Today, April 22, being Earth Day, this is an appropriate occasion to view things in perspective. So here goes.
Predictions made by environmentalists in 1970 -- the year the event was founded:
* A new Ice Age (Newsweek);
* A world "eleven degrees colder by the year 2000" (Kenneth Watt);
* By 1985 air pollution to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half (Life magazine);
* By 1995 between 75 and 85 percent of all species to be extinct (Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson);
* Mass starvation (Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes).
Say: "Thank you, thank you, Earth Day! If those 20 million hippies hadn't taken the day off work, we'd all be dead by now!"
P.S. The Wall Street Journal this week noted the disappearance of a U.N. Environment Programme website that had featured a prediction "that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010" and included a map showing from where those refugees would come. Of course the refugees never materialized but the Journal expects that by 2021 the unabashed U.N. agency will be predicting the 50 million refugees by 2030.
These guys count on the dying off of those old enough to remember their previous pratfalls and the coming to age of a new generation that can be suckered, keeping in mind the sage observation of H. L. Mencken:
* A new Ice Age (Newsweek);
* A world "eleven degrees colder by the year 2000" (Kenneth Watt);
* By 1985 air pollution to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half (Life magazine);
* By 1995 between 75 and 85 percent of all species to be extinct (Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson);
* Mass starvation (Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes).
Say: "Thank you, thank you, Earth Day! If those 20 million hippies hadn't taken the day off work, we'd all be dead by now!"
P.S. The Wall Street Journal this week noted the disappearance of a U.N. Environment Programme website that had featured a prediction "that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010" and included a map showing from where those refugees would come. Of course the refugees never materialized but the Journal expects that by 2021 the unabashed U.N. agency will be predicting the 50 million refugees by 2030.
These guys count on the dying off of those old enough to remember their previous pratfalls and the coming to age of a new generation that can be suckered, keeping in mind the sage observation of H. L. Mencken:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous
to be led to safety) by menacing it with
an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.
No comments:
Post a Comment