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This list is 18 predictions made on the 1st Earth Day in 1970.
While there have been famines since then, most haven't been from environment problems as predicted here. They've been political, most commonly from civil wars involving Muslims.


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

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,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

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.”

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.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “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.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “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….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “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.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

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.'”

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.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “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.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “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.”

So where they predicting the world would end due to global warming, or global cooling?

I was a sophomore in high school when we had a whole day dedicated to Earth Day. I remember the green "E" and all the hype. The one prediction that I wish had come true was the official introducing the day's events made the comment that he didn't figure this movement would get any recognition and would soon be forgotten like many other such concepts.

You can go to the history books and compare how the environmental movement has caused much of the decay of the greatness of America. Those people will die supporting many of the causes of environmentalism and still not recognize the destruction of the American way.

I won't argue that some ideas on sound conservation of natural resources has merit, but to stop most industrial advancement all for an unrealistic expectation that we had to stop all types of production and power generation because of a negative environmental impact is flawed.

When I was a kid in school and we had social studies and learned about Montana and its natural resources and how economically sound the state was. It was called "The Bonanza State" and "The Treasure State" due to the myriad of resources. With oil, mining, timber, livestock and wheat farms, Montana was a very rich state and was in the top of the states nationally that was abundant economically and without need of federal assistance.

Now, some 46 years later, with a war against using the natural resources available, Montana has become a welfare state with a "Big Sky".

Thanks a lot for nothing...

18 examples of "settled science".....

Good post.

There are two side of the economic equation. Cost on one side, benefits on the other. A liberal is someone who has trouble understand both sides of that equation.

I burn a tire every earth day to celebrate.

Fuqk the green weenies and the havoc they reek.

The radical environmental bunch has an ultimate goal - seal off the entire Great Plains/Rocky Mtn corridor as a natural area and herd all the people into a half dozen enormous tent cities.

And then in the early to mid 1970's we were entering the next big ice age. I'm sure a lot of you folks recall that one. That one didn't fly so it got changed to global warming and now it's just become climate change. Now to make matters worse climate change is now "settled science" so you can't disagree with it because they said so.

Earth day is all about stripping away your freedom, putting the government in charge and increasing your cost of living expenses for renewables.
In short, its what Naomi Klein wrote: we need to destroy capitalism in order to save the Earth.

I remember it well:

I forgot to add: good heads up posts, Rock Chuck & antelope_ sniper - more for my "folder".

The science is out there - Global Warming /Climate Change is a self-serving hoax.

Anyone who believes Albore deserves what they get but leave my world alone.

file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Climate/Global%20Warming.html

Earth Day Co-Founder killed and composted girlfriend

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

Nutty assed freaks! Every one of them.

And the snowflakes wonder why some of the old silver tops are just too cynical to acquiesce to the self anointed progressive nobles.

I can't find it using Google, but I remember Jacques Cousteau predicting in the 1960s (I think it was) that all of the fish in all of the seas would be gone by the year 2000.

Bill Quimby

Yes.

Too good not to repost.

There were actually two different Earth Days, one in March and one in April. I seem to recall that the one in March was proposed by some fellow in San Francisco to celebrate the equinox and the one in April was initiated by Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental education day.

Most of the people mentioned were devout liberal pinko commie maggots who proposed some very outrageous (and very unconstitutional) programs both here and abroad. Ehlrich and his wife were particularly vocal and often appeared on Carson spewing his venom. Commoner was about as bad. Their ideas and predictions were taught in college courses and frequently were accepted as gospel. Most of their predictions have failed miserably. Their followers, however, just say that their predictions are still valid but that they were just off a little in their timing.

Many liberals (commie pinko maggots) today still adopt their ideas that call for government control of about everything and the destruction of the American way of life. We can see the fruit of the seeds they planted by looking at some of the heavily supported candidates for POTUS who
are proud socialists or who campaign on the elimination of some freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Ha