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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Based on predictions in the 1950’s there would be no more American Bald Eagles by 1980, so would someone please tell any of the 4 nesting pairs of “imposter birds” to quit dive bombing the open field just to the west, and scaring the crap out of the neighbor’s dog.
Mark, in my neck of the woods the local control freaks fantasize about culling some of the Bald Eagles because they’re eating “too many” puffins, and because they’re disturbing the nesting Common Murres.
I just wish Bald Eagles fed on control freaks. That would solve so many problems.
Let’s not mix-up environmental success stories with failed Earth Day predictions.
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/eagle/recovery/qandas.html
http://www.fws.gov/endangered/what-we-do/peregrine-falcon.html
Not mixing them up, just pointing to the notion that when humans are confronted with real issues, (as in the toxicity of DDT), they usually come up with real solutions
Mark from the Midwest commented: “… just pointing to the notion that when humans are confronted with real issues, (as in the toxicity of DDT), they usually come up with real solutions.”
Curious what you think the “real solution” involving DDT was?
to MarkL
Diazinon, when used correctly, is surprisingly safe, it has a short half life, and no measurable effect with dermal exposure. It was banned for residential use in the U.S. in large part based on a few studies involving direct, and substantial oral administration to monkeys and rats. Problem is that most people in the U.S. don’t know how to read and follow directions. I’d guess, (no data), that the diseases spread by cockroaches do more damage to humans than diazinon has.
The newer class of neonicatinoid insecticides are more effective and have less mammalian and bird toxicity than any of the old organphosphates.
Happy Human Achievement Day, everybody!
Thanks, I’m celebrating with a frosty cold adult beverage right now!
It has been snowing and too cold to enjoy a cold adult beverage here.
I will not see earth day I will be under our bed
“I will be under our bed” … Hmmmmmm. Doing what I wonder. 🙂
I didn’t see earth day either. But, I was on top of my bed doing…Hmmmmmmm.
Meditating?
Well, it was certainly relaxing. I fell asleep afterwards.
Once again, it’s not about temperature or truth. Learned useful idiots will always be available to inflate their ego with a dire prediction about catastrophe. More useful idiots will be available to propagate those predictions and give them false validity. This goes on ad infinitum until the people realize the emperor has no clothes on. I’m betting the people will figure it out before they lose control of their destiny. England just lost their last aluminum smelter and has become a 100% aluminum importer due to Green machine needing to be appeased. The target is industry and capitalism, not temperature.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have missed a big opportunity to study these types of people for too long. There has to be some mental or nurturist commonality between these people just like there often is among serial killers. Seriously, there has to be some cause for people that don’t appear to have a major mental disorder to spout such nonsense. Perhaps the only commonality is “incentives” from wealthy donors, but I would sure like to know what is going on inside these alarmist’s heads.
But the psychologists are crazy….https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200909/why-shrinks-have-problems
Not as crazy as their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
DSM: PSYCHIATRY’S DEADLIEST SCAM
Thanks. Your lead gives me the chance to repeat one of my favorite quotations:
Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung in 1909 upon their arrival in NYC aboard the George Washington for a series of lectures at Clark Univ.
http://chronicle.com/article/Freuds-Visit-to-Clark-U/48424/
Fitting on Earth Day. But Earth Day was largely about acting on environmental pollution, which North America and Europe have by and large done. The first Earth Day was 1970. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland. That won’t happen again. So the larger analogy to CAGW is imperfect.
It is equally easy to go into the 1990’s (the IPCC FAR and TAR, UNFCCC founding era) and find equally ridiculous specific predictions concerning time frames for CAGW that have not panned out. Essay False Alarms has a few gems. Enough to make the point about specifically failed climate alarmism.
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
How is this a failed prediction? Since 1970 there have been three major famines in Cambodia, N. Korea and Ethiopia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine).
Currently ~11% of the world’s population is undernurished. Hunger is the main cause of death in 45% of children under 5 (3.1 million/yr) (http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats).
Furthermore, predictions on air pollution have not necessarily come to fruition because of concerted efforts to curb NOx, SOx, CFC’s and particulates through environmental regulations. Had these not been enacted, the predictions would surely have come true (e.g. see present-day China where regs are lax/non-existent).
And had these actions not been economically or politically viable the concerted efforts would not have been made. As they haven’t (yet) in China or India. But they will be.
