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It's freaking Earth Day so now is a good time to catalogue the other hysteria's and catastrophes that scientists predicted that never came to pass.
Many of the doom and gloom scenarios can be classified as Malthusian. A Malthusian catastrophe is a return to subsistence-level conditions as a result of population growth outpacing agriculturalproduction.
I was taught Malthusian theories in college in the late 80's at the University of Minnesota. The irony is thick as 1942 U of MN graduate Norman Borlaug had set off the green revolution. He is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. When confronted with the undeniable evidence that it was possible to double food production, my professors simple replied that that only meant twice as many people would eventually starve.
Paul Erlich picked up on Malthusian theories and set off another scare with his book The Population Bomb in 1968. Liberals loved the idea that we were all destined to die, cold, hungry and in the dark. Malthus can be excused as the pill wasn't around when he wrote his theory, but they both completely under-estimated the ingenuity, industriousness and inventiveness of man.
People are not just another mouth to feed. At the most basic level they are another set of hands to put to work and more over they are also another mind with an imagination that is available to solve problems. We are a far richer planet with 6 billion people that we were with 3 billion people. There is less starvation, less hunger along with more wealth and more leisure time. By every measure the people of the planet in aggregate live better now than they did 50 or 100 years ago even though we have far more mounths to feed.
Erlich has been proved wrong by time, so the liberal media picked up a few other scares. In my short lifetime I have had to endure a the following crisises: global cooling, AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Y2K and now Global Warming. You'll have to excuse me if I don't get too excited.
Paul Erlich was actually dumb enough to bet that he was right. Al Gore has learned a lesson here and never puts any money behind his lies. Julian Simon was a libertarian professor who bet Erlich than none of his predictions would come to pass. They eventually settled on a bet and Erlich lost.
Here are Simon's words on the scare mongers and the media.
All of [Ehrlich's] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about "famines of unbelievable proportions" occurring by 1975, about "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" in the 1970s and '80s, about the world "entering a genuine age of scarcity." In 1990, for his having promoted "greater public understanding of environmental problems," Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award."
[Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker."[3]
What we can take away from this is that the people and the media like to be worried about something and they have little time for the voices of reason. When the crisis du joir is no longer sustainable, people don't rejoice, they just move on to a new crisis. Hence, MMGW will not be a crisis 10 years from now, something else will.
Cross-posted at Anti-Strib. Comments welcome.
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