American Enterprise Institute
Mark Perry
April 21, 2016

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, 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 46th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 16 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 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 his 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.

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.”

Link

I just love things like this. Few things expose complete idiots like sweeping forecasts they know nothing about, having no basis whatsoever in fact.

19) "Scientists reported with unprecedented alarm that the North Polar icecap is, in their words, 'falling off a cliff.' One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week warns that it could happen in as little as seven years, seven years from now. " - Al Gore, 2007

Who is this Paul Ehrlich character, and why is he an expert?

quote:

Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

And that was the optimist!

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
Who is this Paul Ehrlich character, and why is he an expert?

Oh, I'm sure his credentials are every bit as impressive as Al Gore's.

On a different note.. We really have cleaned up our act. When I was younger Lake Erie was a sewer.the sky over the steel plants in Northern Ohio was orange. Farming practice has improved considerably. We have learned from the mistakes of the past but they were trying to scare us..

In 1970, I predicted that the wonderful girl I met that January would be my wife.

Forty-seven years later:

Milton 1-0

1970 E.D. Prophets 0-247

.

I'm just glad that the science behind climate change is settled...otherwise we might be in actual trouble, facing extinction and all.

quote:

Originally posted by Zecpull:
On a different note.. We really have cleaned up our act. When I was younger Lake Erie was a sewer.the sky over the steel plants in Northern Ohio was orange. Farming practice has improved considerably. We have learned from the mistakes of the past but they were trying to scare us..

There is no doubt tremendous strides have been made in the last ~50 years. LA smog, Houston ship channel, a number of other truly terrible spots, and a great many small sites have been cleaned up. I'm not sure what impact hysterical forecasts like these had, if at all.

I was burned in my childhood by an assurance in a school newspaper that the earth would exhaust the entire supply of oil by 1996, and have been wary of such breathless forecasts ever since.

quote:

Originally posted by John Steed:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
Who is this Paul Ehrlich character, and why is he an expert?

Oh, I'm sure his credentials are every bit as impressive as Al Gore's.

He is/was a Prof at Stanford, that's all that matters. Around me if anyone from Stanford or Berkeley makes any stmt re man will destroy mother earth, they such are revered as prophets. One problem is the core goal of any gov't funded research is to create the need for continued funding, a follow on research contract. We have friends in that business.

We are all supposed to be dead now from ozone depletion.

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I am still waiting for some soylent green! What the hell is taking so long!

What a bunch of fucking morons. They need to choke on their own bull shit.

Lots of stupid fucks, past, present, and unfortunately future. Ron White is right, you can't fix it.

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
Lots of stupid fucks, past, present, and unfortunately future. Ron White is right, you can't fix it.

You would think that nearly everyone intelligent enough to be making such predictions would know of the appalling record such silly pronouncements have, holding the maker up to derision and ridicule, and either refrain altogether or be awfully careful.

Chicken Little declared: "The sky is falling".

Paul Ehrlich, what a dumbfuck. I have not seen his name for a long time. Almost painful seeing it here. Like that foolish fool Krugman, Erhlich is a person that you would like to mail a postcard to everyday, "You are an idiot". Of course that would accomplish nothing...

So here's what it's all about. In 1992 Barry Commoner (mentioned above) told a California conference on public health where--for reasons I cannot fathom--he was the keynote speaker.

He announced that the Clean Air Act and other attempts to clean the air of Los Angeles had failed. The only solution would be--wait for it!--SOCIALISM!

This conference was in LA and every person attending except for Barry Elitist knew that in 1970 the air was scarcely breathable, and that pollution had been reduced by about 99%.

I have a friend who studied with Ehrlich at Stanford, and--despite being a smart guy and seeing the results of Ehrlich's predictions--still considers him a prophet.

Regarding predictions 2 and 3, the air and water pollution (exemplified by the Cuyahoga River - a tributary of Lake Erie, not the lake itself - catching on fire) at the time was pretty bad. What they didn't take into account was that total destruction wasn't inevitable - it could be stopped and reversed.