The errors were in assuming that the actions wouldn’t be made at the right time for the societies in question and that the same is not still happening.
Environmentalists are out of step with best practise by definition.
“How is this a failed prediction…”
All famine you listed, is due to politics. Something that will only get worse as the watermeolons get more power.
KIT: I worked in Ethiopia during the “famine”. There was lots of food. Ethiopia can feed double it’s current population. The problem was civil war and inability to transport food by truck as is often the case. So western countries flew food in over the fighting factions. The Rift Valley in Ethiopia is amazingly fertile.
The Clean Air Act in the US pre-dated Earth Day by 7 years. Earth Day can hardly have influenced the drive to cut real pollution in the US since it was already well underway.
Quite right. Earth Day should be seen as evidence that the successful environmental movement was/is being hijacked by watermelons.
B.L.,
You might like to read this post, and comments — mine at 2:21.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/12/24/increase-in-uk-temperatures-largely-due-to-increase-in-sunshine-hours-caused-by-reduced-pollution/
Comment after mine by ‘saveenergy’ links to more old photos.
If you are worried about mass starvation, worry about the regime of irredeemable currency imploding, thereby destroying the world’s payment system and leveling multilateral trade to primitive barter. That would be a global catastrophe of the first order.
Kit Carruthers
Gee. Those “famines” were caused BY the communists running the socialist societies and failed government policies that Earth
Day enables and celebrates! Not to mention the 1.5 million Cambodian deliberately and directly killed BY the communists Earth Day celebrates and was invented and promoted by. Nor the 50 million Chinese killed by the communists Earth Day celebrates.
See, the “air pollution” over China is a Communist-produced mess, deliberately produced as they deliberately pursue money and power by using their people as near-slaves in a society run by generals and bureaucrats FOR generals and bureaucrats. Even given the pollution problems, the rise in their economy between 1995 and 2015 outweighs the deaths that Mao imposed over his sadistic and deadly reign. They can recover from air pollution. Given power and low energy costs, perhaps they will.
If the poor countries had a moral, ethical governments – and NONE do! – and a moral base in their citizens who did not steal and cheat, and enough energy and resources to sell honestly – instead of through corrupt reigns that cut and lie and steal and over-charge for what poor services are delivered late and with no reliability … THEN you would see famine deaths go down immediately.
But the leaders and tribes in each poor country and in every communist country and in many socialist countries are not honest, ethical nor moral.
Well said.
At the time, US Leftists tried to blame the Ethiopian famine on colonialism rather than Communism, 42 years after the brief Italian colonization (1936–41) ended. The Communist Derg were wholly to blame.
Same in Cambodia & N. Korea. Surprised Kit didn’t make that obvious connection.
Besides which, those government-made famines clearly were not “everywhere” except for the regions my former prof Ehrlich predicted.
The “Kit” Carruthers all come in a kit.
“…Currently ~11% of the world’s population is undernurished. Hunger is the main cause of death in 45% of children under 5 (3.1 million/yr) (http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)…”
Look around. Figures I saw for the “developing world” went from 37% in 1970 to less than half that by 2005 – despite a growing population that was supposed make things worse. How exactly are improving conditions with drastically-reduced undernurishment consistent with that prediction?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_malnutrition
Here we drop from 19% globally in 1990-1992 to your current 11% of 2012-2014
http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/
The overpopulation-based predictions of mass starvation were not contingent on anything but population growth. They’ve had predicted that we would not be able to produce enough food to feed everyone. Clearly those predictions are false.
Any starvation that had happened is not due to general lack of food – it is due to politics.
I’ve especially enjoyed your mentioning of N. Korea and Pol Pot’s regimes in Cambodia – it’s like you trying to say that homicidal dictatorships that practice mass murders of it’s citizens are caused by overpopulation.
If your annual gross receipts from all sources equate to $34,000US per year; (that includes all handouts), you are one of the world’s elite 1%ers.
I hate to even tell you all of the goodies that anyone living below he “poverty line” in the USA has. Well more accurately , a very significant majority of them do.
75% own a VCR even, and more than that own a microwave oven.
Most of the people living below the government mandated poverty line in the USA, are among the world lite 1%ers.
I’m reminded, by your post, of a piece by Willis a bit back in which he wrote of giving and expressed how much we really have to give relative to actual worldwide poverty.
