Fifty years of failed Eco-pocalyptic predictions

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/

Fear mongering idiots.
I laughed at some of them.

Prince Charles = master idiot.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/another_year_another_round_of_global_warming_doomsday_predictions_that_never_came_to_pass.html

No matter how far the predictions are off, the sycophants in the media will continue predicting the talking points that the science is settled and continue their support for the destruction of industries that produce reasonably priced and reliable energy.

From the following article at Roseville Today:

Heavy rains, big snow along with power outages, overflowing rivers and high winds rocked Northern California to end 2022 in dramatic fashion. A healthy dose of hydrologic optimism has eased concerns for the moment of dire predictions for a dry winter. The season is off to a strong start with more rain and snow on the way for early 2023. Hope remains strong for replenishing California’s 10 largest reservoirs this spring.

So the dire predictions were for a dry winter and the storms seem to be never ending. Thank goodness the climate is and has always been cyclical and natural.The reason the Earth has so many deserts and so much water is because we have always had floods and long droughts. It has nothing to do with our driving gas-powered vehicles. Mother Nature is much more powerful than humans. (Is it acceptable to use the term 'mother' or is that offensive?)

How many dire predictions have to be 100% wrong before the media starts doing their job to ask questions and do research instead of just repeating what they are told? There certainly have been a lot of them...

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocalyptic-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/

from last link in previous post.

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.”

MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded tomorrow with media hype

Currently from the 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.”

In biblical times, they would kill false prophets. Today, they excuse their behavior and claim that they'll get it right "next time"...

I've come to the conclusion that big governments want absolute control over us. They use climate change or pandemics or supply change SNAFUs or fuel shortages or whatever else they can use to control us. The pandemic isolates us and climate change is an excuse to control our energy. They want to outlaw all forms of energy they can't hold over our heads and mete it out to us as a means of control. By forcing us to EVs, they can control our mobility. They want to outlaw home gardening and home schooling. They want to control every aspect of our lives. They don't want us to be able to defend ourselves and they don't want us to be able to mobilize against them. They would like the option of starving us out if necessary.

My point is that we should beware of big government politicians with sweeping big government solutions.

There are certainly mixed messages from the environmentalists.     I've been considering the impact of Rain forests and the environmentalists interest in them in particular.

EnvironMENTALists fight Co2 in every venue except the rain forest and the rain forest is a huge producer of Co2!! THey talk about the water...but would that water just go toward more arid regions?

https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/rainforest-destruction-zmaz78sozraw/

indigenous...culture??  and in this day and age all the elites are trying to do is to eliminate the indigenous!!!

Calypso Jones wrote:There are certainly mixed messages from the environmentalists.     I've been considering the impact of Rain forests and the environmentalists interest in them in particular.

EnvironMENTALists fight Co2 in every venue except the rain forest and the rain forest is a huge producer of Co2!!    THey talk about the water...but would that water just go toward more arid regions?  

https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/nature-and-environment/rainforest-destruction-zmaz78sozraw/

indigenous...culture??  and in this day and age all the elites are trying to do is to eliminate the indigenous!!!

Have you never heard of photosynthesis?

Rainforests do not 'produce' CO2.  Plants absorb CO2, which helps them to grow, then they release it back into the air as OXYGEN which we need for survival.   Rainforests like the Amazon do this on a massive scale.

When the forests are gone CO2 is no longer transformed into oxygen through photosynthesis.  When they are razed and burned guess what happens?  The CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.

What water are you talking about going to more arid regions?   Do you think if the rainforests are gone that the same amount of rain will fall and they can just redirect it?  Less moisture will go into the atmosphere and rainfall declines which results in drought.  I'm not going to explain something so basic.  Try googling rainforests, transpiration and precipitation.

yes i THINK I HAVE heard of photosynthesis. LOLOL

ALL green plants give off oxygen during the day through the process of photosynthesis and then they give off Co2 during the night.