Walter Williams: ‘Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong’
By Walter E. Williams
Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.
In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.
In International Wildlife (July 1975), 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.” In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.
In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Also in
‘March for Science’ invokes God, Hitler, Gay Marriage, Racism, Sexism – Blames GOP for making climate worse
Climate Depot’s Round Up of Coverage of the alleged ‘March For Science’
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “Having spent the day in DC on April 22 interviewing the marchers, it struck me about how this is first and foremost a march for endless government funding, ideology and in support of a no dissent policy. (Another new study gives plenty of reason to dissent: New Climate Study Calls EPA’s Labeling Of CO2 A Pollutant ‘Totally False’) The Trump administration can help make science great again by resisting these pay up and shut up demands for taxpayer research money.” See: Bloomberg News: Obama ‘stashed’ $77 billion in ‘climate money’ across agencies to elude budget cuts
Watch: Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer criticizes ‘March for Science’: ‘It is sort of a religious belief for them’ – Dr. Will Happer on Fox News: Asked about more government funded science? Happer: “We’ve had 8 years of very highly politicized so-called research on climate. It’s not what most of us would recognize as real scientific research. Something where the outcome was demanded before the funding was provided. We should tend to real environmental problems and fix them and stop chasing these phantom problems that are really just religious dogma.”
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Pictures and reports about the ‘March for Science’
‘March for Science’: Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ – The early claims of 97% ‘consensus’: In 1992, former Vice President Al Gore reassured his listeners, “Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.”
Climatologist Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr: “If there was any doubt the “March on Science” is political – The march is explicitly a political movement” See full article
Anti-Trump ‘March For Science’ Protest Has Problems W/ Bill Nye Because He’s A White Guy
13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970
March For Science To Bill Nye, The Science Guy: Take A Back Seat, You’re White.
The March is over:
Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: ‘The smartest people on the planet want to oppose Trump & the best they can come up with …
Earth Day Must Divorce Itself From The Climate Scare
By Tom Harris
All sensible people are environmentalists. We want to enjoy clean air, land, and water and we like to think that future generations will live in an even better environment. These were the original objectives of Earth Day and I am happy to have presented at Earth Day events in the early 1990s.
However, in recent years, Earth Day has been hijacked by the climate change movement. Today, the Earth Day home page starts:
Earth Day 2017’s Campaign is Environmental & Climate Literacy
Education is the foundation for progress. We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet.
The U.N.’s My World global survey shows that Earth Day organizers are out of touch with average people around the world. After almost 10 million people from 194 countries have been polled, “action taken on climate change” rates dead last out of the 16 suggested priorities for the United Nations.
For most of the world, and especially those in developing nations, the message is clear: in comparison with access to reliable energy and clean water, better healthcare, government honesty, a good education, and protecting forests, rivers and oceans, climate change is not important.
Besides the strategic blunder of focusing Earth Day on an issue that the people of the world do not seem to particularly care about, there is a serious ethical problem that will come back to haunt organizers if they don’t soon change focus.
Reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes and consequences of climate change. Scientists cannot even agree on whether warming or cooling lie ahead, let alone the degree to which we affect it. Yet, climate campaigners assert that ‘the science is settled.’ We know with certainty, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways.
The consequence of this overconfidence is tragic. According to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, of the over $1 billion spent worldwide each day on climate finance, 94% goes to mitigation, trying to control future climate. Only 6% of global climate finance is dedicated to helping vulnerable people cope with climate change today. In developing countries, even less, an abysmal 5%, goes to adaptation. Based on a theory …
CNN criticized on Earth Day for daring to air a climate skeptic
There was a certain melancholy about Earth Day 2017. The decades of failed predictions of doom, those damn frackers giving us cheap gas back, and now the Trump administration cutting regulations. No wonder some of the front men are getting a little testy.
Like Bill Nye, the guy who doesn’t have a science degree. Matthe Balan ofMediaite caught him revealing his inner authoritarian:
TV personality Bill Nye criticized CNN on New Day Saturday for letting a skeptic of man-made climate change participate in a panel discussion.
“I will say, much as I love CNN, you’re doing a disservice by having one climate change skeptic, and not 97 or 98 scientists or engineers concerned about climate change,” Nye contended.
Nye appeared with May Boeve of the green action group 350.org and Princeton University physics professor William Happer, who has downplayed the impact of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. So despite the two-to-one slant in favor of the environmentalists, the former PBS host wasn’t satisfied.
The message of the American Left has devolved into “shut up!”
13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970
Saturday is Earth Day — an annual event first launched on April 22, 1970. The inaugural festivities (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.
Sound familiar? Behold the coming apocalypse, as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:
- “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
- “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
- “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a
March “for Science” — an attempt to replace the failing Earth Day
Today, the misnomer “March for Science” is trying to take over the aging faded Earth Day. It’s an attempt to steal the good brand “Science” yet again for other causes. Once upon a time, Earth Day used to mean something. Back in 1970, 20 million people took part, 12,000 events were held: Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day events.
Source: March “for Science” — an attempt to replace the failing Earth Day…
Our Air Is Cleaner Than Ever, So Why Do People Think It’s Getting Worse?
Blame global warming hysteria
Source: Our Air Is Cleaner Than Ever, So Why Do People Think It’s Getting Worse?…
John Stossel: ‘Gore creatively misremembers his own movie’ & Climate march is ‘really marching for a left-wing religion’
But so far it’s been good: Over the last century, climates warmed, but climate-related deaths dropped. Since 1933, they fell by 98 percent. Life expectancy doubled.
Much of that is thanks to prosperity created by free markets. But some is due to warming. Cold kills more people than heat.
Carbon dioxide is also good for crop growth. Even The New York Times admits, “Plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years.”
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Instead of celebrating Earth Day Saturday, I’ll celebrate Human Achievement Hour. The think tank behind it, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says Human Achievement Hour pays tribute to “our basic human right to use energy to improve everyone’s quality of life.”
Some ways to celebrate:
—Use your phone or computer
—Drive a car
—Take a hot shower
Good idea! Let’s celebrate progress instead of attacking it.…
Study: DiCaprio’s Oscar Speech Did More For Climate Change Than Earth Day
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar acceptance speech comments urging action on climate change drew more attention on social media than Earth Day, according to a study out of the University of California San Diego.
The study, titled “Big Data Sensors of Organic Advocacy: The Case of Leonardo DiCaprio and Climate Change,” was published Aug. 2 in scientific journal Plos One. It argues DiCaprio’s acceptance speech for best actor received much more attention on social media than it did on traditional media outlets.
More than 36 million people watched this year’s Academy Awards. DiCaprio won best actor for his role in “The Revenant.”…
These 7 Predictions From The Original Earth Day Were Way Off | The Daily Caller
These 7 Predictions From The Original Earth Day Were Way Off | The Daily Caller
Environmentalists truly believed and predicted that the planet was doomed during the first Earth Day in 1970, unless drastic actions were taken to save it. Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily Caller News Foundation takes a look at predictions made by environmentalists around the original Earth Day in 1970 to see how they’ve held up. Have any of these dire predictions come true? No, but that hasn’t stopped environmentalists from worrying. From predicting the end of civilization to classic worries about peak oil, here are seven green predictions that were just flat out wrong. Read the full list here. http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/22/7-enviro-predictions-from-earth-day-1970-that-were-just-dead-wrong/
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