My wife visits homes of poor to deliver health care (in US). They all have cable and big flat screens – much more than we have, not that I want or need it.
Regarding the statement that present-day China has lax or non-existent ‘regs’:
As a technical advisor to one of their standards committees I beg to differ. China has at a very high level made the necessary policy decisions to transform the situation that has prevailed for decades. Not only are the standards needed in many industries already in place the initiative proceeds as a policy of the government, not in spite of it. They do not need rescuing by others. Consider how different that is compared with other countries. I know it is easy to take cheap shots at developing countries but it is worth considering that normal people inhabit all of them. Like India, they plan to deliver a decent life to everyone according to their abilities. As you can well imagine, they carry little truck with the mindless scares that pervade Western cultures that seek to have everyone live in a state of perpetual guilt over something. Relax.
Back in 1970, no one really took these fools seriously (except Ehrlich who turned out to be fabulously wrong!). The problem is, today, these fanatics like CNN’s John Sutter are actually given a big stage and with the zeal of an academy award winner – Alinski-ize the airwaves will false alarmism.
They have NO facts, it’s all about the non existent “consensus”. Sutter said such tripe as, “The science is settled” and “Everyone agrees”.
This is why the left needs to be shamed and exposed. They have NO evidence (MODELS DON’T CONSTITUTE EVIDENCE).
All the stats show, fewer hurricanes, fewer tornadoes and a world average temperature that hasn’t budged in almost 19 years.
When will this farce end?
Scott April 22, 2015 at 2:44 pm
Back in 1970, no one really took these fools seriously…
I disagree. The modern environmental movement in the USA began in the 1960s as the Baby Boomer generation began to come of age. We had already seen and experienced the real and obvious air and water pollution of the 50s, and we could also see big improvements in the environment by 1970 as a result of legislation, and changing attitudes.
It was a different time, a different place, and I guess you really had to be there.
It was only later – I think – that the environmental movement was hijacked by those promoting sustainability, Gaia, CAGW, CO₂ & coal demonization, and all the rest of the Green Agenda.
The real environmentalists of my day are a different breed of cat than those fakers parading around in green tinsel today. We had songs like this, if you can handle goosebumps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BRqA3DSmpc
The Green Leaves of Summer,
music by Dimitri Tiomkin, from the movie The Alamo
performed by the Brothers Four
You weren’t kidding about goosebumps – thank you very much for posting that – that age of music is sorely missed.
not only goosebumps, thanks.
The only good thing about these Earth Days are the sales some companies put on. I just loaded up with a 6 month supply of hemp hearts (shelled seeds) for about half of what I would normally pay at Costco (best deal around normal days).
Aside from that just queue George Carlin and “Save the Planet? Who are we kidding? We haven’t even learned to take care of one another and we’re going to save the planet?”!
Hemp hearts?
Earth Day is just a euphemism for Humans Are Evil Day.
Max Photon on April 22, 2015 at 2:58 pm
– – – – –
Max Photon,
That is an important critical point on interpreting Earth Day.
I think a little differently about what the premise underlying the intellectual basis of Earth Day is. My view is:
‘Earth’ Day is just a euphemism for ‘Privately Funded Human Achievement that Harnesses Nature is Evil’ Day
John
Phony-environmentalist’s Day maybe ….
…. where the guilt-ridden can absolve their guilt by giving money to somebody.
Why Australia?
Surely Oz should be in famine? No?
Oh, this is about poverty. Agreed.
Fight poverty.
Let climate change sort itself out when we have the luxury to do so.
To celebrate my Earth Day, I bought a 6500# diesel BMW X5 xDrive 35d 4×4
Nice ride, it sets you up perfectly to drive 90 mph during the upcoming 2nd little ice age
any carbon credits with that?
Now hood-mount a .50 BMG with infra-Green motion sensors and you’ve got yourself one sweet ride!
“…mount a .50 BMG”
Yikes, why waste expensive ammo on Greenies.
Dillon Aero makes a really cool mini-gun in 5.56. Only trouble is that the empties will scratch the finish on your Chevy!
https://youtu.be/7Nug5FZgxuk
To be fair the air pollution deaths claim is a woefully low estimate according to the World health organisation.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/
Whether or not this has increased or decreased over the last 50 years I don’t know, but i expect as air pollution has risen recently in the highly populated asian countries this figure has also risen significantly.
There are some serious environmental issue hidden under the CO2 rhetoric which should be tarred with the same brush.
