Tomorrow, Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day 2018
By Mark J. Perry, Ph.D. writing for the American Enterprise Institute
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey.
Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “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.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “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.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “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….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “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.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “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.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “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.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “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.”
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For Earth Day…
An Ode on Climate Activism
(A Limerick)
I long was a fan of Ecology,
‘Til it became “Gaia’s Theology”.
To question the memes
Is heretical it seems,
And errant exceeding apology!
Rather than Meteorology,
These pontiffs espouse Ideology.
To shape human feeling
Is foremost their dealing;
Inducing remorse with Psychology.
Yes, the science-of-climate’s esteem
Is built on “unprecedented extreme”.
It appears the mundane
Would be ill to their gain,
As it’s lucrative for them to scream.
So, it’s up to the people to learn,
And the facts from the spin to discern.
Is the planet in harm,
Or just false alarm?
Which way will society turn?
Pops Piasa:
Your climate poems / raps
are so good they make everyone
else here seem like hack writers.
Thanks Richard, I’ll trade my writing ability for some math comprehension anyday. I am sometimes compelled to sum up my observations in poetry, and it tends to become something akin to scrabble or crossword puzzles for enjoyment. Everyone is welcome to pass them along as being from an anonymous source because this subject is about all of us, not just me.
You can’t make me read those predictions.
I guess I’ll do it though, for science and ……..prosperity or sum such.
The retrospective lunacy of these predictions is a powerful argument against the Precautionary Principle.
Jump to 1:07:30 for Bezmenov’s discussion of ideological subversion. It’s awesome.
Thank you Max for posting this – essential information.
#17 is actually coming true but not in the way Ehrlich thought. One of the major reasons rain forests are being cut down is to grow crops to make biofuels. So it turns out that their dumb ideas are what made their dire prophecy have some substance.
Will any print organs of the DNC run this story? LA Times, NY Times, WaPo, Boston Globe? Crickets… They were too busy with anti 2A and legal pot stories.
I don’t have the details to hand, but I seem to remember that Kenneth Watt is not an ecologist, and certainly not a climate scientist. He was a zoologist or entemologist. I also think he was denying global warming long after the 70s, suggesting the temperature records were wrong.
“….Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey….”.
IMHO, what many loyalists and followers of the environmental movement seem to be doing is mistaking arrogance for intelligence. One can be arrogant as heck and still engage in poor decision-making from the lack of adequate intelligence. With arrogance having been chosen as an an acceptable substitute for intelligence, the environmental movement has chosen means to its ends (wind and solar energy and the climate alarmist narrative) that have shaky scientific, engineering and economic bases and are easily questionable. When you throw politics and political ideologies into the mix, things only get worse.
When people accept arrogance as a substitute for intelligence in their leaders without knowing or realizing it, it becomes easy for the arrogant leadership to play on the fears and scientific or other illiteracy of the masses. Only the ones that are enlightened enough and have adequate literacy can see through the rhetoric and realize the errant ways that have been chosen by the arrogant leadership.
Awarding themselves a license of moral superiority and self-righteousness makes the arrogant leadership impossible to reason with. At his point, making false and misleading predictions matters not one iota. They are incapable of being wrong, especially when they are.
I don’t even want to talk about how much this has happened in human (excuse me, huperson) history.
Best analysis of this mess that I’ve seen yet, CD.
The answers are available to anyone who wants to see them, but are ignored by people who don’t want to face them.
Sounds like a solid 97% consensus.
Doom, my favorite four letter word. Consider it’s rather specialized use as rhetorical device. When things get really bad in one’s head you don’t merely cuss in man to man fashion you pronounce to one and all, “YOU’RE ALL DOOMED.” And it’s nothing at all new. It’s been going on since Moses threw down the tablets and has been taken up by preachers everywhere since. The IPCC even unashamedly refers to one of its graphs as the “burning embers” diagram. GOOD GRIEF let’s keep the devil out of this debate.
SAID HANRAHAN by John O’Brien
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
. . .
