 1980 which I might just dig up to see how spectacularly wrong people like Paul Ehrlich were. My environmentalist phase was explicable as the enthusiam of youth and I’ve kept up things which are worthwhile doing (like composting and walking wherever I can) and ditched all of the clearly erroneous beliefs I can’t believe I temporarily had. “EnvironMentalism” is profoundly anti-technologic and pessimistic and an extreme example of uniformitarianism where there is the inexplicable belief that nature is either unchanging or changes incredibly slowly. Uniformitarianism posits that any rapid changes must be as a result of human interference with nature while studiously ignoring such events such as ice ages and the sudden drainage of lake Agasiz following the last ice age. Climate, being chaotic, is changing on all time scales and the only way of dealing with the changes is human ingenuity.
15 years ago I believed that increased CO2 would cause global warming, but being the curious type, I went to the scientific literature and discovered that the evidence supporting that hypothesis just wasn’t there. The CAGW cult has convinced me that there seems to be a fundamental religious impulse in people and, once many people go away from conventional religions, they are replaced by something else. This would be fascinating if the potential effects of this mass delusion weren’t so devastating. What is needed is someone like Ron Hubbard to craft a pro-technologic religion which will be widely appealing to counter the CAGW religion. It would be interesting to see what fraction of the population can be convinced to change their mind when presented with scientific evidence. My guess is that this is a minority of the population and that non-rational techniques will be necessary to convince those people who fervently believe that CAGW is real.
Harold Pierce Jr says:
April 22, 2011 at 4:40 pm
In Canada we have about 5 trillion acres of unpopulated land. In super-natural, beautiful British Columbia, “The Best Place on Earth”, we have 250 milllion acres of unpopulated land. And in Vancouver (aka Lotus Land), there are no mosquitos in the summertime!
Come one! Come all!
I’d love to, except that, as a retired former railway engineer, you probably wouldn’t have me. Sigh – the virtues of the many are outweighed by the vices of the few.
At least I’ve never written any soft core porn though so maybe that would count in my favour.
I think you forgot the Prince of Wales who stated in a speech about a year ago that we have 96 days to save the planet. Unfortunately he did not say which planet.
John Marshall says:
April 23, 2011 at 3:02 am
“I think you forgot the Prince of Wales who stated in a speech about a year ago that we have 96 days to save the planet. Unfortunately he did not say which planet.”
I remembered it and checked yesterday – it was about 2 years ago and Charles said “100 months” so we still have about 76 months left.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says:
April 23, 2011 at 1:56 am
“What is needed is someone like Ron Hubbard to craft a pro-technologic religion which will be widely appealing to counter the CAGW religion”
The thing that comes closest to this would be the singularitarians; see http://www.kurzweilai.net or singularityhub or the SF novels by Vernor Vinge.
Take a good mind, add a college education and lots of that 70’s weed and what do you get? A permanently altered mental state characterized by a mild delusional psychosis of the secondary type, evidenced by meticulously thought out paranoid scenarios, coupled with a holier than thou personality.
Best,
J.
Sonicfrog says:
April 22, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Ideally, there should be dates posted on when each comment was said.
The date was stated in the first sentence:
Via iHateTheMedia, here are a few of the predictions made on the first Earth Day.
Granted the actual year was not stated, but it was 1970.
The local newspaper (The Columbus Dispatch) publishes a weekly environmental column called “Earthweek: Diary of a Planet,” despite its assertion that it has no bias in the arena of climate change. This week’s column starts off with the following:
“The world as we know it is likely to end within 30 years, and human civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving until 2100 without being hit by a manmade catastrophe, according to two of the world’s most-respected scientists.”
The scientists were the U.K.’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and Astronomer Royal for Scotland John Brown. Rees argues that climate change and overpopulation are the world’s leading manmade perils. Brown cautions that the Earth is overdue for a catastrophic impact with an asteroid.
While I have no quibble with the asteroid scenario (what could mankind possibly do to prevent it anyway?), I have to ask why an astronomer is weighing in on climate change and overpopulation. If Reeshad publicly denied the theory of AGW, the environmentalist crowd would have immediately attacked his credentials.
There is a saying that if they’d had computer models in 1846 they would have predicting that by the year 2000 we’d be ten feet deep in horse sh*t…
Well – let’s face it – that’s come true…!
It is this wretched doom mongering that is my real gripe about the global warmers and environmentalists generally. There are plenty of sensible things to be said and improvements in the way we live our lives and to cut down pollution etc, but this sort of doom laden garbage just turns me off. I agree with the comments that these people really enjoy predicting disaster – a feature of most environmentalists who seem to dislike human beings. Years ago, on British television there was a series called Doomwatch, an environmental fictional programme. You could tell the authors really relished the sorts of disasters they imagined. Especially when there was heavy loss of life.
When these people are interviewed now, they either insist that the disaster is still right around the corner, deny they said it, or change the subject. Such prognosticators can never never admit they were wrong.
In 1968 at a young age, we remember reading Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday screed entitled “The Population Bomb.” Then and now, the whole thing reeked of communo-fascist special-pleading: Only a Maximum Leader bestriding a totalitarian Central State can save us from ourselves.
