18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now: The planet’s future has never looked better. Here’s why” 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 in 1970, 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 51st anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 21 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 [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis that 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 issue of 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 [by 1980].”
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.”
Note: The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons.
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 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. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).
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.’”
Note: Global oil production last year at about 95M barrels per day (bpd) was double the global oil output of 48M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.
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 [by 2005], 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 again this year with dire predictions of “gloom and doom” and “existential threats” due to climate change. And let’s think about the 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 virtue-signaling “environmental grievance hustlers” like AOC, who says we have “only 12 years left to stop the worst impacts of climate change.”
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Buy Into The Globalist Climate Hysteria At Your Own Peril
The globalists say that ‘climate change’ is the biggest threat to humanity and that we need to give up our privacy and freedom in order to stop it. They are wrong on both counts
In December 2020, Karl Lauterbach, the health minister of Germany, said that addressing ‘climate change’ will require restrictions on personal freedom, like the ones that were put in place to “flatten the curve” of COVID.
In the same way, British economics professor Mariana Mazzucato said:
“The world may need lockdowns again soon, but this time to deal with a climate emergency.”
The World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) have all written how they want to shut down society to “fight climate change.”
They want dietary controls, energy controls, ‘carbon’ restrictions and ‘climate change’ linked, whether it makes sense or not. The future effects of this are huge.
The 2022 WEF article by the director of WHO’s Environment and Health Department, “How to Fight the Next Threat to Our World,” said:
“World leaders must put health at the center of climate action and social justice.”
With WHO in control of course.
If WHO ends up being the primary organization with control over global health, WHO will have de facto power over world society as a whole.
And communist China will be exempt, just as they are now, on their ever-increasing use of coal and growing emissions.
China emits more CO2 than the next 28 industrialized countries combined and is building four times more coal electricity than the U.S. has.
China uses more than half of the eight billion tons of coal used each year and gets 58 percent of their energy from coal. Our ‘decarbonizing’ efforts are undermining our national security and benefiting our rival, China.
WHO could order climate lockdowns to reduce ‘pollution’, which they say is good for public health. This is why President Joe Biden has wrongly, for world and U.S. interests, joined with WHO for management of world health.
The UN and WEF’s The Great Reset plan include ‘smart’ (15 minute) cities, limits on travel, new food systems (insects replacing meat), a full switch to ‘green’ energy (wind and solar) and more. All of these changes will go more smoothly if there is a central power, such as WHO.
If WHO orders restrictions on freedom to ‘save the climate’, Biden and those of a certain political leaning can just blame them. Like the Netherlands, the number two (after the U.S.) exporter of food in the world is doing now.
They are attempting to shut down or limit food production of half the farms in their country to satisfy their EU climate mandate. This will drive up food costs even more.
They want us to give up our way of life and freedom to ‘save the planet’. Except those at the very top of the power pyramid. Think Joe Biden, John Kerry and Bill Gates jetting around the world.
But “green solutions” are a huge, expensive, scam. Wind and solar don’t do much to make the environment cleaner or change the climate either.
WHO wants to ration personal ‘carbon (CO2) footprints’. Their argument is ‘pollution kills’. If you don’t go along, you’re responsible for the deaths of others.
This means that when you use up your ‘carbon allotment’ for the month, you can’t buy that plane ticket, hamburger or steak, beer or soda or buy gas for your car.
If you still can afford a car.
Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes often require regular people to give up their freedom and rights to “serve the greater good.” They used the “care for others” argument during COVID.
To force people to do lockdowns, social isolation, wearing masks, and getting the jab.
Covid policies were a warmup for climate lockdowns and freedom limits.
The globalists are not dumb. They know that they can’t get rid of all gas-powered cars by 2030 or 2050.
They know that once the EV goals and mandates are in place, you won’t be able to drive very far, so you won’t need a car in the first place. Poor people will not be able to afford cars at all.
They also support 15 minute cities. That will control everyone by limiting us from coming and going as we please. All for the nonexistent ‘climate crisis’.
