![]() “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”ĥ. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. ![]() The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”Ĥ. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.ģ. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”Ģ. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:ġ. Well, it’s now the 47th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 17 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in the 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. The book has been described in the New York Times as one which could 'push awareness of global warming to a real tipping point'.In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “ Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In An Inconvenient Truth Gore writes about the urgent need to solve the problems of climate change, presenting comprehensive facts and information on all aspects of global warming in a direct, thoughtful and compelling way,using explanatory diagrams and dramatic photos to clarify and highlight key issues. Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, has been a passionate advocate of action to halt climate change for many years. So why is it that some leaders seem not to hear the clarion warnings? Are they resisting the truth because they know that the moment they acknowledge it, they will face a moral imperative to act? Is it simply more convenient to ignore the warnings? Perhaps, but inconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen, rather, their significance grows. Our climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it has become a true planetary emergency and we must recognise that we are facing a crisis. ![]() The truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives.
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