Guest Opinion by Chris Talgo
On January 1, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” rang in the new year by airing a segment in which several scientists, including Dr. Paul Ehrlich, predicted that we are on the cusp of a sixth mass extinction event and that “the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Suffice to say, Ehrlich does not have a stellar track record when it comes to making predictions about impending planetary doom. For those unaware of Ehrlich, in 1968 he authored The Population Bomb, in which he wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death…nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Obviously, Ehrlich was dead wrong about his doomsday prediction in the 1970s. However, that has not stopped him from constantly ringing the apocalypse alarm bell. Indeed, for more than half a century Ehrlich has been producing ridiculous claims of mass starvation, ecological Armageddon, and a host of other wacky prophecies, all of which none have come to pass.
Nonetheless, despite his abysmal history of failed predictions, Ehrlich was front-and-center on “60 Minutes,” engaging in his most outrageous claims to date.
For example, according to Ehrlich, “humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from.”
Actually, that is completely untrue. As Michael Schellenberger notes, “The assertion that ‘five more Earths’ are needed to sustain humanity comes from something called the Ecological Footprint calculation. I debunked it 10 years ago with a group of other analysts and scientists, including the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology.”
During the segment, Ehrlich’s Stanford colleague, Tony Barnosky, also made several shocking predictions about a looming mass extinction event that he claims will wipe out life as we know it.
According to Barnosky, “There are five times in Earth’s history where we had mass extinctions. And by mass extinctions, I mean at least 75%, three quarters of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth. Now we’re witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch.”
He added, “The data are rock solid. I don’t think you’ll find a scientist that will say we’re not in an extinction crisis.”
Once again, lets separate fact from fiction.
Per Environmental Progress (EP), “The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.”
Moreover, as EP points out: “Many environmentalists and conservationists claim that fossil fuels and economic development are responsible for the decline in population numbers. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“In fact, denying developing countries access to fossil fuels and economic growth is among the largest threats to wild animals. Making charcoal and burning biomass are top drivers of tropical deforestation, and is still the primary source of energy in Sub-Saharan Africa,” explains EP.
So, as Ehrlich and friends continue to beat the world-is-going-to-end unless we curb population growth, disavow fossil fuels, and reduce consumption of material goods, they could not be more misguided.
Human innovation has overcome the vast majority of the problems we’ve encountered to date. People like Ehrlich and Barnosky are anti-human, in that they view humans as the source of problems. In reality, humans are ultimate problem solvers, and if history has taught us anything, it is that the capacity for humans to conquer unforeseen difficulties is literally limitless.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.
For more on population, click here.
For more on resources, click here.
Ehrlich is rehashing Malthus, and making the same wrong assumptions as Malthus. Assuming no change in technology had progressed to opposing any technology that might change his premise
Remember, Erhlich is the one who said having cheap and abundant energy would be like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
There’s a virtually infinite universe of energy and mass out there, but it seems Ehrlich can only comprehend a partial vacuum.
“… the capacity for humans to conquer unforeseen difficulties is literally limitless.”
This is a dynamic completely foreign to the brain of a biologist (Save for the precious few we know here at WUWT). Actually, biology has not been a science for 4-5 generations. It was the first casualty among the sciences of Marxist ideologues. It lies there inert and immobile like a piece of amber full of ancient insects in a sample drawer. It is a catalogue of creatures that they view as timeless and not as the present incarnation of chains of ancestors stretching back 2.5+ billion years or more.
From paleontology we know that life is marvelously dynamic. We know that 99.99% of all life forms that ever lived have gone extinct, almost all before we got here! We know that major extinctions arose from major geological events, like a bolide collision with earth and catastrophic volcanic outpourings of lava, gases an shot-blocking particulates. Each of five major extinctions in the last 500 million years wiped out 90 percent of species that existed at the time of the event!
The linear mindset of the likes of Ehrlich makes them unfit to think and write other than silliness about the future of dynamic systems. His ‘work’ and The Club of Rome look at earth’s resources with a bean counter’s eye. The real resource is human ingenuity. We don’t demand zinc. We demand non-coroding barn roofs and culverts and car door handles and flashlight batteries. This is not a zero sum game.
Ehrlich is rehashing Malthus
I disagree.
Ehrlich is rehashing Attenborough (Optimum Trust) who rehashed Ehrlich who rehashed Malthus
And Packham – another BBC ecoalarmist
“Always wrong, never in doubt.”
Pretty much describes the entire Climate Change Hysteria Cult.