DOOMED
We seem to have plenty of “Hanrahannas” these days too
The usual CBC suspect Bob McDonald is at it again…
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/earth-s-climate-running-hot-and-cold-1.4618752
Supreme idiotic comment, since no one sane would deny climate did, does and will change. But Bobby is a journalist/proselyte and not a good writer to boot. His straw man argument shows unadulterated ignorance of atmospheric circulation. A really bad start… Ciao Bobby.
Oh man, this is brilliant! My entire life (I am 61) has been accompanied by various doomsday threats. I don’t care anymore, I lean back and listen to my old Steely Dan records and grow my own vegetables. 🙂
61!
At the prime of middle age.
Keep on trucking.
The inconvenient questions that the IPCC can’t answer.
1) Why did sea level rise faster in early 2Oth century than now and even now is not accelerating?
2) Why do only rural land temperature data sets show no warming?
3) Why did climate scientists in the climategate emails worry about no warming trends? They are supposed to be unbiased either way.
4) Why do some local temperature land based datasets show no warming Ex: Augusta Georgia for last 83 years? There must be 1000’s of other places like this.
5) Why do 10 of the 13 weather stations in Antarctica show no warming in last 60 years? The 3 that do are near undersea volcanic ridges.
6) Why does the lower troposphere satellite data of UAH show very little warming and in fact showed cooling from 1978 to 1997?
7) Why is there only a 21% increase in net atmosphere CO2 ppm since 1980 but yet mankind increased fossil fuel emissions CO2 by 75%?
8) Why did National Academy of Sciences in 1975 show warming in the 30’s and 40’s and NASA in 1998 and 2008 not show nearly as much warming for those time periods?
9) Why has no one been able to disprove Lord Monckton’s finding of the basic flaw in the climate sensitivity equations after doubling CO2?
10) Why has there never been even 1 accurate prediction by a climate model. Even if one climate model is less wrong than another one it is still wrong.
11) Why do most climate scientists not understand the difference between accuracy and precision?
12) Why have many scientists resigned from the IPCC in protest?
13) Why do many politicians, media and climate scientists continue to lie about CO2 causing extreme weather events? Every data set in the world shows there are no more extreme weather events than there ever were
14) Why do clmate scientists call skeptics deniers as if we were denying the holocaust?
!5) Why did Michael Mann refuse to hand over his data when he sued Tim Ball for defamation and why did Mann subsequently drop the suit?
16) Why have every climate scientist that has ever debated the science of global warming lost every debate that has ever occurred?
17) Why does every climate scientist now absolutely refuse to debate anymore?
18) Why do careers get ruined when scientists dare to doubt global warming in public?
19) Why do most of the scientists that retire come out against global warming?
20) Why is it next to impossible to obtain a PhD in Atmospheric science if one has doubts about global warming?
21) Why is it very very difficult to get funding for any study that casts doubt on global warming?
22) Why has the earth greened by 18% in the last 30 years?
23) Why do clmate scientists want to starve plants by limiting their access to CO2? Optimum levels are 1200 ppm not 410ppm.
24) Why do most climate scientists refuse to release their data to skeptics?
25) Why should the rest of the world ruin their economies when China and India have refused to stop increasing their emmissions of CO2 till 2030?
26) Why have the alarmist scientists like Michael Mann called Dr. Judith Curry an anti scientist?
27) Why does the IPCC not admit that under their own calculations a business as usual policy would have the CO2 levels hit 590ppm in 2100 which is exactly twice the CO2 level since 1850.?
28) Why do the climate modellers not admit that the error factor for clouds makes their models worthless?
29) Why did NASA show no increase in atmospheric water vapour for 20 years before James Hansen shut the project down in 2009?
30) Why did Ben Santer change the text to result in an opposite conclusion in the IPCC report of 1996 and did this without consulting the scientists that had made the original report?
31) Why does the IPCC say with 90% confidence that anthropogenic CO2 is causing warming when they have no evidence to back this up except computer model predictions which are coded to produce results that CO2 causes warming?
32) How can we believe climate forecasts when 4 day weather forecasts are very iffy?.
