Monday, May 26, 2014

'All experts agree...', vintage 1970.

Scientific predictions from Earth Day 1970:

“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 
“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 
“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 
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day 
“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 
“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 
“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

“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 
“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 
“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 
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist 
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. 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

This stuff never changes. Science apocalypticism is the scourge of the 20th century, and shows no sign of letting up in the 21st.


10 comments:

  1. Commissar Boggs, Ministry of TruthMay 26, 2014 at 7:19 AM

    GENEVA, 8 January 2014 (The Onion) – With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, [according to] a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late...
    --- The Onion

    It's too late. We're past the Tipping Point. Chaos is descending...

    Everything seemingly is spinning out of control.

    Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

    --- Fram & Putnam (AP, 2008)

    We will witness signs and wonders. The very seas will rise from their appointed bounds and overwhelm the planet despite the Vows of Berlin and the Kyoto Protocol.

    My advice: loot a liquor store and party down.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Commissar Boggs, Ministry of TruthMay 26, 2014 at 7:35 AM

    To my missing friends and family on Memorial Day. I remember you. I thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The environmental alarmists are insane. It's an ice age, no, it's a worldwide famine, no wait, it's global warming, no, the ocean is rising.

    (By the way, give us more money.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Stop reminding them of their past failed predictions. That's not fair.

    Science is supposed to have predictive power. A hypothesis, if it's worth its salt, should serve as a guide to how certain phenomena will interact. Yet the current crop of hypotheses have given us only shrieking, alarmist nightmare scenarios that never come true.

    Who are the real science-haters here?

    Ben

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ben,

      Scientists predict what you refer to as 'shrieking, alarmist scenarios' because they've happened in the past and could happen in the future.

      There have been many episodes of climate change in the past associated with mass extinctions of varying sizes. Such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 MYA due to an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels similar to what we're causing now.

      Or the Malthusian crisis of the early 14th century in Western Europe in which the population was too large for the agricultural technology of the time, when it was impacted by bad weather in the period 1315-17, resulting in the death by starvation of around 5-10% of the population.

      You believe the predicted disasters were avoided. I think that they were delayed. The global population in 1970 was 3.7 billion. Today it's 7 billion. In 2050, it will be 9 billion. We've managed to feed the increased population without too many famines and by overfishing the oceans (which accounts for the protein intake of a billion people) to the point of collapse, as a result of having cheap abundant oil and natural gas to manufacture fertilisers and agricultural pesticides and using almost all of the available arable land.

      In the next 40 years, we've got to increase the global food production (or work out how to stop wasting so much of it due to spoilage - which is quite significant in poor countries), with energy becoming progressively more expensive.

      I really do hope that there will be some new technological advance which will allow us to avoid increasing famines. Eventually, our present agricultural technology will run up against the Malthusian limit. Malthus was only proved 'wrong' in the past, because new technologies, and whether they'll work, are unpredictable.

      Delete
    2. Excuses. What they're doing isn't science, it's alarmist propaganda for the sake of wealth redistribution and increased control under the veil of "environmental control." Now the EPA has set its sights on friggin' stoves and fireplaces, because they're insane.

      Delete
    3. I should've said "environmental protection."

      Delete
  5. Speaking of possible ecological disasters, thank the Devil that Eve ate that apple. If she hadn’t there would be no death, and if Adam and Eve and all of their descendants followed God’s instructions to be fruitful and multiply the Earth would be covered with a sea of humans hundreds of miles thick by now.

    -KW

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  6. "All experts agree..." my ass. A few cherry-picked examples mixed with religious propaganda does not equal consensus.

    “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


    Who is this professor Peter Gunter? A well-known demographer? Nope. A professor in the department of philosophy and religion studies, virtually unknown except for this one quote which has been recycled over and over and over again by conservative nutters and professional liars such as Egnor.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Commissar Boggs, Ministry of TruthMay 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM

      Trog: "Who is this professor Peter Gunter?"

      :-D

      Great question from an anonymous troll!

      Delete