> Erhlich is the one who said having cheap and abundant energy would be like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”
Energy is a tool. Humans are tool users. Abundant energy has and will continue to unleash a greater human condition. I prefer to think of abundant energy as gifting our children a toolbox and imagination. Thinking them idiot children is the greatest denigration.
I think Ehrlich hates almost everyone.
Almost everybody except himself.
Perhaps including himself. He may look forward to his personal extinction event which is now clearly overdue.
Worst case, we have to endure another 10-12 years of his perfectly wrong predictions.
Yes,well, that proves what he has really wanted is people living in the dark ages, except himself of course. People
Like him prove, everytime they open their mouths, that they think no one else is fit to live on the same planet as he.
This man has been wrong so many times with his predictions it’s a wonder anyone gives him another soap box.
He will always be given a soapbox AND a bullhorn by the news media as long as he spouts the required nonsense. If he were to say “Everything is fine.” then he would be ignored. Same for Al Gore, for John Kerry,….
Dr. Bill Gray (Colo. State U.) was a darling of the news media whenever he issued his seasonal hurricane forecasts. They couldn’t get enough of him. Then he publicly began to question the orthodoxy of global warming and they turned on him. cast him as some sort of crank, then began to ignore him and his forecasts.
https://babylonbee.com/news/60-minutes-interviews-population-control-expert-thanos
😉
You’ve gotta love the Bee!
Don’t knock him! Where else can you get such a 100% reliable forecaster by just reversing the predictions made?
Who needs science, or even logic, if you believe a human being can be an infallible ouija board? Evidently a preponderance of the posters here believe that if Paul Ehrlich predicts something, that is bulletproof evidence it can never happen. From that point, it’s only a tiny step further to dismiss any and all warnings of potential catastrophy as “chicken little” alarmism. Did the boy who cried wolf prevent the wolf from arriving?
Running out of food is only one of several easily conceivable scenarios that could collapse civilization, and there are undoubtedly many more that are still inconceivable. And we are ill-prepared for all of them.There’s a good chance that the human species will become extinct itself before a majority of other species die out. To think that we can overcome any obstacle that may present itself is nothing but megalomania.
Surely it’s not only rational, but unavoidable, to be ill-prepared for the inconceivable? I confess I am ill-prepared for a world-eating manifestation of Yog Sothoth, but ignoring the possibility is a benefit, not a cost.
The point is that in the last fifty years or so many have gained a lot of money and power from predicting catastrophe on inadequate evidence, and the result has been enormous damage to human flourishing, especially as doom-mongering has gained political traction in the last few years.
Remember that the present (real) world economic crisis is variously the result of Net Zero policies to prevent a burning planet (inconceivable), lockdowns to prevent billions of COVID deaths (implausible) and the obliteration of the world by Vladimir Putin (paranoid).
My point is that we are NOT ONLY unprepared for the conceivable, but furthermore adamantly blinding ourselves to the very possibility of global catastrophy with wistful breast-beating about our marvelous progress and prodigious powers of adaptation, and this despite our pitifully brief existence as a species and abominable record of toxifying our environment.
A good example of our inability to deal with catastrophy, even on a miniscule scale, is given in this report from 2015 on the toxicity of the pesticide chlordecone.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4712216/
The toxicity to humans of this product was revealed following an industrial accident in Virginia in 1975, yet it continued to be applied intesively in banana plantations in the French West Indies until 1993, contaminating the soil, the drinking water, coastal areas near the estruaries of polluted rivers, and most of the population.
And it was not until 2004 that studies of the effects of this pesticide on pregnancy and infant development were initiated, showing that it tended to shorten pregnancies, increasing the incidence of preterm births, and interfered with the neurological development of the newborn. It has since been accepted as a work-related cause of prostate cancer.
This week a French court ruled that the claims of the affected people are inadmissible because too much time had passed since the use of the pesticide was halted. (I haven’t been able to find a copy of the actual judgment, which is reported to run 300 pages, including a remarkable 5 pages explaining the reasoning behind it.)
“In what is seen as a rare move, the two judges concluded their decision with a five page explanation for
the reasoning behind their dismissal of the legal action.”
Here we have a man-made catastrophe that gave very early warning, yet took 30 to 40 years to assess, and for which no solution has yet been found half a century on…
The murdering globalist totalitarians are creating chaos in our energy and medical sectors with their popular delusions, and that could fulfill Ehrlich’s prophesies in entirely different ways – the Big Cull of the elderly and poor will happen in Europe this Winter, due to unworkable woke energy policies and resulting energy shortages, and deliberate mismanagement of the Covid-19 scam with destructive lockdowns and toxic “vaccines”. It was never about the Climate or about Covid – it was always about destruction, carnage and CONTROL.
