60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich's Failed Doomsaying One More Time

Reason ^ | 1.3.2023 | Ronald Bailey

[nickcarraway]

The Population Bomber has never been right, but is never in doubt that the world is coming to its end.

Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, "I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to."

Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: predicted that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.

At least CBS correspondent Scott Pelley acknowledged, "The alarm Ehrlich sounded in '68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world." Nevertheless, Pelley credulously reports Ehrlich's assertion that the world is undergoing a Sixth Mass Extinction owing to humanity's rising population and consumption. Paleontologists have identified five previous mass extinction events during the past 450 million years in which something like three-quarters of species disappeared due to events like supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.

In fact, just as positive trends in global agricultural productivity that were already underway 50 years ago nullified Ehrlich's prophecy of inevitable famines that would kill hundreds of millions, current trends in agricultural productivity, population, urbanization, and dematerialization will likely negate his extinction auguries and predictions of civilizational collapse. Why? Because an increasingly wealthy and technologically adept humanity will be withdrawing from nature over the course of this century.

As the result of continuing increases in crop productivity, the world has reached peak agricultural land which means that more land will be freed up to revert to nature as the century evolves. In addition, global human population will likely peak around 2050 and begin falling. Furthermore, people will be depopulating the landscape as they move into cities. Currently, some 56 percent of humanity live in cities and that number is projected to increase to 68 percent by 2050 and 85 percent by 2100. What that means is that the number of people living on the landscape (many as subsistence farmers) will drop from 3.5 billion now to around 1.2 billion by 2100. Again, this will free up land into which wild species can expand and grow.

In his 2020 article on resource production and use, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis researcher Arnulf Grübler outlines a scenario in which technological progress enables a richer humanity to cut its overall natural resource use from about 100 gigatons per year now to 83 gigatons by 2050. (It's worth noting that about half of the current resource use involves non-metallic minerals, e.g., cement, sand, and stone.) Humanity can withdraw increasingly from nature by getting more and more value from ever less resource use.

Human activities have indeed been putting greater pressure on other species, both on land and in the seas. "The data are rock solid. I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an extinction crisis," asserted Ehrlich's Stanford colleague biologist Anthony Barnosky in the 60 Minutes segment. "It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That's what mass extinction looks like." Assuming Barnosky's estimates are right, just how long would it take for three-quarters of the world's species to go extinct? "If currently threatened species—those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable—actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as three to 22 centuries," said Barnosky in the U.K. Mirror back in 2011. Three centuries is slow in terms of global geological and biological processes, but it is really fast in terms of the earlier noted positive human technological, economic, and social progress trends.

In 2018, in their article in the journal BioScience, three researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society see biodiversity conservation reaching "breakthrough" after passing through a "bottleneck" over the next few decades. Ultimately, they projected that over the course of this century increasing wealth and urbanization will enable the global restoration of wild nature. From the article:

For the first time in the Anthropocene, the global demographic and economic trends that have resulted in unprecedented destruction of the environment are now creating the necessary conditions for a possible renaissance of nature. Drawing reasonable inferences from current patterns, we can predict that 100 years from now, the Earth could be inhabited by between 6 and 8 billion people, with very few remaining in extreme poverty, most living in towns and cities, and nearly all participating in a technologically driven, interconnected market economy. Building on the scholarship of others in demography, economics, sociology, and conservation biology, here, we articulate a theory of social–environmental change that describes the simultaneous and interacting effects of urban lifestyles on fertility, poverty alleviation, and ideation. By recognizing the shifting dynamics of these macrodrivers, conservation practice has the potential to transform itself from a discipline managing declines ("bottleneck") to a transformative movement of recovery ("breakthrough")

CBS and 60 Minutes should be ashamed of promoting Ehrlich's oft-debunked nonsense.

Note: I have debunked Ehrlich's bogus prophecies many, many, many, many times. For more background, see my books The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting, with my co-author Marian Tupy.

[hinckley buzzard]

Ehrlich and his colleagues have been thinking the same things for over 50 years. And so far they have thought wrong.

[Mastador1]

This guy is an idiot, a highly educated idiot but an idiot all the same. I remember well his fearmongering well, and Johnny Carson helping to promote it on his show. Interesting that despite Ehrlich’s doom and gloom and gloom about mass starvation and death because dear Gaia just couldn’t support even the number of souls when he he wrote his marvel of bullshit, here we are with even higher global population who have been fed and the only reason people do go hungry and starve is because of local and global corruption.

[oldguy1776]

There is no Earth...we are all living an illusion projected by the galactic overlords from Alpha Beta. UFO’s are their observation probes.

