A few doomsday predictions from the first Earth Day that never quite materialized
Yesterday was Earth Day, so I hoped you hugged a tree or kissed a marmoset, or something.
But way back in 1970 when the first Earth Day was celebrated, several prominent scientists made a bevy of predictions about the near future that makes us wonder what it was they were smoking.
Mark Perry of AEI complied a nice little list of predictions made around the first Earth Day that are cringe-worthy for the predictor and hysterically funny for the rest of us.
Here are a few of the 18 that Perry dug up:
4. Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make, Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.
5. Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born, wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled Eco-Catastrophe! 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.
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the Great Die-Off.
7. It is already too late to avoid mass starvation, declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, 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.
9. In January 1970, Life reported, Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to supportthe following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollutionby 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.
And no list of idiotic predictions from that time period would be complete without a nod to those who believed that the #1 problem facing humanity was global cooling:
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years, he declared. 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.
Perry says to keep these predictions in mind when examining what's on the Earth Day website today:
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/04/a_few_doomsday_predictions_from_the_first_earth_day_that_never_quite_materialized_.html#ixzz3Y8nv0hEY
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