Ehrlich’s predictions have been 100% wrong, just like the very-scary predictions of the woke Climate alarmists and the murdering Covid alarmists.
”THE LEFT LIES ABOUT EVERYTHING!”
They lied about everything Climate and they lied about everything Covid.
THE ABYSMAL FAILURE OF THE GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS’ PREDICTIVE TRACK RECORD.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professors of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
For 60:40 predictions, the odds of being this wrong are 1 in 13 quintillion; for 70:30 predictions, the odds are 1 in 13 septillion. It’s not just climate scientists being randomly mistaken – they must have known they were not telling the truth.
It’s his deep rich voice of intellectual condescension that keeps him coming back.
LOL – this guy is such a clown.
And CBS gives this clown the Big Microphone.
And all the while, someone at NPR and someone at PBS is sitting at their desk on Monday morning crying in his coffee, thinking, geez, why didn’t I think of having Paul Ehrlich on my network? ha ha ha ha ha
I think that by ‘mass extinction’ maybe he means his own.
Me thinks his calculations are the Future of Maths Extinction
60 minutes is a waste of time.
60 nanoseconds is too much time for them
It’s been going down hill for a long time, but when Andy Rooney left, he took all of the remaining fun out of it.
Much like most mainstream stuff I’m afraid. I’m almost at the point of just letting the idiots get on with it to sit on the sidelines as society implodes on itself. I just can’t quite let go…….
It’s an hour you won’t get back
Elite access for idiot commentary in national media is no different than elite access for power and privilege in all other cases.
I know, let’s spend $4 trillion in borrowed money to celebrate the end of the world and fund big gatherings at beach party meetings for advocacy groups instead of using zoom.
Sounds like you got a hold of the plan.
It was in a file drawer mislabel under “imported frozen seafood”.
Sadly, that borrowed money is our money and no one seems to have the wherewithal to incite a (metaphorical) pitchfork and torch revolution.
We have all seen tough times, the 70’s was a nightmare in the UK, but I was in my teens/early 20’s so hadn’t a clue what was going on and just partied and womanised.
I would do the same today but now I know I can’t dance, the hangovers I didn’t get then have caught up with me, and the women all look like my Grandmother.
I notice they always talk about species going extinct but don’t mention the arrival of NEW species. After all, Darwinian evolution means that you’d expect unfit species to die off and more fit species to arise to take their ecological niche. So you shouldn’t discuss an extinction rate without also discussing the emergence rate.
That’s no use. The entire point is creating alarm and soliciting donations.
You can’t trust the emergence rate, though. Every minor variant is labelled a new species. There’s no prestige for discovering that some spotted frogs are getting bigger. But discovering the ‘greater spotted frog’ is a fantastic opportunity. You get naming rights, speaking rights, even a PHD.
And they never use actual species counts and, you know, observational data. They build imaginary computer worlds and run simulations, like the global warmists do. A lot like computer games. But not as much fun.
Not the extinction he has been predicting but a real one nevertheless – Western Civilisation is in a downward spiral, committing woke driven suicide by denying itself cheap reliable energy and turning its back on the benefits it alone has brought to that civilisation.
“Western Civilisation is in a downward spiral”
Yes, it is. Thanks to delusional thinking, and a Mass Media that spreads the delusions far and wide, causing people to do things that are not in their best interests, like electing radical Democrats to political office.
All of my educational training to a terminal degree level on scarcity and natural resources refutes Malthus and Ehrlich and Holdren. Yet they get all the media coverage and podium time to a mass audience. But I’m not going to spend my time every evening at the local theater yelling fire in front of a general audience to catch up.
“podium time”
Lectern time.
In a few years this angry old fart will be right about one thing.
Do read Rosling’s Factfulness’ and cheer up
How embarrassing: Old age is going to get Paul Ehrlich before any of his predictions will.
You really cannot know if we are on the brink or not. I guess it depends on what the timeline is for brink, but nothing says the Sun could not create a massive solar flare, an asteroid is just a few decades from impacting, that we are in fact at the end of the interglacial period or any number of potential cataclysms.
You can argue that his stated mode of extinction is wrong if he is claiming it is the global warming scam.
How long did previous mass extinctions take? Hundreds of years? Thousands? If you’re actually there, it could be so slow, relatively speaking, that you might not notice.
