Earth Day 2016

I just realized that Boomershoot 2016 will be at the same time as Earth Day 2016. Which, of course reminds me of something Michael Justice said while participating in Boomershoot 1999, “Celebrate Earth Day by blowing up a small part of it”. You too can participate, sign up here.

And while we are thinking about Earth Day here are some wonderful predictions made on Earth Day 1970:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“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….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.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: 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, January 1970

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“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.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

I have a prediction of my own about Earth Day 2016. The people who attend Boomershoot and blow up a small part of the earth in Idaho with us will have a great time.

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10 thoughts on “Earth Day 2016

  1. Ehrlich is no more a “biologist” than was Trofim Lysenko.

    “Peter Gunter, professor” — professor of what? Basket weaving?

  2. All those “experts” weren’t just wrong, but spectacularly so. And yet, where are they now? We know Ehrich is still suffering from diarrhea of the mouth; and he’s not only still spewing about mass starvation, but has jumped on the AGW bandwagon. I think this comes back to Joe’s theory about people with Crap for Brains. How can you not have at least a little introspection and say to yourself, “Huh. I sure blew the shit out of that prediction. What else am I wrong about?” But instead they double-down, triple-down, and expect us to join in. The worst part is, to some others with Crap for Brains, they are successful.

    • They lack ‘introspection’ because society has very few negative consequences for ‘crap for brains’ these days.

      An ancient Shaman who was as incompetent as the examples given above didn’t stay around long.

      Hell, the plains tribes of the 1800s wouldn’t put up with a medicine man who couldn’t perform. The Adobe Walls Shootout story is that the medicine man Isa-tai had ‘made medicine’ about the warriors being bullet proof. After several Comanche were killed and Billy Dixon made that shot, Isa-tai was beaten and lost all respect.

      https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fis05

      Seems we’re so much more “civilized” these days.

  3. Actually, having Crap for Brains is an asset, if you’re a celebrity pseudo-scientist willing to hire out to create agitprop. My understanding is that our current global climate models are incapable of predicting the past or present – feed them information from 20 years ago, and they “predict” climatic conditions vastly different from what we now have. But, if your research is being conducted at a liberal university, funded by liberal sources, your conclusions had better fit the agenda if you want to continue your current cushy livelihood.

    Last year my wife and I attended the Leavenworth Bird Festival – a great annual birding event with tours by local experts, etc. The keynote speaker was Kim Bostwick, a noted ornithologist who had studied the Blue-Capped Manakin in South America. We were looking forward to a great lecture about this bird. Instead we suffered through an interminable diatribe about how awful climate change was, and how all the other liberal professors in the echo chamber agreed, and how all of this lamenting wasn’t helping and we needed to DO SOMETHING!

    This remarkable breakdown of the scientific method was not lost on the audience – here this woman had zero credentials to even address the topic, zero information to add, and no credibility whatsoever. Yet, as a “scientist” from an Ivy League university, she figured she had the authority to tell us plebes what to do. Stick with birds, lady.

    Just remember, every little cloud of water vapor and CO2 you create at Boomershoot is contributing to global climatic something.

  4. It was ten degrees colder last week than it is right now. If this trend continues, and if Congress and the United Nations do nothing to stop it, I feel that temperatures in the Northwestern U.S. will increase by 520 degrees within a year. Do the math. Numbers don’t lie and you can’t deny me my feelings.

  5. I left my tree planting gear at home in Canada, but we could still plant some saplings on the top of the first berm, or put in a few more rows of saplings on the roads edge up the hill ;-p

  6. I am sure the famine predictions would have been correct if socialism had continued to spread as was their preference.

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