Last week the singer/scientist/genius Bob Geldof announced that because of - of course, global warming - all of mankind was going to be dead by 2030, just 17 years from now.
If true, of course, it would make it much easier to plan for my retirement, but I'm just not quite willing to take old Bobby's word for it. I've been able to live long enough to see environmental predictions come and go, and to realize that most of them - including those from Al Gore and the rest of the faith-based "climate change" community - are absolute hokum. To remind you of how useful "settled science" can be, here - courtesy of the Watts Up With That? blog - are some predictions from Earth Day, 1970. Lots of keen foresight here. Enjoy.
“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
“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
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“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
And my personal favorite:
“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
