Sort of like the Arctic Ocean was supposed to be ice free during the
summer by now..
We all know what happened to that prediction...
Here are some more failed environmental activist predictions... these
ones from around 1970 about the time of the first "Earth Day".
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 issue of 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 “Echo-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 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. (Note: According to the most
recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
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.”