Earth Day is just around the corner. It is celebrated every April 22 on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, two days after Hitler’s birthday. Here are some crack scientific forecasts from the original Earth day in 1970.
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington 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
“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
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“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
One of the greatest things about the Earth’s crust is that it is full of hydrocarbons, which make modern civilization, and indeed life itself possible. Without fossil fuels, millions of people in the US would have frozen to death this winter. Millions more would have starved, and every tree in the country would be cut down for firewood. The air would be filthy and society would collapse.
On Earth Day 2014, we should celebrate by thanking our fossil fuel distributors for keeping the environment clean and making civilization viable.
Without fossil fuels . . .
Streets of NYC would be covered with horse manure.
Without coal, there wouldn’t have been very many people or horses in New York during the 19th century.
By the 19th century, without coal, all the forests would have been totally used up and for heating and cooking the horse dung would be burned.
People really forget their history don’t they. Humans started burning rock (including amber) because they ran out of wood and anything else that was burnable. Without fire we are stuck in the tropics.
Speaking of horse dung an coal, wasn’t it PJ O’Rourke who said “would you rather die at 9 of dysentery or at 80 of cancer?”
Not sure about that, Steve. There were 700,000 people in NYC in 1850. I don’t think coal had had much affect on them yet in 1850.
On the eve of the Civil War, coal mining operations were present in over twenty states and U.S. production stood at more than 20 million tons.
The Coal may not have had a great effect but the Horse Manure sure did.
Who says they are not anyway?
De Blasio.
Riggggghhhht! Want to buy a bridge? 😉
Thanks Steve. Your work is very much appreciated.
Michael
Yours is a concise and accurate statement of the danger of the “green” philosophy. Without fossil fuels there will be no electricity. Without electricity the world’s sanitation systems will fail. The result will be mass death from exposure, starvation, disease and violence. The greens couch their rhetoric as a warning of potential mass death if they are not given control over us, the great unwashed. in fact, the greens are at their core misanthropes, who desire the destruction of the human race.
With luck there will be a major snowstorm in Washington D.C. on Aprill 22….
(I can hope can’t I.)
If I can’t have a major snow storm, how about a large herd of hungry polar bears?
We just had a storm that dropped some snow on the east coast this week. One next week could still happen.
I certainly hope so.
Back in 1970 the first Earth Day wasn’t about global cooling it was about pollution and it was bad. Lake Eerie was dying, the Hudson River was on fire. I grew up on lake Minnetonka in Minnesota back then they used to dump raw sewage into the lake there were no septic systems, it was bad, the lake was dying, 40years later is it much cleaner.
I believed in Earth Day back then but now that pollution is under control in this country, they are saying that CO2 is a pollutant which is ridiculous. Nothing would be green without CO2, there would be no life without CO2. We all emit 1/2 tom of CO2 annually just by breathing and the plants love it, they are CO2 starved.
Environmentalists couldn’t deal with success.
I think you attribute to NY what rightly should go to Ohio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River
Ohio had the “Burning River” but the Genesee River flowing into Lake Ontario in the Rochester NY area was so polluted the vegetation on the banks was white and strange shapes or dead, the river flowed all sorts of colors from the Kodak dyes and it stunk worse than any chemistry lab I have ever been in 4 decades as a chemist.
The US has had plenty of rainbow rivers. In my own hometown, the Naugatuck River used to be dyed from the shoe factory in town (Keds). In central Mass, the Nashua River suffered from the dyes released from the papermills in Leominster and Fitchberg. the upper Housatonic River was polluted so badly from GE that they literally had to remove by dredging the entire river bed for a stretch.
Just wrote a post on the Eureferendum blog explaining why we, thanks to our leadership, the UN. the US, the EU and NATO we have swapped places from a historic perspective.
We now have become inhabitants of an evil empire.
We have been turned into the bad guy’s.
All we can do to restore this situation is to throw out out current governments, distance ourselves from the UN, dissolve the EU, throw out all the AGW. Earthday loving, carbon fuel hating, Gaia treehugging zealots and restore our relationship with Russia.
