Environmental hysterics nothing new

David Deming
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND May 05, 2008 12:28 pm

— Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley recently warned that failure to take action on global warming could mean the extinction of the human race. During the past few years we’ve been repeatedly warned that we are in the midst of a climate crisis that threatens our survival. Al Gore calls it a “planetary emergency.” We might take this concern more seriously if the doom-mongering wing of the environmental movement weren’t burdened by a long history of false prophecies.
In the middle to late 1960s, the leading environmental concern was overpopulation. The 1967 book “Famine 1975!” warned that “by 1975 a disaster of unprecedented magnitude will face the world … famines will ravage the undeveloped nations … this is the greatest problem facing mankind.”
A sober review of the book in the scholarly journal Science characterized the prediction of mass starvation as “self-evident,” argued that technological solutions were “unrealistic,” and concluded that catastrophe was unavoidable. The reviewer concluded “all responsible investigators agree that the tragedy will occur.”
More widely read was Paul Ehrlich’s shrill screed, “The Population Bomb” (1968). Ehrlich began with the infamous words “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and claimed that “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
“We must have population control,” Ehrlich argued, because it is the “only answer.”
Ehrlich followed with publication of the essay, “Eco-Catastrophe.” He predicted that the Green Revolution would fail and that the “ignorance” of the Cornucopian economists would be exposed. By 1980, environmental degradation would wipe out all “important animal life” in the world’s oceans, people would choke to death from air pollution by the hundreds of thousands, and life expectancy in the United States would fall to 42 years. “Western society,” Ehrlich proclaimed, “is in the process of completing the rape and murder of the planet for economic gain.”
In 1975, the news media informed us that a new Ice Age was imminent. An article in the Chicago Tribune titled “B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon?” noted “it’s getting colder.” The Tribune interpreted a number of ordinary weather events “as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place — a shift that could be the forerunner of an Ice Age.”
Within 10 years, the imminent calamity of global cooling was replaced by global warming. And the mass famines predicted by Ehrlich and others never happened. Since 1970, the six principal air pollutants tracked by the EPA have fallen significantly, even while U.S. population and energy use have grown.
It has been estimated that the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, single-handedly saved the lives of a billion people. Higher crop yields from improved grain varieties also helped preserve the environment by limiting the need to convert undeveloped areas to arable land.
So please excuse my skepticism when you claim that global warming means the end of the world is nigh. I have heard it all before.

DAVID DEMING is a geologist, an adjunct scholar with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma.