Earth Day Predictions
From iGeek
To judge how "off" someone likely is in the present, it is a good idea to remember how wrong they were in the past.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2020-02-01 |
To judge how off someone likely is in the present, it is a good idea to remember how wrong they were in the past. Here's a few predictions from the first earth day:
- “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” ~ George Wald
- “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” ~ NYT
- Paul Ehrlich has a rich history of being wrong (which is why he wins so many lefty accolades),
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make... The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." ~ Mademoiselle, April 1970
- "...between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the 'Great Die-Off.'", rant in the Earth Day issue of The Progressive
- “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich predicted 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
- DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” 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. ~ Audubon, May 1970. (NOTE: life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
- “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.
- “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.” ~Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor
- “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….” ~ January 1970, Life Magazine
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt had a few losers:
- “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.” ~ Time Magazine
- “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.'”
- the pending Ice Age, “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years... 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.”
- Prediction: decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate ~ Barry Commoner
- Scientific American published a chart (Quoting Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences) 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.
- "in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” ~ Look Magazine, quoting Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley (secretary of the Smithsonian Institute).
So what did we learn about eco-scare-mongers, if you know how wrong they were on everything they predicted in the past?
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