Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.
For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.
Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.
Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
“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, the day after the first Earth Day
“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.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“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, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“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.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“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….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“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.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director
“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.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“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.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
“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.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.
Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.
Yes, this is a copy and paste as I am no scientist. Apparently neither were they.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece
The ice cap on Mars is melting too. Are we to blame for that?
Delina** I recycle. I conserve energy. In fact, I have a solar water heating system in my home. I am all for cleaner water and air, I simply don’t believe in man made global warming. It is a scam.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=5CEAEDB7-802A-23AD-4BFE-9E32747616F9
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9&CFID=9446457&CFTOKEN=57730634
Why does anyone scam another? For money. Many, many people are getting very rich off this, Al Gore included.
internet marketing tools
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIQ1RTIasEs
Watch this. NASA video on melting Arctic ice.
Downvoters did not watch the movie. Drrr I’ma downvotr dis s fella becausee he linked one o dem internets tubes.
Your Mars comment just proves how illogical you are.
us republicans hate earth day.
rape the planet
log the forests
drive our hummers
drill baby drill
kill baby seals
take all the fish from the oceans
we need another war
die….die….DIE
I’m with you – screw the earth.
Seriously STFU!
TL;DR
Is there anyway to give a question a thumbs down?
The environment is not “fine,” and some of those predictions are coming true. Much of it like other futurist ideas never come to pass. However, we have seen a large rise in environmental illnesses, with more to come. The effects of today will not be felt until about 35 years from now (which we learned AFTER the first Earth Day). Our problems are a combination of natural climatic change and human-produced change. We can’t affect the former, but we can the latter.
The right wing swore that communism was taking over in the late 40s. That didn’t come to pass. The founder of IBM said there would only be a need for 5 mainframe computers EVER. That never came to pass. Etc.
The environmental movement is far more concerned about politics, socialism, control, and ideology than about whether or not anything is actually wrong with the earth.
the only thing that has changed is there are a few different names next to the ignorant, alarmist quotes. nobody is supposed to follow up on these prophecies/predictions, we’re supposed to believe them for the moment, forget them in time, and believe them again next time. although there probably won’t be a next time… since the sky is currently falling at a rate of 11.6 billion bpm. or km/yr. or mph… or something else… the details are irrelevant.
So you admit you dont understand science, and you mishmash a bunch of quotes from fairly radical poeple (Erlich was an idiot, and was recongmized as such back in the 70s by most of the scientific community), throw in some magazine quotes about global cooling, which was really NOT a credible scientific theory,,, and then make a statement that you cant believe scientists?
Who are you going to believe when it comes to science? Your own uneducated views and ‘feelings’? Do you understand that in 1970, the EPA was formed to help some of these issues, and if we didnt do anything, gas masks in cities in the 80s would be real… just like the chinese wear masks in their cities to try to minimize pollution.
The quote that the ecology of this planet is fine is patently false. We are losing a huge amount of rainforest each day, and replacing it with throwaway farmland that ends up being depleted a few years later.
Extinction of species is happening at a rate that approaches the Permian (never heard of the Permian extinction, eh? Figures).
That’s why I am not celebrating Earth Day. And I am glad I took a few geology classes in college in 1992, before everyone started the mass hysteria about global warming (not being slowly relabeled “climate change”, which is repackaging a logical fallacy as science). Back then, I learned a little about climate history.
We had record breaking heat here in the San Francisco Bay Area the day before yesterday. Proof of global warming? The records that were broken were set in 1915. Why don’t the global warming alarmists every explain why it was hotter then? Or the warm trend of the 1930s? The answer is because they can’t, because they don’t _really_ know.
Gore’s scientists can’t even get history right when they know the answer.
Baloney! Lets’ just keep having more babies and using more clean soil, clean water, and raw materials to create more stuff to keep filling our dumps.
Please don’t worry about a thing. Scientists are always wrong!
Seven billion and going.
Man Made Global Warming is a scam to get you to stop using fossil fuels for the benefit of?
A lot more people stand to gain if they make you think fossil fuels are not to blame than the opposite. And that’s not the only consideration to be made about fossil fuels. Energy independence is another which would have the very desirable side effect of improving homeland security.