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Epic Fail: Seven Big Failed Environmentalist Predictions
The Federalist ^ | 04/24/2015 | Robert Tracinski

Posted on 04/25/2015 12:52:22 PM PDT by 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.


(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Society; Weather
KEYWORDS: canada; climatechange; environmentalist; fracking; globalwarming; globalwarminghoax; hydrocarbons; methane; opec; petroleum; populationbomb
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1 posted on 04/25/2015 12:52:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Forgot to mention the Ozone Hole.


2 posted on 04/25/2015 1:04:38 PM PDT by MNDude
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To: sauropod

.


3 posted on 04/25/2015 1:09:18 PM PDT by sauropod (I am His and He is mine.)
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To: MNDude
Forgot to mention the Ozone Hole.

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

4 posted on 04/25/2015 1:14:55 PM PDT by Bob (No, being a US Senator and the Secretary of State are not accomplishments; they're jobs.)
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To: MNDude

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


5 posted on 04/25/2015 1:17:16 PM PDT by Fungi (So you think you know anything about evolution? Think again.)
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To: SeekAndFind

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


6 posted on 04/25/2015 1:17:29 PM PDT by catbertz
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To: Bob
...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.

7 posted on 04/25/2015 1:22:43 PM PDT by Calvin Locke
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To: Bob

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?


8 posted on 04/25/2015 1:24:26 PM PDT by hadaclueonce (It is not heaven, it is Iowa. Everyone gets a "Corn Check")
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To: SeekAndFind
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.)

9 posted on 04/25/2015 1:29:02 PM PDT by RayChuang88 (FairTax: America's economic cure)
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To: Fungi

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


10 posted on 04/25/2015 1:29:05 PM PDT by rockinqsranch ((Dems, Libs, Socialists, call 'em what you will. They ALL have fairies livin' in their trees.))
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To: SeekAndFind

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


11 posted on 04/25/2015 1:33:06 PM PDT by rockinqsranch ((Dems, Libs, Socialists, call 'em what you will. They ALL have fairies livin' in their trees.))
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To: SeekAndFind

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


12 posted on 04/25/2015 1:33:27 PM PDT by hecticskeptic (In life it's important to know what you believeÂ….but more more importantly, why you believe it.)
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To: rockinqsranch

Yep, in third to the last paragraph.


13 posted on 04/25/2015 1:51:46 PM PDT by Fungi (So you think you know anything about evolution? Think again.)
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To: Fungi
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."
14 posted on 04/25/2015 1:53:37 PM PDT by Skepolitic
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To: SeekAndFind

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.


15 posted on 04/25/2015 1:56:01 PM PDT by Nip (BOHEICA and TANSTAAFL - both seem very appropriate today.)
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To: SeekAndFind

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.


16 posted on 04/25/2015 1:56:53 PM PDT by Skepolitic
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To: rockinqsranch

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.


17 posted on 04/25/2015 2:02:09 PM PDT by Walrus (I love the America that used to be ---I hate the America that now IS!)
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To: RayChuang88

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.


18 posted on 04/25/2015 2:36:06 PM PDT by The Antiyuppie ("When small men cast long shadows, then it is very late in the day".)
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To: SeekAndFind

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...


19 posted on 04/25/2015 2:39:17 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously-you won't live through it anyway-Enjoy Yourself ala Louis Prima)
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To: Bob

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


20 posted on 04/25/2015 2:41:34 PM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; Not averse to Going Bronson.)
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