Interesting story from The American Enterprise institute about dooms day prediction a la the first Eart day 1970.
Some of my favorites
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.” (1980’s)
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.”
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.’” (oh they just moved the date of peak oil to 2008; another wrong prediction)
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.
Of course the errors in my opinion fall into two different categories: the total ludicrous and real problems like water and air pollution, and food production that were solved by technology, but not in the way the false prophets of doom wanted. I get the feeling their solution is a post industrial /capitalism socialism with a North Korean totalitarianism.
I remember this crap being drilled into my head as a kid in school and other places in the early 1970’s. In peculiar a Superfiends Episode:
7 “Too Hot To Handle” October 20, 1973
With temperatures rising all over the Earth, Colonel Wilcox informs the Super Friends that the rise in temperature is more than a mere heat wave. The top scientist have been working around the clock and found out the Earth is drifting out its orbit. Superman goes to India and seeks the help of fellow Justice League of America member The Flash, who was saving the Taj Mahal from an Earthquake. The Flash uses his super speed to put the Earth back into orbit by reversing the magnetic poles of the Earth. The junior Super Friends notice a strange man who’s dressed in heavy warm winter clothes. They chase after the strange dressed man and follow him to his hideout inside an active volcano on a Pacific island called Malibah. They find out the man’s name is Kolbar and he comes from the planet Solartararium. Kolbar was trying to find another hot planet for his people to live on when their planet cooled off too heavily because of pollution. Superman, Aquaman, the Junior members, and the Flash journey to Solartararium to clean up the planet.
Now this bring me about the doom and gloom of today sorry pope Bill the quasi-scientific religion Guy.
