Fraser Forum 06/08
www.fraserinstitute.org
Environmentalists’ wild predictions
Walter E. Williams
Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalists’ predictions that they might prefer we forget.
At the first Earth Day celebration in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” And in 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the United States and that “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that the US population would have declined to 22.6 million by 1999. Ehrlich’spredictions about England were even gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome, warning that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, and petroleum, copper, lead, and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book, The Doomsday Book, wrote that Americans were using 50% of the world’s resources and that “by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The world as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”
Further, in 1970, Harvard University biologist George Wald warned, “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Senator Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Latter-day doomsayers are not the only environmentalists who have been wrong. Doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the US Geological Survey announced that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.
In 1939, the US Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of US oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974, the US Geological Survey advised us that the United States had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, is that there is a 1,000 to 2,500-year supply.
Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists predicted man-made global cooling and a coming ice age, and warned us that millions of Americans
would starve to death, what kind of government policy should the United States have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? In 1939, when the US Department of the Interior warned that Americans only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken? Finally,
what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct today, now that environmentalists have switched their tune to man-made global
warming?
Here are a few facts: Over 95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s average
temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of the Earth and variations in the sun’s output. In addition, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.