If we fail to do this ASAP we will pay the price 10 fold.
I believe that in the final episode of Star Wars, we’ll find out that the rebels are actually the bad guys.
OK—I have a somewhat different viewpoint on some of this.
1) The world population has gone from 2 billion to over 7 billion in a century. This has happened because of better and more available housing, medical care, food, water, sanitation and the and a main enabler for all this is available energy
2) We have used up a significant portion of the lowest hanging fruit of the fossil fuel tree. No predictions as to when the supply will start to run dry, just that it is a finite source.
3) Fossil Fuels are simply, sources of stored solar energy, and most so called renewables are using current solar energy. Notable exceptions are geothermal and nuclear energy.
4) One difficulty that people overlook is that we cannot duplicate what nature can do in storing energy, as in all fossil fuels, wood, and ethanol In a hundred years, we have not improved much on the lead-acid battery for storage. Therefore, solar, wind and the like must be used mostly locally and immediately or added to an energy grid.
5) Using back of the envelope figures of rate of energy use, rate of solar energy striking the earth surface. and efficiency in using that energy, I maintain that someday our main source of energy will be nuclear. We can hedge that prediction in many ways, including efficiency, adaptation and more, but regardless of wild alarm,, the choice between that and starving or freezing to death will make the decision inevitable.—— or we can go back to the concept of eugenics and only the few of us chosen ones will continue (sarc)
6) Regarding number 5, I do believe our ability to quantify has deteriorated; otherwise there would not be such absurd amounts of money invested into energy initiatives which are not feasible.
7) The worst earth day poster I saw was that of a polar bear climbing a pole in the middle of a a small iceberg, posted in a high school. Propagandized science!!
I agree that nuclear is the best option (I can see a nuclear power plant out my window. Unlike the Greens I am not a hypocrite.)
In regard to #6 the money invested was TAX PAYER MONEY and not the money of the investors who instead made out like bandits.
Al Gore played the game with Maurice Strong at Fall River, Massachusetts on the US Earth Day in 1995. Gore hyped Strong’s company Molten Metals, the stock sharply rose and Strong and the other insiders quickly sold. Shortly there after the DoE dropped the funding of the company and the stock dropped like a rock leaving those conned by Al Gore and his buddy Maurice Strong holding an empty bag.
(Maurice Strong, a Canadian is a major donor to the Democratic and Republican parties as are most large corporate donors. That is why the average joe is ignored in American politics.)
Also note Al Gore has already bailed on Green Energy. But this time the scam is much, much larger and a nation is left holding the empty bag. Like the Ozone crisis, I think the Molten Metal scam was a trial run to see if the CAGW plan would work.
I am not surprised Gore is bailing. The idea was not to completely collapse Western civilization but to force it under the control of the UN and transfer as much wealth as possible from the poor and middle class to the rich. In that they have been highly sucessful. According to the IMF, “In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal, and the top earners’ share of income in particular has risen dramatically. In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled over the past three decades, now accounting for about 20 percent of total U.S. income (Alvaredo and others, 2012)…” .
Pascal Lamy made it very clear that an EU type UN was the other goal.
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story The Molten Metal Technology Inc. story is around two page downs.
Al Gore Walks Away From Green Energy
Pascal Lamy: Global Governance: Lessons from Europe, What can the world learn about global governance from the diplomatic model of the European Union?
Lamy: Whither Globalization? Essay says the goal has been to get rid of “the Westphalian, sacrosanct principle of [national] sovereignty” since the 1930s.
(wwwDOT)theglobalist.com/pascal-lamy-whither-globalization/
IMF Report: (wwwDOT)mf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/dervis.htm
Not enough uranium to replace fossil fuels for power generation.
There are hundreds if not thousands of years of coal
Go with thorium:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Thorium/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/Search/?term=thorium%20reactors
While I agree that Thorium is better, Monazite is a rare mineral sand. I haven’t done the sums but from my experience I’d question whether there are enough reserves to run a bunch of thorium reactors. It is a tiny % of the global economic mineral sand reserves.
