On Wednesday, we (well, not necessarily “we”, but “some of us”) celebrated Earth Day.
Earth day has been celebrated every year since 1970, by people who are concerned with the environment (including everyday people and activists…as well as extremists and whacko lunatics).
The idea of Earth Day is to save us from the horrific consequences of defiling the environment which will surely ensue if we don\’t do everything these people tell us we should.
Global Warming will melt the ice caps, ocean levels will rise dramatically (anyone want to buy some new beachfront property..in Kansas?), and fracking will pollute all our water as it collapses the earth from within. Stuff like that.
With the above in mind, Mark J. Perry, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, has given us an article titled “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year”.
I thought you might like to see a sampling of those predictions. So here are just five – keeping in mind, of course, that the other 13 are just as apocalyptic and just as spectacularly wrong:
“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.”
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.”
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…”
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.
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.”
So, what do you think? How\’d those predictions work out? And how does it make you feel about the current crop of similarly apocalyptic predictions?
Tell you what: let\’s discuss them 45 years from now…unless Global Warming has fricasseed us all, and we have fallen into a 2,000 foot fracking crater filled with polluted water, that is.
