We’ve Had Six Years Left to Save the World for the Past 50 Years

By Andrew Follett

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

 

Anew article in a scientific journal claims that we have just six years left to save the planet from global warming, a claim that environmentalists masquerading as scientists have been regurgitating for at least the past 50 years.

 

“Scientists used to avoid phrases like ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis.’ No longer,” wrote the Washington Post on X. “Escalating rhetoric comes as a new study shows there’s just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate.” The claim is comical given that such catastrophist language has been common in the environmental movement for decades, and it hasn’t let up.

 

A 2019 article, titled “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” spawned a documentary about scientists’ alleged “moral obligation to warn humanity” that global warming will destroy everything in just a few short years. What’s never mentioned is that the use of such language is nothing new. There’s a long track record of these kinds of predictions — and of their being flat-out wrong.

 

In 2018, then-teenage activist Greta Thunberg promoted on social media Harvard University professor James Anderson’s warning that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Five years later, when that did not occur, Thunberg quietly deleted her tweet. Anderson had also predicted in 2018 that “there will be no floating ice remaining [in the Arctic Ocean] by 2022” unless the U.S. and the rest of the world enacted his vision of environmental protection. That never happened, and the ice remains.

 

In 2006, Al Gore claimed that unless his preferred policy measures were implemented “within the next ten years,” the world would “reach a point of no return.” That would place “the point of no return” in 2016. In 1989, a senior U.N. environmental official told the Associated Press that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” if extreme government action was not taken by the year 2000. In 1982, executive director of the U.N. environment program Mostafa Tolba claimed that “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust” would occur in just 18 years, in the year 2000. And as recently as in 2019, President Joe Biden claimed, “How we act or fail to act in the next twelve years will determine the very livability of our planet,” alleging that his $5 trillion spending plan could prevent the Earth from becoming an uninhabitable wasteland.

 

This environmental paranoia isn’t limited to politicians and activists.

 

Harvard biologist George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would end within 15 to 30 years “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

 

“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,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. “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.”

 

Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 (quite the year for doomsday predictions) that increasing population made mass starvation imminent, predicting that “the death rate will increase until at least 100–200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” That obviously did not happen, and the average daily supply of food per person globally has steadily increased, despite (or perhaps because of) population growth. Ehrlich’s lengthy record of failed apocalyptic predictions included his worry that environmental damage would cause the entire United Kingdom to collapse into starvation by the year 2000, and he has more recently asserted that global warming will cause with “near certainty” the collapse of civilization in the next few decades. Ehrlich’s doomsday forecasts have consistently failed to materialize, but that hasn’t stopped him from repeating them this year on CBS’s 60 Minutes. In fact, he has refused to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they haven’t occurred, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in [his famous and famously wrong book The Population Bomb] was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”

 

Ehrlich has persisted in his population-control hysteria, making absurd suggestions such as that governments should poison water supplies with fertility-blocking drugs and only provide antidotes to approved couples, reiterating support for this view as recently as 2012. And he hasn’t been alone.

 

David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club, supported Ehrlich’s position and once stated that “all potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was essential to the founding of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and many organizations that constitute the modern environmental movement.

 

This kind of ridiculous doomsaying — and its obvious failure — seems amusing today, like a left-wing environmentalist equivalent of the Millerite movement’s Great Disappointment. At that movement’s peak, there were roughly half a million Millerites, all of whom were extremely let down when the predicted rapture didn’t materialize and Jesus Christ didn’t return by 1844 as William Miller had predicted. Many Millerites simply moved the deadline after each failed prediction, meanwhile trying to use their fearmongering to gain political power. But unlike the destitution the Millerites brought onto themselves by giving away their worldly possessions in anticipation of the allegedly fast-approaching end times, the environmentalists who keep making failed doomsday predictions transfer their doomerism’s damage onto others.

 

Ridiculous environmentalist claims and concerns about overpopulation have not only spurred out-of-control government spending, they have directly (albeit not single-handedly) led to horrific human-rights abuses, such as the forced sterilization or abortion of roughly 700 million people during China’s decades-long one-child policy and India’s “emergency” forced sterilizations. The extent of the human-rights nightmare that can result from overpopulation- and eco-hysteria is difficult to overstate.

 

The Washington Post may not remember the drumbeat of failed predictions made by environmentalists over the course of the past half century, but apocalyptic rhetoric is nothing new in the cultlike echo chamber of eco-activists and extremist environmental-science scholars. Countless predictions that the end is nigh have been around for the past several decades. Don’t give away all your savings just yet.