We’ll say this for Paul Ehrlich —at least he’s consistent. In 1968 the Stanford biologist famously declared that “the battle to feed all humanity is over,” at a time when the Earth’s population was about 3.5 billion.
Today we have a population of eight billion (better fed than ever), yet there was Mr. Ehrlich, on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night still predicting that “humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.” [emphasis, links added]
The CBS narrator acknowledged that the green revolution in agriculture disproved Mr. Ehrlich’s prediction of mass famine.
But the show went on to suggest that Mr. Ehrlich’s repackaged gloom about melting icecaps and the rate of extinction may finally prove him right in saying we are still heading the way of the dinosaurs.
As with Thomas Malthus, the father of doom-and-gloomers, the repeated failures of Mr. Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe to materialize never seem to discourage those who believe human beings are breeding and consuming our way to destruction.
The reason these dire prophecies fail is that they ignore the most decisive variable: human ingenuity.
In the years since Mr. Ehrlich first forecast apocalypse, human beings have found untold new ways to improve life on Earth—e.g., by reclaiming arable land, inventing new medicines, increasing food production, making clean water more available and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Mr. Ehrlich is 90 years old and looking spry. When he was born in 1932, life expectancy for an American baby was 61 years. For Americans who will be born in 2023, it’s 79.11 years.
One explanation is that much of what Mr. Ehrlich considers to be a population “crisis” is simply because people are living longer and much less likely to die as infants.
Another way of putting it is that Mr. Ehrlich is living proof that we are living through what his intellectual nemesis, Julian Simon, liked to call an “epidemic of life.” We’d say that’s a cause for celebration.
Read more at WSJ
He has never been right in his false predictions once claiming that the coasts would have to be evacuated because the stench of dead fish
After the 60 Minutes “extinction show” Ehrlich tweeted yesterday that the usual right-wing came out in force. He said “If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the Population Bomb…”
Guess that shows for a fact that peer-reviews were crap back then and they still are today with so many papers tying anything and everything on CO2-caused “climate change”.
As I wrote elsewhere yesterday, Ehrlich is always wrong but never in doubt!
“If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed”
Peer review is not of this time anymore. Peers help to find typos and grammatical errors, they are not there to help find big flaws in a research project. Peers know that if they criticize another peer too much, they will get criticized as well.
What we need is opponent-review. Only opponents will do their best to find flaws in a research paper.
Good point, but it won’t happen with global warming / climate change alarmists. The fix is in.
An extinction I would like to see is that of self-aggrandizing pseudo-scientists like Ehrlich and Mann.