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 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 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.”
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.”
MP:
Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth
Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded tomorrow with media hype, and
claims like this from the official Earth Day website:Scientists warn us that climate change could accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival and everything we love. We call on you to keep global temperature rise under the unacceptably dangerous level of 2 degrees C, by phasing out carbon pollution to zero. To achieve this, you must urgently forge realistic global, national and local agreements, to rapidly shift our societies and economies to 100% clean energy by 2050. Do this fairly, with support to the most vulnerable among us. Our world is worth saving and now is our moment to act. But to change everything, we need everyone. Join us.Finally, think about this question, posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hype, hysteria and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by the “environmental grievance hustlers.”
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