London had a dark soot cloud over it much of the 19th century, as well as raw sewage running in the gutters. The improvements in urban air and water quality over the last 100 years are nothing short of technological miracles. Many of the air pollution problems in China involve political choices, not technological or economic necessity
This is the same WHO that used death by car accidents and murders in their US life expectancy calculations. I wouldn’t trust a word they say.
Air pollutions deaths would be reduced greatly by cheap energy (aka coal powered electricity)… large percentages of the people of Earth use dung/wood fuel for heating and cooking… The pollutants where you live (even in the West) are more dangerous than what’s outside…
Question : The fifth or do one down where ” most demographers agree”
Was that also a 97% consensus?
dates for each quote would have been helpful
2005: ABC Australia: Tim Flannery warns on global warming
TIM FLANNERY: Eastern Australia’s the area where el Nino reigns supreme, of course, and it was the land of drought and flooding rain. But since 1998 particularly, we’ve seen just drought, drought, drought, and particularly regions like Sydney and the Warragamba catchment – if you look at the Warragamba catchment figures, since ’98, the water has been in virtual freefall, and they’ve got about two years of supply left, but something will need to change in order to see the catchment start accumulating water again.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1389827.htm
22 April 2015: Warragamba Dam Level : 86.5%.
never mind. for ABC & Flannery, there’s a new CAGW meme in place now:
22 April 2015: ABC Lateline: Interview: Tim Flannery
TONY JONES: Well it’s the biggest storm to hit Sydney and other parts of NSW in a decade. So are we likely to see more extreme weather events like this in the future, as many climate scientists have argued?…
TONY JONES: Yes. I mean, you know your own critics essentially make the argument that these huge kind of storms, these huge dumps of rain put the lie to the idea that it’s going to get drier in Australia.
TIM FLANNERY: Well that’s right. Every time it rains I seem to cop it from someone about this sort of thing. But the fact is it’s going to rain in the future. We’ll have intense storms in the future. But what I was talking about a decade ago and what continues to be absolutely true today is that south-eastern Australia overall is losing rainfall, it’s starting to dry out, there’s a drying trend which is strongly tied to the influence of greenhouse gases…
TONY JONES: Well what do you think of Bjorn Lomborg’s qualifications?…
***TIM FLANNERY: I’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of him. Every sentence that we engage with, the ground seems to shift. But, look, he’s – my understanding is he’s – his basic degree is in politics…
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4221859.htm
Meanwhile, it is already the 23rd April here so St George’s Day. Wishing a happy day to all English and English-at-Heart! Well, wishing a happy day to all and gratitude for the good things we have owing to coal and oil. May the developing countries soon receive similar benefits and not be held back by Greenie fundamentalists.
I can’t get over Tim Flannery’s hypocrisy…talk about pot and kettle. Is he not the extinct wombat ‘expert’?
Anything coming out of government, the mainstream media or any government agency, is a complete deception. TPTB believe they can “manage” people when in fact people only respond positively to true leadership.
The first one failed. Let’s try again. http://www.mbio.ncsu.edu/jwb/PrimordialSoup.jpeg
Just tried to post this at DeSmog.blog :
Instead of focusing on the “deniers”, lets look at the predictions of the “realists” from the first “Earth Day” 35 years ago:
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
and our favorite apostle Ehrlich:
“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
I guess, we are all dead now!
I got this:
We are unable to post your comment because you have been blocked by DeSmogBlog. Find out more.
LOL
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned Ira Einhorn in relation to Earth Day. He claimed to have conceived it. Other promoters, however, insist it was originated by Senator Gaylord Nelson.
In any case it might be difficult to entirely extricate the name Ira Einhorn from Earth Day. His name is certainly worth a Google search – quite a twisted and despicable character.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/tag/predictions-that-failed/
andthentheresphyzuki
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/dan-gardner-the-essential-error-of-david-suzuki
Imagination is in very short supply, residing in a few percent of the population. All these failures are the same. They don’t take into consideration technology and the genius of the few percent who are problem solvers in this world. They are preselected in their education and all avoid technology as a discipline. This is why it is difficult to recruit engineers into the Kumbaya throng.