Oxford UK, has proposed fining people $70 if they leave their 15 minute city zone more than 100 times a year. That is just twice a week.
And they call this a conspiracy theory and isn’t about taking away freedom and controlling people. Really?
We need to resist these globalists at every turn. Our Republican Congress’s opposition to the false UN ‘climate emergency’ hysteria is welcome and needed.
We need to vote every one of our elected legislators out of office that agree with the climate hysteria anti-freedom, control agenda.
Your personal freedom, affordable living and energy security are at stake.
https://principia-scientific.com/buy-into-the-globalist-climate-hysteria-at-your-own-peril/
***********************************************Climate Alarmism Is A Lie That Must Stop
Since 1992 and the Earth Summit in Rio, the West has been living under the spell of a “climate emergency” that is repeatedly renewed but never happened
Since then, the West – and only the West — has set itself the main goal of reducing CO2 emissions (and other ‘greenhouse’ gases, implied in the rest of this article).
It is now 2023, time for a review:
CO2 emissions have not stopped growing and will continue to grow.
Since 1992, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise. With China opening an average of two new coal-fired power plants a week and India apparently more determined than ever to continue its development curve, as is the entire non-Western world, global CO2 emissions will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.
There is not yet any available, inexpensive alternative to fossil fuels.
This increase in global CO2 emissions would be inevitable even if the West persists in its efforts to reduce emissions: Western reductions are — and will continue to be — more than offset by the increase in emissions in the rest of the world.
Will the warming target of the Paris Agreement — “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” — be met?
Achieving the Paris Agreement target requires drastic reductions in CO2 emissions (says the IPCC). This has not happened. We are not on track. This global reduction will not happen.
Therefore, the Paris Agreement target will not be achieved. This is now a certainty or, in the words of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a projection with a very high degree of reliability.
Will the EU’s target of “decarbonisation by 2050” be met?
Even more extreme than the Paris Agreement is the EU’s goal of decarbonisation. As stated earlier, even if the EU ceased to exist, global CO2 emissions would continue to rise. From this perspective, reducing European emissions only makes sense if it is part of an effective global framework, not a national or regional one.
“Setting an example” to regimes and countries around the world that often hate the West simply enables those countries to grow stronger, while the countries setting the example weaken themselves by committing themselves to severe economic disadvantage — while having no effect on the climate.
Do we really believe that China, Russia and India will let the West dictate their economic conditions and CO2 emissions? Meanwhile, as they grow, they would doubtless be extremely happy to see the West hobbling itself.
Frans Timmermans, First Vice-President of the European Commission, probably the most zealous extremist to come to power in Europe since 1945 — whose chief of cabinet is the former leader of Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear campaign — multiplies measures, initiatives and declarations aimed at drastically reducing European CO2 emissions — even at the cost of Europe’s economic devastation, at the cost of freedom, and at the cost of causing a cruel increase in Europe’s dependence on China’s rare earth minerals.
The climate knows neither Europe nor Asia. Nothing that Europe and the West accomplish in this field has the slightest meaning if reduction of emissions is not global.
Would the economic consequences of even the most pessimistic IPCC global warming scenario matter?
Let us now look at the issue of the economic impact of CO2 emissions.
The climate expert and physicist Steven Koonin, former Under Secretary for Science during the Obama Administration, notes in his latest book Unsettled that even if the IPCC’s most pessimistic warming scenario were to come true, the global economic impact would be negligible (Unsettled: Dallas, BenBella Books, 2021, chapter 9, ‘Apocalypses that ain’t’, page 179s.)
In its fifth and latest (full) report, the IPCC estimates that a 3° warming — twice the Paris Agreement target — would reduce global economic growth by three percent.
Three per cent a year? No, three percent by the year 2100.
