Posted on 04/25/2009 8:08:45 AM PDT by Titus-Maximus
Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.
April 22, 2009, 4:00 am
Earth Day is past now, but this article is so popular we’re pinning it at the top of the home page today so everyone looking for it can find it. For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.
Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.
Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” • Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” • George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” • Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” • New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day
“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.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“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.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” • Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“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, professor, North Texas State University
“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….” • Life Magazine, January 1970
“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.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
complete falsehoods. All one needs is to watch the Discovery Channel. The Earth is ever changing. It could care less about what I drive or the next door neighbor does. Ice ages come and go, and so do global warming events. heck... we even get Asteroid hits every couple million yrs. Let’s not forget the Sun, all it takes a lick of particles beyond the normal bounds and we are gone. We are so fn vain.
Read “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. Everything’s getting better: life-expectancy, food, wealth distribution, forrestation, energy, natural resources, water, pollution, waste, chemicals, biodiversity, global warming, etc. Basically, everything complained about on posters I saw in elementary schools are just fine, thanks.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make”
This has been repeated and disproven ad nauseum since Malthus. When will it go away?
Our current ACTING president’s science advisor Dr. John P. Holdren was a collaborator and student of the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, and both pushed the population bomb junk science.
Both are real kooks in every sense of the word.
Now, now. Don’t you know that it was all those sincere greenies, visualizing good things for mother earth, that staved off all of the famine and pestilence?
I wonder if any of those ‘professors’ and PHD’s who predicted doom then like algore is doing now still have their jobs.
I STILL wanna know why algore gets to run around freely ANYWHERE he wishes to spout this crap and make a fortune at it. Why isn’t anybody investigating HIM for fraud???
Liberals are morons.
I was on belmont Plateau and I was scared stiff about Global Cooling then a few yerars later jacque Cousteau said by 1984 we could walk on the water it will be Like Molasses!
Ira Einhorn, Earth Day’s Dirty Secret
http://www.magic-city-news.com/Editor_s_Desk_34/Ira_Einhorn_Earth_Day_s_Dirty_Secret_57095709.shtml
“You won’t find Ira Einhorn’s name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.”
Liberals always lie, and when it’s proven that they are lying, they always repeat the same lies over and over again, but even stronger.
I like the “billions of tons of toxins are spewed into the atmosphere every day” line. If that were even remotely true, we’d have to cut our way through the fog with a chainsaw.
An entirely more frightening possibility is that they truly believed what they were saying.
A lot of stupid predictions, but this has to be the stupidest:
“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.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Um, the natural atmosphere already consists of 80% N2.
This scenario is beyond impossible.
They were “watermelons” then, and so they are today. Green on the outside; Red on the inside. Thoughtful waste management and conservation of resources in the context of protecting individual property rights is a smart and valuable
program. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with modern “environmentalism”, whose purpose is power and control over unearned wealth.
I believe that claim referred to nitrous oxide and nitric oxide emissions. Hasn’t happened, either.
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