No, the Chicxulub event 65 million years ago took place in days. There’s nothing slow about the effects of a giant meteorite hitting the earth at 11-72 km/sec. It was highly noticeable, and everything with a body mass of more than about 2 kg died within minutes or hours. All of the planet’s large vegetation was burned to a crisp within a couple of days. The surface of the oceans flash-boiled.
The rupture of Lake Agassiz about 13,000 years ago would have had an immediate and catastrophic effect on a global basis.
[in] “the Chicxulub event 65 million years … everything with a body mass of more than about 2 kg died within minutes or hours.”
It appears that Sharks, Alligators and Crocodiles survived. I haven’t been able to find any details on their size at the time.
Do you have a reference for the 2kg weight limit cited?
… the next few decades …
Of course.
Chicken Little in a suit. 60 Minutes ain’t what it used to be.
60 Minutes never was worth a bucket of warm spit
60 Minutes was always a legend in their own minds.
Even back in the 80’s, whenever they covered a subject that I knew something about, their “errors” were egregious. Just like the rest of the media, their “errors” always managed to make those on the left look better.
The only difference between now and then, is that 30 years ago, they felt the need to hide their biases. Today, they are proud of them.
if you run your own stopwatch you find that 60 Minutes lasts 57 minutes but, with commercials it’s really just 41 minutes
May he live another 90 years so that he will continue to see is predictions fail. I wonder how many years it would take for him to give up on it.
I doubt he cares that his predictions have failed.
1) He’s become rich and famous.
2) He’s managed to scare many people into doing the nonsense that he’s pushing.
And the same people making these dire predictions wonder why our children and young adults think they don’t have a future. Futurists (always wrong) like Ehrlich, schools, colleges and the media feed them this BS constantly. It’s not surprising they don’t want to get married and have children–or they commit suicide.
I disagree with Chris. Ehrlich’s record is unbeatable. How many people in the field could be this wrong this often over half-a-century and still keep coming back for more?!
I’m sure most readers will know of the Greek seer Cassandra whose predictions of doom were consistently right but never believed. Many years ago (with Ehrlich or one of his imitators in mind) a friend coined the phrase “the Ardnassac Effect”, ‘Ardnassac’ being ‘Cassandra’ spelt backwards, which he applied to those whose predictions never came to pass but were universally believed by the gullible leaders of the day.
Good to see that as he enters his second half-century of prediction he has lost none of his magic!
“…the Greek seer Cassandra…”
Actually Trojan.
It would be refreshing to read a story that tells us of something right that Erlich teaches. Anything? Anyone? He is after all a professor at Stanford. He must have gotten something right to retain such a position.
We are on the brink (well, probably already in) of a mass hysteria event.
That’s exactly what it is.
Why would Ehrlich change his winning ways? The more wrong he is the more they listen to him
There are several high level species that humanity has saved. Some endangered by our actions admittedly but others were headed into history regardless. The difference is I can name those species whilst the mass extinction types cannot name any except polio.
Should be noted there are some unsupportable claims regarding what constitutes a defined species. Isolated rhino populations for instance. Contrarywise we’ve seen several “extinxt” species make surprise reappearances. I also hold out hope for the ivory-billed woodpecker.
It seems the Carolina Parakeet is truly extinct. Very little evidence it was human caused. It would be a great thing if we cold revive the species with still viable DNA.
Should we save variola?
Of course, it’s a moral imperative! We eradicated smallpox out of speciesist delusion that human life has some unique value. The highest value is eliminating human impact on nature.
If Ehrlich is consistent in his no-impact moral framework, he must favor saving the variola.
Now that would be a funny video — collecting signatures on a petition to “save the endangered variola! This poor creature was brutally hunted to the brink of extinction. It now only survives in captivity”
Who imagines that the typical XR crowd would not enthusiastically sign, much like those protesting the deadly di-hydrogen monoxide.
Paul Ehrlich has learnt nothing during his life time .
He has had a comfortable life university and to my knowledge has never produced anything of value to mankind .
Every prediction that he has made has been wrong .
Mass starvation could now happen but that will only occur if politicians start believing Green Peace who are calling for the banning of Nitrogenous Fertilizer .
The world does have a problem which is that the constant propaganda against the use of fossil fuels and nitrous oxide emissions could tip some countries into banning the use and manufacture of nitrogenous fertilizer .
4 billion people are fed with the food produced by fertilizer produced using Natural gas .
Look out Ehrlich…
UK’s record hot 2022 made 160 times more likely by climate crisis
Without global heating, such warm temperatures would be expected only once every five centuries, Met Office says
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/05/uk-average-annual-temperature-tops-10c-for-first-time
Not 159 or 161….