The diplomas of doom mongers give them the appearance of experts on biosphere affairs, but, by excluding (not deliberately, but unwittingly) the dynamism of human intelligence from their purview, their universe is static and passive. They have studied animals and plants that behave predictably the same. Oh, if I want to know how many tigers there are in the forest, I will call on them. They will collect the poops and all the other things they do and will give me a fairly reliable picture of the tiger’s numbers, situation, health, diet,….But, how can this give them expertise greater than that of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker to give us a prediction of famines, burial in horse manure, pollution, the climate, etc., etc.
They are simplistically thinking and guessing mainly from misanthropic, hopeful, freshly pink, naive and unused minds. The few percent, who have the vast panorama including human ingenuity in their purview, know how foolish it is to try to predict such things. One can use the making of prognostications as a filter to categorize such types. It is AXIOMATIC THAT PREDICTIONS FROM DOOMSTERS HAVE NOT AND, I WOULD SAY CANNOT COME TRUE because of the missing overpowering dynamic ingenuity factor in their thinking. Unconstrained by this first order principal component, their thoughts (and heartfelt concerns) soar through the roof of reality.
Well, since Earth Day is nothing more than Communism Day, and since communism — being anti-capitalism or anti-production — is only adept at destruction, I thought it would be fun to counter with this enjoyable list of:
Ten Amazing Inventions from Ancient Times
http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/ten-amazing-inventions-ancient-times-001539
If there is one common theme that all of those quoted doom-loons above miss, it’s that human inventiveness is indefatigable.
(Feel free to add other great ancient inventions to the list!)
Max,
May I ask where in the Pacific NW is your AO, not in precise grid coordinates, but let’s say, major river drainage? Thanks, either way.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/5-amazing-ancient-egyptian-inventions.htm
I don’t have a .50 cal. BMG, but my brother used to have two .30 cal. water-cooled BMGs.
Cannon Beach
Holy Roosevelt Elk!
My childhood stomping grounds. Boy, has it ever changed since the ’50s.
My grandfather built the seawall at Seaside. He & my grandmother are buried at Warrenton.
I’m in Umatilla County now, but spend half the year in Chile. Used to have a 900 yard shooting range, where my other brother tested machine guns for Janes defense publications, but sold the ranch in 2000. Same brother who recently sold his beach houses at Waldport (rental) & Yachats (cottage), along with one on Kauai.
Sorry I can’t invite you to the formerly annual Buffalo Wallow Freedom Shoot, as it was discontinued for lack of range. But my Afghan war buddies & I still get in some gunning & blasting at our reunions in the greater PDX area.
It’s still pretty sweet. 95% of the time I get to surf completely alone, which is a $%#@ur momisugly! DREAM!
As for the elk, during certain times of the year they bed down right outside my door. A few times I’ve had a protective bull at the bottom of my steps not let me even leave my place.
Thanks for the would-have-been invitation. I’ll just have to make do …
let us know when the surf is good, gunneys
Lived in Eugene for a bit late 70s and early 80s and fished for steelies up and down central and southern coasts – Alsea to the Rogue – good memories
@ur momisugly Max,
Looks like she has something in her sights, it looks like revenge.
Bubba,
I used to fish offshore for salmon in the San Francisco area. Those shiny monsters would weigh in at 40-50 lbs! I don’t fish anymore; those are just happy memories of death-defying adventures with a great friend.
Now… my brother-in-law … (who lives on the same property as I) … he LIVES for fishing around here. That and bees. He loves bees. Fishing and bees. And maybe a wee whiskey by the fire at the end of it all. Talk about wholesome simple pleasures.
BTW, that’s Pamela … (on the right).
The second Amendment protects the first Amendment here in the USA. If not for that, the progressives would have already taken away our right to call them liars here on WUWT.
Hear hear!
I have a friend in town who owns Cannon Beach Guns. In this liberal infested place, the dude gets plenty of grief. But every single time I see him I thank him for the awesome public service he provides.
A right not exercised is a right forfeited.
Max, is that you – on the left? I can’t make out if you are short, or that gun is big. We need more photos to be sure.
Does she have a consealed weapon license?
[Only if prisoners wrapped up the Fedex package that sent the weapon. .mod]
I see your friend in the photo enjoys plinking.
Salmon fishing in Chile is like the good old days in the PNW. The first day I went Columbia River Chinook salmon fishing in the Rio Puelo, the three of us caught six fish in three hours. Or maybe it was three fish in six hours. But they were big, the smallest 32# & the biggest 40#. But two novice female fishers did better, with a 45#er & 50#er as the first salmon (or fish) they had ever caught.
