18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of  Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

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,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

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 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….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “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.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “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.’”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

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.”

MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded tomorrow with media hype, and claims like this from the official Earth Day website:

 Scientists warn us that climate change could accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival and everything we love. We call on you to keep global temperature rise under the unacceptably dangerous level of 2 degrees C, by phasing out carbon pollution to zero. To achieve this, you must urgently forge realistic global, national and local agreements, to rapidly shift our societies and economies to 100% clean energy by 2050. Do this fairly, with support to the most vulnerable among us. Our world is worth saving and now is our moment to act. But to change everything, we need everyone. Join us.

Finally, think about this question, posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hype, hysteria and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by the “environmental grievance hustlers.”

 

17
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
Stucky

I absolutely love reading bone-headed predictions ….. like Admin’s NCCA picks.

Some of those predictions, like #4 and #14, still have a chance of happening. Just give it a little more time.

Anonymous
Anonymous

So how to know what cataclysmic predictions are going to prove wrong?

Easy, if they are not in accord with the prophecies they are not going to happen.

And if they are, nothing is going to happen that will change it so quit worrying about them and just live life doing the best you can. Doing the best you can is all that God will ask of you, but he does ask that you do that.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

They get your fucking hopes up with predictions like those, they never come true and I’m still surrounded by about 7 billion idiots (present company excepted). Whenever I get depressed, I try to remember…pizza.

Stucky

NCCA?? Jeebus what a dumbass.

Admin, aka “no nookie Jimbo”, filled with the Holy Spirit while in college.
comment image

Dutchman
Dutchman

Remember ZPG (zero population growth) from 1969 / 1970?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Read that ocean will be dead in 35 years.Since fukushima nuclear accident,now I believe it.

IndenturedServant

I have infinitely more empathy for animals than I do for humans. Their lives are tough enough without us.

Anonymous
Anonymous

I hear radiation deteriorates plastic, so Fukushima will clean up our oceans.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

That’s a cool turtle. It’s like a figure eight. We should put plastic belts around kids when they turn 12. It could fix the obesity problem.

Rise Up
Rise Up

That turtle picture is amazing, and sad. There are miles-long islands of trash in the Pacific, but Fukushima is the final ocean-killer.

comment image?itok=lB_yGUIy

I remember the first Earth Day, 1970…just started dating my nympho girlfriend. We walked 10 miles to the high school (the treehuggers said it would be a good gesture–took 2 hours). Also recall reading Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”. Wasn’t too impressed with it one way or the other. Only thing on my mind back then was that girl.

geo3
geo3

Thinking, my last good year was 1970, wow…maybe the world did end and at last I can move on. People at the end of the tunnel, stop pushing me back.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

If the litmus test for a prediction is that it has to already have happened, then we can also include Admin’s that “the stock market will crash and gold will be a good investment” within the “spectacularly wrong.”

Most of these predictions are in the process of coming true. The predictors, like Admin, aren’t sure of the timing, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

I was born 45 years ago, and it has just been within my lifetime that we’ve managed to fill the oceans with plastic crap. If I live another 35 years, what are things going to look like by then?

Don’t have kids.

TE
TE

@T4C, I didn’t thumbs down you because we are over-polluting the planet, of course being overpopulated tends to bring the trash problem with it. Let alone our liking of “convenient” and the amount of packaging we use is disgusting. And yes, this is all very detrimental to the animals trying to survive with us.

BUT I call bull on a couple of those photos, they could easily be photoshopped, or set up pre-shot (the albatross could so easily be faked by anyone that happens upon any dead animal), Poe’s direction for us to believe half of what we see and nothing you hear, isn’t even good enough with our current technology. Even if you are standing on the street and see an alien ship land next to you, we truly could not be certain that it was REALLY an alien, that is the point we are now at.

Anyone else notice their areas getting filthier? The amount of trash along the roads, the filth of restaurants and retail, we are spending more than ever on cleaning products and machines yet everywhere I look has a layer of filth that a few short years ago was not there.

How are we becoming LESS fastidious about picking up our trash – or not chucking it out a speeding window – while agreeing its a great idea to tax the corporations/rich to stop climate change?

Stupidest humans produced ever. Writing our own extinction event with the likes of the brain trust above, and the ones now.

Anyone else notice how the themes turned into golden products for our owners?

So many ways to Fubar, so many ways.

TE
TE

Crap T4C, you can’t read the tone in my head and it didn’t translate to my writing.

I did not give you a thumbs down. I gave you a thumbs up.

Because we ARE over-polluting the planet…

BUT, a couple of the photos, if not all, are hinky and I keep Poe’s warning in mind as much as I can.

Peace

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading