13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970

Ricochet ^ | 4/21/2017 | Jon Gabriel

[freedumb2003]

Saturday is Earth Day — an annual event first launched on April 22, 1970. The inaugural festivities (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.

Sound familiar? Behold the coming apocalypse, as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
3. “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
4. “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.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [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
6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
7. “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.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
8. “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
9. “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.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

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A version of this article was posted in 2014.

[ssapro]

Makes sense, but I often see that many shops no longer fix, they merely replace parts. I suppose you’re stuck with the more expensive guy that probably knows older bikes.

[wally_bert]

It doesn’t bother me.

People still complement it.

I can always use it as a photo or video prop, probably against a greenscreen with an actor type for some stock project.

Maybe when K5 comes home, it can go to the storage building and I can see about a bike lift.

[maddog55]

[KSCITYBOY]

btt

[Crucial]

Wow, that and the Warren Commission...

Arlen Specter was a total slimeball.

[plain talk]

He defended someone who didn’t just murder their girlfriend. Einhorn kept her in a trunk for months in his apartment until the decaying corpse oozed out and was dripping down in the apartment below. When police finally got inside the apartment it took them a while to even identify it was a corpse. When police asked Ira about it he was impassive and shrugged “you found what you found”.

How does anyone defend that? especially someone with political ambitions as Arlen clearly had at that time. It is quite strange.

[GOPsterinMA]

“Happy Days” Star Erin Moran, dead at 56.

[fieldmarshaldj]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3546475/posts

:-(

[kearnyirish2]

In San Francisco some nuts were distributing literature in front of a building with a “high water mark” that had been painted on it long ago (to show how far the oceans would rise due to global warming); I politely asked one of the dimwits how much the water had risen since it was painted. He gave me a weird look and walked away; at least he wasn’t rude or nasty.

The simple truth is that environmentalism is the new religion of people who have turned their backs on God; they can abandon families/children, abort babies, and engage in deviant acts - but as long as they recycle they are “good”...

[GOPsterinMA]

Thank you.

[gogeo]

Sounds like “consensus” to me.

[The_Republic_Of_Maine]

bump for research

[Crucial]

He was probably one of the first sociopathic globalists.

[Chances Are]

Jeez, I wish I’d been with you for that!

I think your post made my day! Thanx!

CA....

[Blue Collar Christian]

Probably part of the consensus crowd crying whatever “science” is calling the global warming scam currently.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

“I particularly love this one.”

Particularly the “fill ‘er up, Buddy” part. Unless you’re in New Jersey, “Buddy” is long gone. You do it yourself.

[hal ogen]

E dry “earth day” I burn at least 2 old tires to celebrate...

[hal ogen]

Every “earth day” I burn at least 2 old tires to celebrate...

[Jimmy Valentine's brother]

I'm no scientist but I think that "aerospace engineering" and "theoretical plasma physics" are very very separate disciplines

Ooh good catch. Guess there is more than one Elizabeth Warren type lurking a Harvard.

[Right Wing Assault]

I am stuned! The words "could" and "might" do not appear in any of the 13.