Chile farms all the species of North Pacific salmon except Chinook, which grow too slowly. They threw them out & the fish went whoopee! They’ve invaded all the rivers of southern Chile, rounded the Cape & are now blessing Argentine Patagonia with their presence. In Chile, the most northerly river system they’ve occupied is the Imperial, the mouth of which lies at 39′ 45″ S, near Isla Mocha, where the inspiration for Moby Dick, Mocha Dick, hung out. Its main tributary flows past the city of Temuco, so in terms of fishing, it’s like living in Portland, c. 1915 or even earlier.
Some environmentalists worry that the aggressive monsters will eat all the unimpressive indigenous river & coastal fish, but this doesn’t seem to be happening.
The same lures that work on them in the Columbia do the trick in Chile. My buddy who lives on the Rio Tolten, downstream Lake Villarrica, under the volcano of the same name, recently eruptive, would never let me fish his river again if he knew I blabbed. The salmon don’t go up the Tolten above its confluence with the cool Allipen, up which they go to spawn, but the upper Tolten and the lake are home to many trout.
Chile is about at the same level of development as Oregon in the 1950s or ’60s. Their new “interstate” is named Ruta Cinco in honor of I-5, but it’s a tollway, not a freeway.
Invasive chinook. That’s amazing. I’d rather have that than asian carp.
Chinook are amazing fish … (especially with a reduced shallot / butter / white wine / tarragon sauce 🙂
Te invasiveness of Chinook is truly amazing & needs to be seen to be appreciated.
The.
Sorry for commenting under the influence,
Max
Additional magnificent ancient invention: fire (you know, the oxidizing carbon kind).
Ah fire … remember how much fun playing with fire was as a kid? I grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii in a very rural place, and my parents had no problem with my little buddy and I working for days to amass fuel for some serious infernos.
I used to love to dive for fishing lead weights, put them in coffee cans, and melt them in the bonfires. Then I’d have these awesome circular lead blocks. (No wonder my IQ is about 65.)
Fire is just as magical now as it was then.
Max Photon April 22, 2015 at 7:21 pm
What years were those Max? I used to fish for salmon on early morning party boats out of Sausalito for 10 years. The biggest salmon I ever caught was 27 pounds. Confounding statistics, it was also the first salmon I ever caught. Biggest after that was probably a 17-pounder.
Oh and yeah, it’s Earth Day sorry, I forgot we’re all going to die …. waaaah.
I did most of my salmon fishing from about 1986-1994.
A friend and I used to take an 11-foot Boston Whaler (sic!) out the Gate and fish anywhere from Duxbury Reef to the Farallones. We also fished off of Pt. Reyes by way of Tomales Bay; we’d camp at Hog Island for up to a couple of weeks at a time. (Gosh that was fun!)
Other boats were forever coming to rescue us, thinking that our ‘real’ boat had sunk and that we were in the lifeboat.
We eventually graduated to a 17-foot Whaler, but the really fun memories are with the 11-footer.
Oh to be young and stupid(er).
You can go to the earth day site (I would be completely remiss including the link here) and sign the petition to:
For those here expressing “when will this madness end”, I offer a little (really very, very little) sense of progress:
I am the Mayor of my little town of 500 people – (hard to believe, I know)
Yup, I’m the “local leader” but to be clear, this is a voluntary position with zero power and less authority but decent internet connection and is awarded annually to someone showing up late to Town Meeting – not that I’m above using my position –
This banner is over my office doorway: “Carbon is the basis of life on Earth” and I require all appointments be made on my official Calendar by Josh. Hey, they let me set policy. Get ‘em with every little thing.
Bully for you, Bubba!
Paul Ehrlich deserves a day devoted to recalling his lies, false prophecies and hype. The world should long remember and ponder how a proven phony has been able to avoid any accountability through so many decades of being wrong.
I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve had Paul Ehrlich’s BS shoved in my face by environmental dooms-dayers over the decades. Oh to have a time machine to be able to go back and slap every single idiot’s head. Does anybody have one I can borrow?
not sure, but
he was interviewed on Alternative Radio – that I listened to in Bozeman Mt last summer while I was fishing Yellowstone and surrounds – say early Sept – right around labor day. He was spinning the usual.
Should be some transcript. I’ll look, too.
Best,
da Bub