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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“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.””
Except that nitrogen isn’t building up and also does not filter out light. Other than that, totally right.
At some point in the past decade, Ehrlich claimed that his predictions in “the Population Bomb” were actually too optimistic.
One thing he doesn’t like to talk about is that the book was re-printed in the 1970s with toned-down predictions and the removal of a number of failed short-term ones.
Michael, at no point were Ehrlich’s predictions ever optimistic.
Please use the antonymic phrase “actually too pessimistic” to calm my nerves.
Thank heavens all these predictions caused us to change our behavior such that none of these things came true!
“Retired Kit P………………..Likewise……………I am also retired ……………….but your “nit-picking” of Allan’s
article seems somewhat inappropriate.
…
I find it hard to believe that you rated “air pollution , polio and a lack of seat-belts in cars as “really scaring
things” while at the SAME TIME we lived CONSTANTLY with the threat of NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION.”
My training and experience is as a mechanical and environmental engineer in nuclear power. I was also a nuclear trained navy line officer.
So I do not have an issue with Allan providing his thoughts until he uses engineering background to validate what he says. I have never caught Allan being well informed.
The topic of this discussion is irrational fear mongering leading up to the 70s. I can remember being afraid of mean dogs and polio. Having been bitten by a mean dog and having school mates who were polio survivors, I do not think these fears were irrational.
It was a big deal when the polio was distributed in school. It is part of my belief system that we solve problems and make the world a better place.
I stopped being afraid of dogs when I read that dogs were instinctively afraid of men holding clubs. Never had a problem with a dog since. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way in handling fear.
Keep in mind that I am relating experiences before I was trained as an engineer. I never worried about nuclear annihilation. It seems rather silly to rate the effectiveness of fear mongers by how many they influence.
“Keep in mind that I am relating experiences before I was trained as an engineer. I never worried about nuclear annihilation. It seems rather silly to rate the effectiveness of fear mongers by how many they influence.”
It seems rather silly to rate the effectiveness……..by how many they influence” ??????????????????????
SORRY ! BUT HOW ELSE DO YOU RATE EFFECTIVENESS IF NOT BY THE NUMBERS THEY INFLUENCE ???????????????????????????????
Some engineer YOU must have been ! and in the NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY !?
Thank god that you ( like me ) are RETIRED. That makes you an EX-PROBLEM NOW ! PHEW !
That IS a relief for us all……….thanks “Retired Kit P” .
I’ll add my unlikely (but hopeful) prediction: By Earth Day 2070 the DSM XII will have added “environmentalism” to the list of dysphorias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysphoria
Note that all these people who control this narrative are biologists/ecologists. I’ve met a few real scientists among their lot, the ones who come to WUWT come to mind. Biology and its spawn has been a broken, activist science for over half a century. They broke the first ground of misuse and misunderstanding of the scientific method and were imbued with that dangerous “little bit of knowledge” to skew their work into anti-human purpose. Lysenko is the father of modern biological sciences. Climate science followed suit and gleeful biologists flocked to it in droves.
Dr Harrison Brown, who opined we would run out of the main base metals before 2000, read, perhaps in the USGS reports on minerals and metals, what the world reserves of these commodities were, totally not understanding what mineral reserves are to a mining company. I graduated in 1961 in engineering and took a masters in economic geology, and Ive basically had to argue this linear thinking beast even before graduation. It was the inspiration for the Club of Rome Limits to Growth. I made a bet with one of my “humanities” friends that the world reserves of copper would be the same in 2000 as they were in the 1960s, the reason being that a mining company measures enough reserves for planning purposes for 10 to 20 yrs. Drilling and assaying are costly and it is only used when reserves are running down. Most often, they find much more ore in the process of mining. I won the bet handily but, of course one never collects on these things.
Who is Dr Harris to be making frightening prognostications like this. I’ve found that the biggest “tell” with these people is they never refer to themselves by their discipline. Its alway “a scientists” or “researcher” or “professor”. You can be sure they never asked a mining man or a geologist about this? Climate science is the same. The guy pronouncing on the great extinctions and the like in climate could easily be a sociologist or a social psychologist (which is unabashedly a left wing created science – yup, pretty much like climate science).
“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).”
Life expectancy is calculated from a particular date, in the 1970 one would give the life expectancy for a person of a certain age. E.g., I was born in 1940 and had a life expectancy of, say, 60 years. Today in 2018 my life expectancy is about 11 years. So in 1970 a life expectancy for a person born in 1945 is calculated from 1970 and would , as stated in the article, be 49 years from the 1970 date, thus such a person would be expected to live until about 2019 or the age of 2019 – 1945 = 74 and not to the age of 49 or a life expectancy of 49 – (1970 -1945) =49 – 25 = 24 more years or until about 1994.
Dear Anthony:
I ask for your permission to translate this essay into Spanish.
The permission is not mine to give, contact the author.