Epic Fail: Seven Big Failed Environmentalist Predictions

The Federalist ^ | 04/24/2015 | Robert Tracinski

[SeekAndFind]

I recently discussed what it would take to prove that global warming is actually occurring, that it is caused by humans, and that it will be catastrophic. But that’s not the full picture. To understand why so many of us are so skeptical about global warming, you have to understand the environmentalists’ larger track record: a long series of failed predictions and bogus prognostications of doom.

It has been 45 years now since the first Earth Day. You would think that in this time frame, given the urgency with which we were told we had to confront the supposed threats to the environment—Harvard biologist George Wald told us, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken”—at least one of the big environmental disasters should have come to fruition. Fifteen years ago, an article in Reason took a look at claims like this from the first Earth Day in 1970. The specific quotations have been helpfully excerpted here and have been bounced around a lot on the Internet and on conservative talk radio for the last few days. It is a comical litany of forecasting gone wrong.

The author of that old Reason article, by the way, was Ronald Bailey, who has since turned alarmist, in the style of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and who is the one asking what it would take for us to accept the reality of global warming.

He should remember what he reported back then and recall how thoroughly and irrevocably the environmentalists burned up their scientific credibility.

As a refresher, here’s a look at seven big environmentalist predictions that failed.

[MNDude]

Forgot to mention the Ozone Hole.

[sauropod]

.

[Bob]

Forgot to mention the Ozone Hole.

Weren't we also supposed to be killed by Acid Rain several years ago?

[Fungi]

Great article, forgot ozone and acid rain and a few other things.

[catbertz]

Great read of all the nonsense fear mongering in my lifetime.

[Calvin Locke]

...Acid Rain ...

Well, once volcanoes "became" the major source of acid rain, attempting to blame US industry/consumerism for it didn't poll well.

However, I heard a Canadian broadcast about a lake that was tested for pollutants, and then retested after a forest fire around it, and there was an increase in heavy metals.

Naturally, they blamed US industry for spewing all that stuff earlier in the 20th century when the trees were growing and picked it all up.

[hadaclueonce]

amazing the ozone layer healed after we stopped launching the shuttle every month to find out why the ozone layer had a hole.

was that budget maker there?

[RayChuang88]

The great famines since the first Earth Day in 1970 were caused by war or deliberate political action--for example, the infamous famine in Ethiopia during the civil war there in the 1980's.

And at least in the Western world, we've made great strides in cleaning up the air, thanks to tighter controls on automobile and industrial emissions. (Indeed, it's very rare we get high-level smog alerts in the Los Angeles Basin anymore.)

[rockinqsranch]

If you had read it to the end you’d have read he wrote how he purposely left those out.

[rockinqsranch]

I see much of the commentary at this point is telling us they did not read the entire article before posting.

[hecticskeptic]

Earth Day? I think he meant Lenin’s birthday, no?

[Fungi]

Yep, in third to the last paragraph.

[Skepolitic]

It was a bit light on the false predictions of widespread species prediction. From a Boston Globe article: "In 1979, Berkeley ecologist Norman Myers published a book called “The Sinking Ark,” which claimed 40,000 species were disappearing each year. The next decade, a biologist who worked for the World Wildlife Fund predicted up to 20 percent of all species would disappear by the turn of the millennium. That didn’t happen, but the drumbeat of alarms continues: A much-publicized paper in 2004 warned that by 2050, climate change could put 1 million species at risk of extinction."

[Nip]

My favorite prediction from the early Earth Day’s was Icebergs in the Gulf of Mexico by 2000. But, was when the big bugaboo was Global Cooling.

[Skepolitic]

Of course the bozos with PhD’s who made predictions back in the 1970s.

They were operating under the false premise that Marxism would prevail. If that premise had been correct, there would have been global crop failures, mass starvation, and utter resource depletion.

[Walrus]

That’s the way it often works around here. I’ve been guilty of it a few times m’self.

GREAT article. Too bad nobody in the MSM will read it.

[The Antiyuppie]

By amazing coincidence, I’d peg that year as when this place started to go to hell. I don’t think that it caused it, but it was a symptom.

[Vendome]

They even predicted women would stop hitting on me and just yesterday I couldn’t get rid of another pest.

Damned attractive too but, I was in the middle of something amd needed her to leave.

Threw her back into the pond...

[Secret Agent Man]

I’m still waiting to freeze to death from the late 1970s ice age doom and gloom predictions.