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.
60 minutes has at least one propaganda piece in every show. The emotional manipulations they engage in fool most of the people most of the time. The omnipresent false narratives repeated endlessly have brainwashed a significant percentage of the population to accept absurd conclusions. Getting people to ask “is this true?” the first time they hear something and training them to recognize manipulations is the only hope for sanity to be regained.
60 minutes has one OVERTLY propaganda piece in every show. All of their segments are propaganda, just less blatant.
Mentioned is “Making charcoal“
I was thinking about this as I watched flames dance inside my glass-fronted wood stove.
The person that makes (burns) charcoal is known as a “collier” and there are
many other words to learn.
An interesting account is here:
https://www.nps.gov/hofu/learn/historyculture/charcoal-making.htm
And, naturally . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner
An image search is suggested.
After this book, he went off the tracks.
How to Know: The Butterflies 1961
I first read ‘Population Bomb” in college in the mid ’70’s, and thought, “Wow we’re really in trouble”. But I had a degree to earn, then a wife and new job to occupy me, and forgot about him for a while. When I looked at the book again in the early 80’s, I realized everthing he had predicted…never happened.
Now, I’m astounded that 1. he’s still alive (meaning he wrote his first book out of youthful ignorance) and 2. people still listen to the same re-re-hashed nonsense and still believe it.
It seems people LOVE apocalypse.
Well, nobody wants to buy a book titled, “It’s 2023 and everything is A-OK.”
A while back it was pointed out that third world countries (for lighting, heating and cooking) consume about as much kerosene a year as the US does jet fuel.
Fossil fuel free will go down a treat there. Also explains why you can still buy new Tilley lights.
We’re still viable. Democratic support for planned personhood, social progress, and sexual dysfunction is greatly oversampled.
What we may in fact have is a “De-population Bomb” going on, in the US and elsewhere. Here, and perhaps a possible story tip idea, is an interview of Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. Definitely worth an hour of your time:
This is far more momentous economically than the imaginary population apocalypse. How is a diminishing workforce population going to financially support the growing elderly population? What happens to home prices when fewer people have an oversupply of homes to choose from? Home values traditionally have gone up over the last couple centuries. Do they start going down? The U.S. population isn’t declining yet because immigration is making up the difference in the declining birth rate, but it’s a real problem in Japan and Italy right now, and soon in China. Their 1.4 billion will decline by nearly half by 2100. That’s not a small deal.
Exactly so. The fertility rate in Japan is 1.3, well below replacement rate of 2.1 What this means is that every generation, the population of Japan approximately halves. There are entire abandoned suburbs in Japan with houses but no residents. There’s no one who can or wants to buy them, so they sit abandoned. Something like the ruins of Detroit.
It should be noted that the fertility rate of ALL OECD nations is less than 2.1.
Interviewing totally discredited figures like Ehrlich is great for ratings, but news orgs wouldn’t do it because it tarnished their image with the public, and more importantly, other journalists. Sadly, we’re long past those days.
It was different in the ‘60s when he was fresh and his ideas seemingly new. To interview him 50 years later with his rancid track record is sad really.
With any luck, at ninety, there will soon be a Paul Ehrlich extinction event.
Life will always challenge us but the smart money is on the tool making monkeys.
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/counting-species-out/
“ We are often told we are causing a “sixth mass extinction” similar to that wrought by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. So what is the evidence for this claim?
One estimate of the species extinction rate – 27,000 a year – came from the biologist E. O. Wilson, of Harvard University, based on an assumption that habitat loss leads to predictable species loss through a mathematical relationship called the species-area curve. The trouble is, the theory is flawed.
A recent study by Stephen Hubbell and Fangliang He, of the University of California at Los Angeles, found that these “estimated” extinction rates are “almost always much higher than those actually observed” because destruction of forest habitat simply does not lead to proportionate species loss as predicted by the theory. In eastern America, in Puerto Rico and in the Atlantic rainforests of Brazil, more than 90 per cent of forest was extirpated, but the number of birds that died out locally were one, seven and zero respectively.