33) Why do all climate models show the tropical troposhere hotspot when no hotspot has actually been found in nature?
34) Why does the extreme range of the climate models increase as the number of runs increases on the same simulation?
35) Why is the normal greenhouse effect not observed for SST?
36) Why is SST net warming increase close to 0?
37) Why is the ocean ph level steady over the lifetime of the measurements?
38) what results has anyone ever seen from global warming if it exists? I have been waiting for it for 40 years and havent seen it yet?
39) If there were times in the past when CO2 was 20 times higher than today why wasnt there runaway global warming then?
40) Why was there a pause in the satellite data warming in the early 2000’s?
41) Why did CO2 rise after WW2 and temperatures fall?
42) For the last 10000 years over half of those years showed more warmung than today Why?
43) Why does the IPCC refuse to put an exact % on the AGW and the natural GW?
44) Why do the alarmists still say that there is a 97% consensus when everyone knows that figure was madeup?
45) The latest polls show that 33% do not believe in global warming and that figure is increasing poll by poll ? why?
46) If CO2 is supposed to cause more evaporation how can there ever be more droughts with CO2 forcing?
47) Why are there 4 times the number of polar bears as in 1960?
48) Why did the oceans never become acidic even with CO2 levels 15-20 times higher than today?
49) Why does Antarctica sea ice extent show no decrease in 25 years?
50) Why do alarmists resent skeptics getting funding from fossil fuel companies ( when alarmists get billions from the government and leftest think tanks) and skeptics get next to nothing from governments for climate research?
51) If in the spring the Bloomberg carbon clock is only growing .00000001 every 6 seconds and therefore at that rate in 1 year it is only increasing .05ppm and then in the fall and winter it increases at a rate of only 2ppm per year; then why do we have to worry about carbon increases?
52) Why arent the alarmists concerned with actual human lives. In England every winter there are old people who succumb to the cold because they cant afford the increased heating bills caused by green subsidies.
53) Why did Phil Jones a climategate conspirator, admit in 2010 that there was no statistically meaningful difference in 4 different period temperature data that used both atmospheric temperature and sea surface temperature?
54) Why does the IPCC still say that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is a 100 years when over 80 studies have concluded it is more like 5 years?
Well, I guess we should praise them for allowing us to avoid all this, right?
Yeah, them!
Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, I guess.
They will say that by increasing awareness of the problem regulations were implemented that saved the planet. Except the reality is that pollutant emissions were already declining before the EPA was established.
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/federal-government-give-americans-clean-air/
The regulations probably sped up the process. I’m not against regulation. But at some point the costs to make air cleaner outweigh whatever benefit we get. According to the EPA, emissions of six major pollutants it tracks have declined 73% since 1970. The “average” American is likely breathing the cleanest air he’s ever breathed in his life.
Scott I agree with you in general but there is a flaw in your logic. Emissions are not the same as pollution.
When I was growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana we had a coal furnace that had been converted to oil and we had a 30’s era coal power plant downtown. Heating with natural gas, electrification, and modern more efficient coal power located in rural areas lowered pollution in cities. About 20% of power coming from nukes helped too.
California is a different story. I spent summers there since 1960, was stationed there in the early 70s while in the navy, and lived there for six years. Most of California has clean air. Only one place did not.
Hollywood! It is more about perception than it about measuring air quality and comparing it to heath standards.
Too many people, driving too many cars, too miles in a place that traps emissions results in CARB dictating standards for all Americans.
I do recall being at school in about 1973 and my biology teacher trying to fire me up with green rhetoric. He strongly believed that soon we would run out of stuff, according to Ehrlich’s book, which he gave me to read. He advised us to buy and store lead, as it would be one of the commodities that would be increasing in value due to shortages. I rejected his advice, and did engineering.
Gender-fluid dynamics?
No. Something lighter than that.
Lighter-fluid dynamics?
“my biology teacher trying to fire me up with green rhetoric”
“Lighter-fluid dynamics”
Were these Bic problems, or actually of Zippo importance?