I and my enlightened colleagues (says Ehrlich) will show the way if you but heed my message, akin to Biblical prophesy. If not– a pox on you and yours! May Gaia strike you dead, O Infidel.
Amazingly, Ehrlich and his Leninist Earth Day composters are with us yet. Faugh!
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Kenneth Watt.
These predictions by biologists are actually wishfull thinking out loud. If Kenneth Watt is still alive, what an interesting interview he would give – but then the MSM doesn’t do this sort of thing.
“What is needed is someone like Ron Hubbard to craft a pro-technologic religion which will be widely appealing to counter the CAGW religion”
In Canada (and likely the US) the Church of Scientology had itself declared a religion and thereby escapes taxation. Apply this principle in a widespread fashion to allow the average Joe and Jane to escape taxation by joining and you would have a fairly successful membership drive.
A real bonus in all this is that in the US at least, churches do not have to submit financial disclosure statements. In theory you could form churches as tax free real-estate investments. Contributions to the church are tax-deductible by the congregation, and the church can then use these funds to buy land as investments. The property then becomes tax free and income from the land can be used by the church to care for the congregation.
DirkH says:
April 23, 2011 at 4:49 am
John Marshall says:
April 23, 2011 at 3:02 am
“I think you forgot the Prince of Wales who stated in a speech about a year ago that we have 96 days to save the planet. Unfortunately he did not say which planet.”
I remembered it and checked yesterday – it was about 2 years ago and Charles said “100 months” so we still have about 76 months left.
So? JM’s comment is the appropriate one here; mad Charlie didn’t mention which planet. And as almost all of we Brits know, he is one of the most deranged public figures we have to put up with.
I congratulate our Queen on her 85th birthday and hope that she stays around long enough to stop her intellectually challenged son from ever succeeding to the throne. That would definitely be a disaster.
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Kenneth Watt.
Luckily we started producing CO2 which warmed up the planet and helped fertilize food crops, which increased the food supply and largely ended the famines that were common in the past.
Fearful that without famine to keep population numbers in check, that civilization will truly end this time, scientist and politicians around the globe are working tirelessly to find ways to reduce CO2.
The predictions may be right, but the timing predicted is a bit too premature. However the nature has shown some symptoms of resilience so we might be able to cheat some disasters
I have a premise that this sort of doom-and-gloom prediction goes hand in hand with the use of so-called “mind expanding drugs,” ranging from marijuana through LSD.
Ordinary wisdom, knowledge and even spiritual progress comes from mental effort leading to small insights, which the mind strings together into larger and larger insights, and even inspirations. Much hard work is involved.
“Mind expanding drugs” create the sensation of insights and inspirations occurring without effort, however they are notorious for leaving people unable to recall the insights they had. (If one writes the insight down, one often rereads the statement later, and can’t see what was so insightful, for one reads something apparently inane, such as, “the sky is blue.”)
It was for this reason Tim Leary stated, “If you remember the nineteen-sixties, you weren’t there.”
The long term effect of this amnesia is that one is less able to learn. One cannot string together the larger insights the mind makes of small insights. Therefore one is faced with the depressing (and highly subjective) conclusion, “There is no answer.”
It is the people who believe “there is no answer” to our problems who propose the most drastic and deadly “answers,” such as “reducing world population to a half billion.” They do it because their minds are darkened, and they really and truly are filled by despair by the “lack of any answer,” which is all their burned-out brain cells can manage, in their unenlightened state.
There is likely a correlation between the use of anti-depressants during middle age, and the use of large quantities of marijuana and other “mind expanding drugs,” during ones youth.
I’ve watched a lot of friends, (who started out far more brilliant than me,) gradually become more and more depressed and stupid, over the past fifty years, claiming “marijuana is harmless” every step of the way. Now it is difficult to have a coherent conversation with many of them.
Therefore I conclude my premise: Drugs don’t expand the mind. Rather than inspiration, drugs lead to despair.
“Caleb says:
April 23, 2011 at 11:55 am
I have a premise that this sort of doom-and-gloom prediction goes hand in hand with the use of so-called “mind expanding drugs,” ranging from marijuana through LSD.”
I tend to agree with you. See my earlier post, albeit a lot shorter than yours. The weed generation, those that stuck with it, are on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
They think drug use lead to enlightenment. Carl Sagan included. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an impaired state, where “connections” spontaneously come to mind without going through rigorous mental or academic tests. It is a sad state because I believe the damage is permanent – I’ve seen it in some of my friends. They just don’t know it because they are able to function at relatively high levels of performance. But they are forever hindered by a mild psychosis that instills paranoia and because of this feeling of “enlightenment” they also have a superior attitude that permeates their personalities.
This is my hypothesis and I’m sticking with it :).
Best,
J.
Jose Suro says:
April 23, 2011 at 5:16 pm
“But they are forever hindered by a mild psychosis that instills paranoia and because of this feeling of “enlightenment” they also have a superior attitude that permeates their personalities. ”
Hmmm…. the brain produces its own cannabinoids… and paranoia is a known side-effect of caffeine…