Another widely used estimate for the extinction rate – 40,000 species a year – came from Norman Myers, a British conservationist. Though often cited as if it were a scientific estimate, this number was more of an assumption. This is what Myers wrote in 1979: “Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of natural environments, the final one quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species – a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average extinction rate of 40,000 species per year.” For more on Myers, see here.
There is no doubt that humans have caused a pulse of extinction, especially by introducing rats, bugs and weeds to oceanic islands at the expense of endemic species. Island species are often vulnerable to parasites, predators and competitors that continental species have evolved to cope with. Mauritius’s dodos, New Zealand’s moas, Madagascar’s elephant birds and many of Hawaii’s honeycreepers all succumbed to the introduction of rats, pigs, monkeys – and humans.
But now that most of these accidental introductions to islands have happened, the rate of extinctions is dropping, not rising, at least among birds and mammals. Bird and mammal extinctions peaked at 1.6 a year around 1900 and have since dropped to about 0.2 a year. Wilson’s 27,000 a year should be producing (pro rata) 26 bird and 13 mammal extinctions a year. Myers would predict even more.
Moreover, according to an analysis by the scholar Willis Eschenbach, of the 190 bird and mammal species that have gone extinct globally in the past 500 years, as recorded on the comprehensive list kept by the American Museum of Natural History, just nine were continental species (if you count Australia as an island, which in ecological terms it is).”
When people struggle, they disregard their environment and breed more. When you don’t have gas, you hop the fence and strip the national park of wood. And you kill the tiger that endangers your friends and family when they do it.
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1595160096480563200
If the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to, it will be due entirely to the global warmunist efforts to “save the planet”, not from human emissions. “Fighting climate change” is the real threat.
The obvious reply to those who claim thousands of species are going extinct each year from climate change is: “name one.”
Corals! If the CoTS don’t get them the warmening and bleaching will-
https://www.ctpublic.org/2022-10-28/marine-biologist-enric-sala-on-the-rebirth-of-a-south-pacific-coral-reef
Well okay there is the small matter of overfishing first.
For the first time since records began in 1900, more people died in The Netherlands than were born in 2022, according to the nation’s official statistician.
In a stunning example of Western demographic decline, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) of The Netherlands reported that last year the birth rate fell below the death rate, with 168,000 babies born compared to 169,000 deaths. The number of births declined by 11,000 over the previous year, putting the rate of 1.49 children per woman on par with historically low birth rates in the 1980s.
Don’t tell Earl Paulich or you would risk increasing the death rate by one immediately!
Paul Ehrlich is noteworthy in that he sums up in a single individual, all that is wrong, harmful and unfit for purpose about contemporary dystopian politicised climate science.
I predict with 100% certainty the complete extinction of Erlich’s prophecies within a decade.
Ehrlich reminds me of some of those people (Kardasians, Hiltons etc.) who are famous for being famous.
Another case of “some ideas are so ludicrous that only an intellectual would believe them.” Although in Erlich’s case I doubt the intellectual part. He’s about as intellectual as Joe (rutabaga) Biden.
Ehrlich is a dumb ass. Doesn’t he know that Captain Kirk and Spock and Scott, Uhura, Chekov and Sulu saved a breeding pair of Humpback Whales RIGHT FROM HIS OWN HOME TOWN and these became Adam-whale and Eve-whale? Now, I know that Star Trek is fiction, but then, so is The Population Bomb. At least one of those fictional works is entertaining and fun. Double dumb ass on you, Paul Ehrlich.
I discussed this question in my post “Where Are The Corpses“. It was eventually turned into a journal article entitled “Historical bird and terrestrial mammal extinction rates and causes” by Dr. Craig Loehle and myself, and has been cited 137 times, most recently yesterday.
TLDR version? The extinction rate is not statistically different from the geological record, and there is no evidence of a “6th mass extinction”.
w.