Posted on 01/02/2023 11:46:04 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Earth is headed for a sixth extinction, warned biologist Paul Ehrlich on “60 Minutes” this Sunday. And since Ehrlich has predicted about 20 extinctions over the past 60 years, he’s a leading expert on the issue.
Why didn’t “60 Minutes” have the decency to find a fresh-faced, yet-to-be-discredited neo-Malthusian to hyperventilate about the end of the world? Why didn’t producers invite a single guest to push back against theories that have been reliably debunked by reality? Because the media is staffed by environmental pessimists and doomsayers who need to believe the world is in constant peril due to the excesses of capitalism. And Ehrlich is perhaps our greatest alarmist.
His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” is among the most destructive of the 20th century. The long screed not only made Ehrlich a celebrity, but gave end-of-day alarmists a patina of scientific legitimacy, popularized alarmism as a political tool, and normalized authoritarian and anti-humanist policies as a cure. Ehrlich’s progeny are other media-favored hysterics by other antihumanists, such as Al Gore or Eric Holthaus or Greta Thunberg, who skipped learning history and science because she also believes we are on the precipice of “mass extinction.” And none of this is to mention the thousands of other Little Ehrlichs nudging you to eat insects, gluing themselves to roads, and demanding you surrender the most basic conveniences and necessities of modernity.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the opening line of “The Population Bomb” reads. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” Ehrlich wrote...
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
How did I survive the '70s? I must be one of the lucky few who managed to scrape by on tree bark and grass ...
Somebody ought to inform these yahoos that this old planet has a MINIMUM of 1007 years left before God vaporizes it with a fervent heat …
Third worlders were sterilized in exchange for access to utilities-thanks to The Population Bomb/emergent mass starvation doomsday science. I use this as an example of theoretical scientific theory fail all the time.
PS it is emergent global warming currently being sold-they leave out the word emergent purposely even though they seek drastic and immediate action.
I remember him from the 70s. Sorry I missed the show, the laughs would’ve been great. I’m not surprised that 60 minutes had him on. I haven’t watched those idiots in years.
Some years ago I read the late Dixie Lee Ray’s book “ Environmental Overkill”.
One of the first books I read that thoroughly debunked Erlich and his minions.
Also one of the most thoroughly RESEARCHED books I’ve ever read.
Even though she wrote it, I believe, in the 1990s, it’s still a great read.
So Ehrlich is called a neo-Malthusian. A few years ago, I found out that even when Malthus was alive, we had a cure for overpopulation. All we have to do is educate girls. When women see the career opportunities available for them, they won’t want to spend the best years of their lives barefoot and pregnant. That’s a big reason why birthrates have gone down in the world’s advanced countries.
Better explanation here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/the-extinction-next-time.php
Plus they just can’t stop themselves-
It’s “DAMN THE TRUTH, FULL LIES AHEAD!”
The irrepressible doomster is 90 years old.
None of his predictions have ever been true.
My family ate remaindered copies of The Population Bomb to survive.
Ehrlich’s scientific specialty was not exactly human population problems. He is an expert in lepidoptera. That’s right. Paul Ehrlich is a professional chaser of butterflies, who stumbled onto a gig that paid way better.
I remember it too. Ehrlich showed with geometric logic that not only was there a second key to the wardroom icebox, but that it would be impossible for agriculture to keep up with population growth. We’d all be starving to death by the 80s.
It has always amazed me that Ehrlich became famous, and doubtless wealthy peddling his catastrophist nonsense at the exact same time that a guy named Norman Borlaug from a little town in Iowa was taking the green revolution to places like India and Pakistan. In the course of a decade he helped double grain production in those places, and the improvements in agriculture in the third world haven’t stopped.
All anyone had to do was look at the actual events of the world to know that Ehrlich was full of it.
Cui bono?
60 Minutes has never let facts get in the way of a good scare story.
I already finished mine. Would you like a lift?
Thanks for bringing up Borlaug and the GR.
For a better interpretation of the population “hockey stick”., see Dr Nathanael Jensen’s genetic exposition. It’s available on you tube. It’s mind blowing.
I found a quote from 1974 in which he claims that we would be out of petroleum “in the next quarter century.”
Malthus didn't have any research to back up his claim, he just pulled it out of his ass, and eventually repudiated his well-known trope -- but of course, there are still those, like Ehrlich, who saddle on and ride it, even around here.
Julian Simon, alas, died a bit too soon, and Ehrlich is only alive because it's against the law to, well, you know.
“What about all the new discoveries of critters people thought were long extinct?”
WHAT? LIKE MODERATE DEMOCRATS?
Because they need to foster and nourish a state of fear.
Further, there have always been end-of-the-world doomsayers throughout history. Yet here we still are.
Why they decided to exhume Ehrlich and not present someone more contemporaneous is puzzling, as Ehrlich has been thoroughly disproven by history.
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