The Population Bomb a few decades later - not so much

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The New York Times is running a great series on the Malthusians who 30-45 years ago were claiming that we were reaching a great "tipping point" and if we did not actively work to cut our population growth, we would be in serious trouble.

Needless to say, the population continued to grow and we are doing much better than ever.

From the New York Times:

The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion
The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind. In 1966, for example, a writer named Harry Harrison came out with a science fiction novel titled “Make Room! Make Room!” Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for too few resources, the book became the basis for a 1973 film about a hellish future, “Soylent Green.” In 1969, the pop duo Zager and Evans reached the top of the charts with a number called “In the Year 2525,” which postulated that humans were on a clear path to doom.

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson’s on “The Tonight Show.” How the apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth is the focus of this installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining significant news stories of the past and their aftermath.

And of course, once a flaming attention whore, always a flaming attention whore:

But Dr. Ehrlich, now 83, is not retreating from his bleak prophesies. He would not echo everything that he once wrote, he says. But his intention back then was to raise awareness of a menacing situation, he says, and he accomplished that. He remains convinced that doom lurks around the corner, not some distant prospect for the year 2525 and beyond. What he wrote in the 1960s was comparatively mild, he suggested, telling Retro Report: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

What gets me is that this rhetoric is exactly the same as is being used today by the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, they just changed the talking points. Everything else is the same, there is a tipping point, we have to do something now to prevent future disaster, this has to be a global coordinated effort (centralized government) and we need to have our daily livelihood controlled by our betters if we are to survive.

That kind of thought was wrong then and it is wrong now. We are doing just fine.

From a population standpoint, we could take eight billion people and put them into Texas and if they were evenly distributed, each person would be about 200 feet from each other person. The Island of Manhattan is three times denser than this.

From an environmental standpoint, an increase in CO2 will boost crop production and more people die from cold weather than from warm.

The Times has more here and The Weekly Standard has a nice writeup here - it's about the benjamins...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on June 2, 2015 6:53 PM.

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