Earth Day predictions of 1970...

[SteyrAUG]

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. 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.

[BrianS]

The founder of Earth Day is also a convicted murderer.

The next big environmental scare is ocean acidification.

[HeavyDuty]

While I do agree the fringe Greenies are way out there, I don't see anything wrong with decreasing our impact on the environment in a logical, achievable way...

There's a germ of truth in their position.

[Trajan]

I believe in conservation, not silly greenism.

[HeavyDuty]

Exactly. I once ended up at a party attended by some hard-core Greenpeacers, it was all I could do to keep from smacking them around a little. (The fact that one of them was hot probably helped.)

[SteyrAUG]

While I do agree the fringe Greenies are way out there, I don't see anything wrong with decreasing our impact on the environment in a logical, achievable way...

There's a germ of truth in their position.

Recognizing they are completely FOS is not the same thing as driving a leaded gasoline truck down the road spraying CFC cans out the window.

[kwelz]

Recognizing they are completely FOS is not the same thing as driving a leaded gasoline truck down the road spraying CFC cans out the window.

True, but there are those that would do just that to spite earth day.

[John_Wayne777]

Keep in mind also that during the 1960's-1970's millions of people were actually starving to death...in China, where Mao's ideas on production and farming led to horrific famine.

Interesting, though, to see how the predictions could be lifted from news articles published today. Same old song, different day.

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

Conservatives should have "People Day" where we celebrate individualism and warn of the dangers of the State and the collective run amok.

[Gentoo]

“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

Very few people today, and certainly none of the college kids involved in the 'green' movement, remember or realize that in the 1970s there was a huge scare of an impending ice age. All the environmentalists wouldn't shut up about it. How they went from ice age to global warming was a complete change in position - one that went largely unnoticed until a few right wing outlets started pointing that out and the the whole thing changed it name to 'climate change'.

The whole environmentalism issue has been completely co-opted by leftist progressives as a means of furthering their own agenda. It is no longer about protecting or conserving resources, it is about control over people using the environment as a club to beat them into submission.