This amount represents a reduction in global economic growth of 0.04 percent a year, a number that is barely measurable statistically. That is in the IPCC’s pessimistic scenario. In the more optimistic scenarios, the economic impact of warming will be virtually non-existent. The IPCC, AR5, Working Group II, chapter 10 states:
“For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers…. Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices… and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”
In other words, according to the data of the IPCC itself, the economic growth and well-being in Europe and the United States are more threatened by extremist and delusional environmental policies than by global warming.
As Jean-Pierre Schaeken Willemaers of the Thomas More Institute, president of the Energy, Climate and Environment Cluster, noted on February 22:
“The EU and its Member States have focused on climate policy, mobilizing enormous financial and human resources, thereby reducing the resources necessary for the development of its industry and weakening the security of energy supply.”
The lesson of all this is simple: future generations will judge us harshly for allowing extremist environmental activism to enfeeble us in the West, while a hostile East – China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — continue to advance their industrial and military capabilities.
Instead of trying to fight CO2 emissions, we would do better to invest in researching ways to make reliable supplies of energy both cleaner and less expensive so that everyone — by choice — will rush to use them.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-alarmism-is-a-lie-that-must-stop/
************************************************Australian Pumped Hydro project in big trouble
Australia’s power grid faces a fresh threat from blackouts after the federal government-owned Snowy Hydro revealed a potential two-year delay to the $5.9bn Snowy 2.0 expansion along with a further cost blowout.
Snowy said the commercial operation of all units may be delayed until the end of the decade with a potential latest start-up date of December 2029 and an earliest date of December 2028.
First power is now due between June and December 2028 at the latest with an easiest date of June to December 2027.
“Snowy Hydro anticipates that the timeline for full commercial operation is delayed by a further 12-24 months from the current publicly released dates,” the company said in a statement.
Newly installed Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes told The Australian the new completion forecast was a “realistic, achievable range”, with the company hoping to bring the project as early as it could. “My expectation – and obviously my objective – is to refine it to the upside,” he said.
The Snowy project has been dogged by a series of project issues including the collapse of one of its contractors, Clough, delays through Covid-19 and, more recently, a major tunnel boring machine getting stuck in the Snowy Mountains.
The delay of the massive hydro expansion will now significantly hike the risk of blackouts in the power grid later this decade as coal plants exit the system. It may also increase pressure on Origin Energy to rethink plans to close its giant Eraring coal station in NSW by August 2025.
Any delay will also add to electricity system risks after the grid operator warned of worsening forecast reliability in NSW in 2026 and 2027 should Snowy not hit the original 2.0 deadline.
Mr Barnes said extra detail on the “budget implications of the project reset” will be released in July 2023, and this will be clearly communicated with key project stakeholders, with a renegotiation of the original fixed-price contract with the contractor, the Future Generation Joint Venture (FGJV) – now run by Italy’s Webuild – on the cards.
“The contract has been a struggle. We want them to be motivated around a realistic time frame. So it’s appropriate to want to reset, which will inevitably mean some renegotiation of the contract,” Mr Barnes said.
“My job is to try and get everybody going in the same direction, and a fixed price contract in this inflationary environment doesn’t have everybody going in the same direction.”
Snowy blamed the delays and cost hikes on four factors: the mobilisation and resourcing implications of the Covid-19 pandemic; the effect of global supply chain disruption and inflation impacting the cost and availability of a skilled workforce, materials, and shipping. Snowy said design elements also required more time to complete due to their technically complex nature, with the final design now being more expensive to construct.
Mr Barnes said Snowy’s contractor had been forced to build more roads than initially forecast to ensure equipment and materials could be moved safely, as well as more complicated changes to the scope of the project, including the need to line a key incline tunnel with steel.
Snowy also pointed to the impact of variable site and geological conditions, including the soft ground that has “paused” tunnel boring machine Florence’s progress at Tantangara since before Christmas.
Mr Barnes said a slurry plant that should allow Florence to get moving again would be commissioned within a few weeks, and Snowy and FGJV were also looking for other ways to make up for lost time on the headrace tunnel.
“One of the things we’re thinking about is whether we tackle this headrace tunnel from both ends,” he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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