All doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be wrong

cancel2 2022

Canceled

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “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

4. “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.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [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

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “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.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “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

9. “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.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “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.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “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

https://www.netzerowatch.com/earth-day-at-52-none-of-the-eco-doomsday-predictions-have-come-true/
 
Last edited:

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:
1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “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

4. “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.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [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

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “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.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “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

9. “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.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “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.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “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

https://www.netzerowatch.com/earth-day-at-52-none-of-the-eco-doomsday-predictions-have-come-true/

.
 
I mean - are you paying attention to what's going on w/ the planet right now?

Cripes. Disappearing habitat, poisoned water & air, oceanic foodchain completely endangered, mass exctinction.

How are you missing all of this?

Some of the timeframes they had were off, but otherwise they were spot on.
 
food shortages bring down governments.. the Arab Spring started in Tunisia because of it
and was a very real cause of the Syrian civil war
 
I mean - are you paying attention to what's going on w/ the planet right now?

Cripes. Disappearing habitat, poisoned water & air, oceanic foodchain completely endangered, mass exctinction.

How are you missing all of this?

Some of the timeframes they had were off, but otherwise they were spot on.
all from population pressures (one way or the other) -except for incompetent governments
 

Think of all the scare stories in the past; ozone layer, acid rain, mass starvation, new ice age etc. At least one environmentalist has seen the light.

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare


On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.

Read more: https://environmentalprogress.org/b...nmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare
 
Last edited:
I mean - are you paying attention to what's going on w/ the planet right now?

Cripes. Disappearing habitat, poisoned water & air, oceanic foodchain completely endangered, mass exctinction.

How are you missing all of this?

Some of the timeframes they had were off, but otherwise they were spot on.

They did it better...

 
maggot;
All doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be wrong

Did anybody predict that capitalism would turn most of the western world into self-serving morons ?


Haw, haw.........................................haw.
 

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “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

4. “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.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [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

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “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.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “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

9. “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.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “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.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “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

https://www.netzerowatch.com/earth-day-at-52-none-of-the-eco-doomsday-predictions-have-come-true/
The only doomsday curse is when tRump was lawlessly hacked in there with the gutter help of ant-American Fox type media conspires of the gutter, dumbass voters who sold their hides to tRump after he called them all stupid, uneducated and easy to manipulate to their face and with a smirk and were not the majority. This includes repukes facilitating the hacking of this tyrant tRump that caused the COVID doom of millions of human beings on Earth. Its time to consider the blue wave effect against the repuke enemy from within and tRump and his gutter mob too who are a rancid and diseased liability on the integrity of humanity and its soul:

5 Ways the Trump Administration’s Policy Failures Compounded the Coronavirus-Induced Economic Crisis
Last week, the total coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 100,000—a grim milestone in a battle that the Trump administration was not adequately prepared to fight. The United States now accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths despite only accounting for roughly 4 percent of its population. The Trump administration’s failed public health response is mirrored by its failure to respond to the economic crisis, which has led to an economic fallout that sets the United States apart from other high-income nations.

With some 37.6 million Americans filing for unemployment insurance since the beginning of March and the official unemployment rate reaching 14.7 percent in April—a level not seen since the Great Depression—the American economy is in a disastrous state, with repercussions expected for years to come. The level of economic and public health pain that Americans are now experiencing, however, was not inevitable, but rather the consequence of a series of policy failures that started well before the coronavirus outbreak. The Trump administration’s past actions weakened the United States’ ability to respond to the pandemic, and its current actions continue to exacerbate the dual public health and economic crises. Although Congress was able to pass a series of stimulus measures that have blunted the economic pain for families, this relief happened in spite of the Trump administration, not because of it.

The weakness of the Trump administration’s economic response to the coronavirus crisis—much like the failure of its public health response—can be seen in comparison with the United States’ international peers. As demonstrated by the experiences of peer nations, a rapid and coordinated public health response could have contained the pandemic more effectively and reduced the mounting economic losses. Instead, it seems as though the United States is getting the worst of both: the highest death toll of any country and what will likely be the sharpest economic contraction in American history."

https://www.americanprogress.org/ar...mpounded-coronavirus-induced-economic-crisis/
 
Last edited:
The advanced nations of the world took action after 1970 to ensure those predictions didn't come true.

Almost all of the landmark environmental legislation in the USA was passed after 1970, and collectively they either averted disaster, or they made substantial improvements to environmental conditions.
 
I mean - are you paying attention to what's going on w/ the planet right now?

Cripes. Disappearing habitat, poisoned water & air, oceanic foodchain completely endangered, mass exctinction.

How are you missing all of this?

Some of the timeframes they had were off, but otherwise they were spot on.

The air isn't poisoned. The water isn't poisoned. There is still plankton and fish in the ocean. Extinction of species is normal.
 
Oh dear Barfly Effete has run away now.

Not at all. I just do other stuff once in awhile. You know - living an actual life stuff.

Population is definitely a huge issue, as are our unsustainable practices w/ energy & development.

We need to start thinking in terms of sustainability. We're so far from that now.
 
The link between cloud formation and cosmic rays is well established but the magnitude of the forcing has been poorly understood. Indeed the IPCC and CMIP6 climate models choose to ignore the effect completely.

Dr. Jasper Kirkby has been doing groundbreaking work as well at CERN to understand the mechanisms at work.

There have been a flurry of recently published studies on radiative forcing and its variation due to cloud changes.

The latest is a new study published in the journal Nature. Climate scientists Dr. Henrik Svensmark and colleagues have found that cosmic rays, or variations in ionization, are closely related to the formation of aerosols and clouds, and that “low-liquid clouds are mainly responsible for the change in net radiative forcing.”

The results are groundbreaking: The connection between cosmic rays, clouds and radiation budget is reaffirmed.

The paper’s abstract:

Atmospheric ionization produced by cosmic rays has been suspected to influence aerosols and clouds, but its actual importance has been questioned. If changes in atmospheric ionization have a substantial impact on clouds, one would expect to observe significant responses in Earth’s energy budget. Here it is shown that the average of the five strongest week-long decreases in atmospheric ionization coincides with changes in the average net radiative balance of 1.7 W/m2 (median value: 1.2 W/m2) using CERES satellite observations. Simultaneous satellite observations of clouds show that these variations are mainly caused by changes in the short-wave radiation of low liquid clouds along with small changes in the long-wave radiation, and are almost exclusively located over the pristine areas of the oceans. These observed radiation and cloud changes are consistent with a link in which atmospheric ionization modulates aerosol’s formation and growth, which survive to cloud condensation nuclei and ultimately affect cloud formation and thereby temporarily the radiative balance of Earth.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-99033-1
 
Last edited:
While we are on the "doomsday" predictions, lets look at what Republicans Sean would never show that Republicans predicted would happen if Obama was ever elected:

Republican presidential hopeful Michelle Bachman said that Obama would be responsible for “punishing tax rates, redistribution of wealth, socialized medicine, inputting censorship in the form of the un-Fairness Doctrine and taking away the secret ballot from the worker.”

Republican candidate John McCain, in this video, claimed that Obama would change both the American flag and the national anthem.

Fox News speculated that Obama would forfeit the Gulf War and start a new one, and that race relations would transform “from a thorny issue to an explosive one.”

Right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute was sure that “the Defense Department will be gutted, with cuts so deep that America will no longer be a superpower,”

Rick Santorum warned that freedom of religion would be under attack

Chuck Norris claimed America would face “1,000 years of darkness.”


And if you really want to ping pong, we could fill this forum with Trump's predictions that were either stupid or flat out lies from the jump
 
Back
Top