― Svante Arrhenius
Chemistry in Modern Life (1925), trans. Clifford Shattuck-Leonard, vii.
This question illustrates the level of fantasy many liberals remain in even after reality catches up.
The Ice Age was stopped by our CO2 emissions and if you don't like that one, claim only fringe scientist and a zealous news media made it a big deal.
Thank god the EPA prevented us from having to wear gas mask, too bad at the same time, with half the sunlight we might not be experiencing floods in India and droughts in the Sahara or hurricanes during hurricane season.
On one hand I'm jealous, how wonderful would it be to go through life belieivng your actions stopped one of these devistating scenarios from occuring. On the other hand I wonder how someone functions with so few active brain cells.
The great thing is that action was taken against many of the problems highlighted back on that first Earth Day, and so the worst of the problems were averted. Growing up back then I remember smog that made your chest tight and your eyes water, but the air is much cleaner now because we took action. There were also places in the U.S. where rivers would catch fire because of all the pollution, but our rivers and lakes are much cleaner now.
Sometimes I think deniers would be happier with air that is unfit to breathe and water that is toxic. Want to live in a country with a rapidly growing economy where you should wear a gas mask to breathe and the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth is greatly reduced, just like those predictions? Please move to China and enjoy all that lack of environmental regulation can bring you. Maybe you can even get a job as a miner in their booming coal industry--only a few hundred die in accidents each year, the rest can look forward to dying early from black lung disease.
EDIT for jim z: Did I mention Paul Ehrlich? Did the question? Because if it did, I missed it. I have no doubt there are LOTS of wrong (and right) predictions from the past, by Paul Ehrlich and others. Even if the predictions were wrong, they still may have been useful for getting people to talk about the subject.
I'm sure you know the story about the canaries in the coal mines. For those who don't, old-time miners used to take canaries down in coal mines, because they were more sensitive to bad air than people were. The canaries would start keeling over before the air was bad enough to kill humans. If you had a dead canary, you knew it was time to do something. The anti-Earth Day propaganda that Ottawa Mike, jim z and others put forth makes me wonder what they would have been like as coal miners. I can see it now, they're down in the mine and the canaries starts squawking and dying, so other people are smart enough to turn on the ventilation system and everything is fine. This happens a few times and pretty soon Ottawa Mike and jim z are saying the canaries are useless because they made bad predictions. They probably would have advocated getting rid of the canaries as too expensive and reactionary.
Why do we need people raising warning flags about the environment, when we have companies and governments around to do it for themselves? Didn't Union Carbide do a great job in Bhopal? Or the Soviet Union in Chernobyl and Norilsk? How about BP in the Gulf of Mexico?
I can't forget Tony Dansa and so many others saying we only have 10 years left for this and that. Jimmy Carter said we had 10 years of oil in the 1970. Dansa said the ocean would be dead in 10 years. It never stops them. They simply forget about their former ridiculous predictions and keep on predicting the same thing.
Right Peg. You are clearly deluded if you think Ehrlich's (or those with like mind) predictions were right and it was only through action that prevented them from coming true. In fact, these Ehrlich predictions are from ignorance of reality. They didn't come true because they were wrong. You get the deluded alarmists suggesting that sulfur emissions caused the cooling in the 1970s but due to their heroic efforts, warming resumed. Thanks guys.
Ask the people in the upper Midwest what they think these days... Kenneth Watt is starting to sound like a genius -- but he predicted cooling.
jim z -
Carter based that statement on official CIA projections. If you have a beef, take it up with them.
"We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us." - Jimmy Carter
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperien...
And, the fact remains that if the nation had adopted Carter's energy policy, we'd be a lot better off now. He plan was the correct plan - and that is a fact.
Being nostalgic, I'll start with a few from the first one in 1970:
"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." ― Harvard biologist George Wald
"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
"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." ― Ecologist Kenneth Watt
"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation," ― Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
Actually, digging up the worst ones is too easy. Let's just stick to the best ones. Anybody have any?
