Ehrlich

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich is a longtime environmental icon and author of the 1968 book "The Population Bomb."

Ehrlich confidently predicted in a 1970 issue of Mademoiselle: "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 10 years."

He assured readers of The Progressive in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off." In a 1969 essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!" Ehrlich said "most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born."

This has passed, like Peak Oil. And the Left forgives, albeit  quite selectively.

And, like a bearish stock market goldbug, Ehrlich persists. His thesis is always that we are doomed, the mechanism just gets updated.

He predicted in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich continued that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

In 1975, Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

He now has a new theory. In a July 2017 issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" he predicts that human civilization stands in peril from an ongoing mass extinction on Earth: "Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages (of vertebrates) amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This 'biological annihilation' underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction event."

Is it any wonder that the public get inured to these alarms?

Goldbugs and Erlich will, like a stopped watch, be probably right some day but shouldn't we have the right to make more demands than that?