History keeps proving prophets of eco-apocalypse wrong

Clearly, history proved Bob Woodruff and his famous scientific sources wrong.

In 1970, around the time the first Earth Day was held, Life magazine published a list of pearlers. For each of these, they claim, “scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence”.

Of course, by the 1980s, we had so much sunshine that we could hardly step outside without getting cancer. The next ice age now seems a long way off. Nobody in the major cities of the developed world wears a gas mask, and in industrialised countries, air pollution has sharply declined even as populations and GDP have grown.

The closest thing we have to a global plague is the infestation of professional environmentalists that traipse to the world’s top tourist destinations to confabulate new terrors designed to intentionally transform the economic development model of the world, which has produced so much health and prosperity since the industrial revolution.

Many other zany predictions were made when the first Earth Day rolled around, including that by the year 2000 civilisation would end, we’d run out of oil, all the world except Europe, Australia and North America would be in famine, none of our land will be usable due to nitrogen build-up, organic pollutants would cause freshwater fish to die off, life expectancy in the rich world would decline to 42 years, between 75% and 80% of all the world’s species would be extinct, 90% of the rainforest would have been destroyed, we’d have run out of copper, lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver, and the world would be 11 degrees colder.

Clearly, history proved Life magazine and the Earth Day hippies wrong.

Speaking of a colder planet, in the 1960s and 1970s a common view among scientists and the media was that the world was cooling and we were headed for another ice age. At the time, temperature records showed half a degree worth of cooling in the northern hemisphere, although subsequent “corrections” and “adjustments” to the official data have all but removed this from the temperature record. In fact, modern propaganda efforts have tried to erase the “global cooling” consensus of the time from history altogether.

The most infamous artefact of the global cooling scare is a 1975 Newsweek article, but it is not alone. It is supported by other documents, including a CIA report released pursuant to a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request, entitled Potential Implications of Trends in World Population, Food Production and Climate. Dated August 1974, it anticipated a return to the colder conditions prevalent during the Little Ice Age, which ended in the 19th-century. It considered this “far more disturbing” than cyclical changes on a decadal scale.

The 1974 CIA report specifically cites the work of the late University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus Reid A. Bryson, a “towering figure” and “pioneer in modern climatology”. Bryson contended that the world was at the end of a golden era of benign climate and food surpluses, as a result of cooling caused by industrial pollution, which he argued would have been even worse if it had not been for rising carbon dioxide levels.

Blogger Kenneth Richard, writing at NoTricksZone, calls the campaign to pretend that the global cooling scare never happened a “massive cover-up”, and documents 285 scientific papers that do not support the carbon dioxide-led warming view of climate change, of which 163 papers explicitly predict global cooling. The scare certainly was not limited to the back pages of a popular news magazine.