It.s all about population and getting it down to only a few hundred millions.
Acthally, it is about getting down to a few thousand elite that know better than we what is good for the planet, and more importantly, for them
The bike paths. Free range chickens. Wild shrimp. Weird brands at Whole Foods. Private jets ubtil the fuel runs out.
Gums…
CO2 ‘pollution’ control is about people control, via government control of emissions from energy production and driving energy prices ever higher. Reducing the CO2 plant food needed by global flora for robust growth is just an ‘unfortunate’ but acceptable consequence, it seems, to the AGW advocates.
There are some good things that have happened since earth day numbers 3. and #5,:
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/21/17247994/earth-day-2018-plastic-climate-change
But there are a bunch of lies in the above link/article promoted by Google.
I guarantee you that if we don’t act now to stop global warming, everyone reading this will be dead in 100 years or less.
When the question isn’t the question, the answer is irrelevant.
Whether the predictions came true matters no more than the efficiency and environmental improvements we’ve made over the last 50 years, for the same reason that decreasing poverty or improving standards of living don’t answer the question of poverty and falling violent crime rates in the US are apparently an emergency that must be addressed immediately.
Because the question isn’t the question.
You missed a big one. algore (manbearpig) declaring that all life in the oceans would die off within a short time.
All eighteen predictions were pretty moronic, but one seems to stand out:
“10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “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.”
Nitrogen buildup? Light filtered out of the atmosphere?
What’s up with that?
I have always been under the impression that the atmosphere is comprised of about 78% nitrogen, and has been for quite a long time. If nitrogen could “filter light out of the atmosphere”, the planet would have been shrouded in darkness for the past several hundred million years or so. I guess pushing the idea of nitrogen “pollution” didn’t work out, so they moved on to “carbon” pollution.
Terry, The only thing that could be reasonably assumed by this prediction is Nitrous Oxide (NOx) emissions from combustion of fossil fuels. NOx is responsible for smog like conditions and is now a regulated pollutant. However, it would be a huge overstatement to claim that so much would be created to shroud the earth in darkness.
Yup, especially since we got this stuff called Rain.
He was also reported to have described the greenhouse effect as “the laugh of the century”.
Great progress has been made over the past 50 years in achieving much cleaner air and water supplies. That’s a great achievement and should not be rolled back by the likes of the Koch clan and other avaricious reactionaries , via their agents in DC, such as Pruitt.
Deindustrialization and decarbonization, however, are different matters need to be resisted at all cost.
Oh so wrong Sarastro92
Progress on REAL pollution
to clean up the planet
slowed to a crawl
a few decades ago
and now FAKE pollution
( harmless CO2 ),
demonized to gain political power
is the false target.
What air quality standards are being rolled back?
If you check the US no longer has an air quality problem (airnow.gov). It has been that way for many years. The only poor air quality days are caused by things like wild fires or blowing dust.
Those of us in the third trimester of life remember well the smokey air of our childhoods, even small-towners.
The current state of the US environment is beginning a decline again after being cleaned up exceedingly since the birth of ecological thinking. The problem now is litter. The same millenials who rally for renewables think nothing of ejecting their fast-food waste along the picturesque rural lanes as they practice eating while cross-country racing during their lunch breaks.
Rolling-back a few Obama-era rules and regulations that had little-to-no benefit at a potentially great cost is not rolling-back 50 years of progress.
For ‘Earth Day” I cut down about 25 trees. Just cut ’em down and left them to rot. Wanted to do that patch for several years. Whacked about 50-100 last year. Just cut ’em down and left them to rot.
Now my shooting lanes are open for deer hunting and the small game have brush pile condos. The new growth keeps the deer close by, especially when cold and snowy. I think everything likes the strategically located briar patches.
Anyone want to celebrate ‘Earth Day’ next year? With some help I’ll take out another 100 or so. You can even have the wood! The only sound better than those trees falling is next seasons rifle shot and the smell of venison.
I’ll remind my logger of Earth day while he’s removing diseased oaks and making us both a profit. We’ll have a beer for gaia at day’s end.