[SamAdams76]

Can't believe this guy is still around. Elon Musk was roasting this loser on Twitter the other day.

I remember reading "The Population Bomb" as a child in the early 1970s. My mother was always the alarmist type and so had plenty of "gloom and doom" books on the shelves. Depressed the hell out of me though as I was naive enough back then to take it all serously.

[SpaceBar]

When an individual predicts the calamitous end of society they are labeled a crackpot.

When an entire religion does it, it’s called faith and prophesy.

[Redmen4ever]

Paul Erlich isn’t a scientist, at least not any longer. He has transitioned to a religious fanatic.

What he called the population explosion, and what is today called climate change is a pseudo-science. It’s based on a limited understanding of the way the world works, extrapolated far out of sample. That it has been completely refuted by subsequent history is of no consequence to true believers, because they are mystics.

They insulate themselves from reality with a veneer of “common sense.” For example, common sense tells you that there’s the earth has a limited ability to sustain life. No, the earth doesn’t have a limited. We human beings change the earth. We have no idea how powerful we will become. We can irrigate deserts and farm the oceans. We may one day be able to tap into the energy within the earth and in the Sun. As far as we have come since the start of the industrial revolution about two hundred years ago, we can go as far in the next several hundred years.

[Steely Tom]

I too remember the wall-to-wall promotion that was given this book, in the 1967-68 time period. Not only was it in the display window of the local bookstore, but big posters were displayed in the window too. It was all the buzz among the chattering class at that time, on TV, in Newsweek and Time (I think each of those very influential magazines gave it cover-story treatment).

The book gave a great accelerative kick to the birth control and ZPG movements, which were already well underway and funded by many governments, including ours.

Western countries took these policy suggestions to heart, with family sizes falling to close to or below the replacement rate. Of course, the third-world countries paid no attention.

Then, the switcheroo. When the first-world countries realized that their populations weren't growing fast enough to sustain the debt load that were the result of their deficit spending policies, their governments started saying "we've got to import more workers to replace the ones that we've lost!"

Guess where they started getting the replacement workers from?

[SamAdams76]

Younger people today stressing about silly things like global warming should know that these doom and gloom grifters have been around for over a half century. Below is another book from that era that my mother had a copy of. I was 13 in 1975 and yet here I am. I guess I'm a survivor. I even survived my mother's baloney and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Of which there was always plenty.

I found the opening paragraph to "Population Bomb", for everybody's entertainment...this was written in 1968. If I wrote something so ridiculously wrong like that, I would be embarrassed to go outside in public.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole...

[Lurker]

No one ever talks about Julian Simon. He handed Erlich his ass quite publicly over this nonsense.

L

[SeekAndFind]

Ehrlich is 90 years old.

You can’t teach an old dog news tricks.

[Mr. K]

They are bringing it out now because THEY WANT TO DEPOPULATE the planet.

There are actually nutballs who WANT it to happen.

[GOPJ]

60 Minutes needs to focus on the United States first... we can assist with the solution IF illegals don’t sink us first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muw22wTePqQ

Gumballs: Immigrants by the numbers.

[nickcarraway]

I'll take my chances with the dog.

Interestingly, his name means honest. He probably really does believe this stuff.

[rxh4n1]

“It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That’s what mass extinction looks like.”

I look at my window and there aren’t any birds cause it’s mid-winter. They’re smarter than this idiot. They like global warming.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

I was big in the environmental movement in our high school at that time. I found $20 and bought the screed with it. To me it was gospel. I was a card-carrying member of about 14 environmental groups, including ZPG. … I eventually met Jesus — or I should say He found me — and everything changed.

Many here won’t like this, but I foresee that eventually solar and other power sources combined with domicile battery storage will be normal. There will then be extra power available that can be used for desalinization, vastly reducing the worldwide water shortage and turning desserts into highly productive farmland.

This assumes we are delivered from hell-bent depopulation overlords.

[Organic Panic]

“In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”

I remember teachers trying to scare the hell out of us with the “Coming Ice Age.” But then came acid rain and the OZONE hole from our hair spray in the 80s.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

If someone ever creates a “Museum of Wrong,” Erlich’s statue belongs in the atrium.

[roadcat]

Depressed the hell out of me though as I was naive enough back then to take it all serously.

I also remember reading "The Population Bomb" in the early 1970s. My girlfriend's sister declared that no one should birth a baby in such a world. I married my girlfriend and we had our first baby in the late 1970s, and more later. Her sister eventually had a child in the early 1990s as a 40-year-old; I guess she finally gave up on the doom and gloom predictions.

[Glenmore]

But eventually they will be right; unlimited growth against finite resources is not possible.