Even if there is “only” 500 years worth of reserves, who cares? We have zero idea what the sources of energy will be 500 years from now. However we do know that the technology today is much different when compared to that of the fifteen hundreds.
Well said Gail, Gore’s bait and switch is almost complete, and the UN in the form of IPCC reports is making a power-play to control the Western world through a CO2 levy. It is, and always has been, about politics and not science.
Unconventional nuclear power appears to hold much better outcomes, in providing the required power, than wind and solar. I for one believe we should retain the right to use all fossil fuels to best benefit of the nation.
Speaking of fossil fuels…. As we all know there has been a huge switch from coal to natural gas in the past few years. It makes sense; gas is cleaner, and these days, at least, cheaper. What’s to not like? Yesterday I was thinking and it dawned on me. My local power plant is designed to be powered by either oil, coal or gas — it can be switched over fairly easily. On the other hand, many plants cannot be so easily changed over, and if they are gas, they need gas. More and more coal mines are being driven out of business by over regulation. More and more of the coal powered plants will be shut down due to EPA regulations. This puts the US in an odd situation. With coal, every power plant can have a stockpile of coal outside to give the operators weeks or months or supply. Not so with gas. If someone shuts down the gas pipeline, the plant goes dead. The US is entering a time when a small group of people will control whether our cities have electricity.
The problem is the switch from coal to NG COST MONEY. It also gives NG a near monopoly since the nuclear scaremongering is still very active and solar/wind is an absolute joke. On top of that the Greens want dams pulled down and we have the ‘Wild Rivers Act’
As Obama Promised: Energy Prices to Soon Skyrocket
Obama’s war on coal hits your electric bill
Jason, yep.
There is a concern with pollutants from coal. Arsenic, Mercury and sulfur oxides to name some.
I consider CO2, :however, to be elixir of life.
The ambient levels of mercury are ‘High’ People forget all thesechemicals are NATURALLY in the environment.
See: Mercury, the Trickster God: I’ve been puzzling for a while about why the areas with the most power plants aren’t the areas with the worst levels of mercury pollution. Why aren’t the areas downwind from the power plants heavily polluted?
Mercury in California fog linked to ocean upwelling
The EPA’s Mercurial Madness: …My first surprise was that far and away the largest emitter of atmospheric mercury is the ocean. The ocean? I’d never have guessed that. Other huge emitters are various lightly vegetated land areas. In addition, forests, volcanoes, and geothermal vents are significant emitters …
However do not worry it looks like the EPAs scaremongering is winning. They just won the case in the Colorado Court of Appeals.
There is more Mercury in your immediate environment with all the florescent and compact florescent lighting that is now illuminating the modern world.
Where are the recycling points for all these lighting fitting? How much Mercury is leached into the water supply from trash heaps were the broken lights are desposed?
What other metal salts are in these light bulbs?
I notice that cats are very adaptable. They don’t seem that uncomfortable whether is is 10 F outside or 100 F. But our species is so pathetic that a degree or two difference is supposed to kill us all. How did we ever make it this far?
FIRE
OPen the windows when it is 10 degrees outside. Watch where the cats curl up. 3 dog night? Try a 4 cat night! 😉
All those ’70s kooks (oops, I mean scientists) were predicting various versions of starvation and mass famine; caused by a combination of Man-Made Global cooling, pesticide use, and over-population. So turn the hands of time forward to now, and a very real problem is not third-world starvation, but an epidemic of obesity! Check out China:
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/china-s-obesity-pandemic-slideshow/
21st century Climate Experts are like 13th century Religious Experts.
“After the hailstorm, The second trumpet, and the sea became blood. And look here is blood”
“It’s the prophecy of the Apocalypse!”
“The third trumpet, a burning star!”
http://youtu.be/6_noPUQT3Ho
Isn’t it strange how they both call for the Inquisition!
Without fossil fuels, our computer industry will not exist right now.
Next Earthday make all hospitals, clinics, and doctors surgeries run on renewables only. 🙁
This may educate the sheeple faster than any other method.
Not only are fossil fuels beneficial, they have nothing to do with fossils.
So, you have no idea what the word fossil means, then