History keeps proving prophets of eco-apocalypse wrong

But either way, history proved Newsweek, Bryson, and the CIA wrong.

In her 1962 book Silent Spring, a work of holy scripture for the green religion, marine biologist Rachel Carson warns that insecticides – and particularly DDT – would cause children “to be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours”. Farm animals, birds and insects would sicken and die, leaving the bucolic spring countryside of her fevered imagination silent.

The silent spring she feared never dawned, and not because she cautioned against the indiscriminate use of pesticides. It never dawned because she greatly exaggerated the threat to both humans and the environment. In a scathing critique, entomologist Dr J Gordon Edwards lays out, page by page, how Carson played fast and loose with the facts to launch a campaign that ultimately proved to be deadly to humans. In part thanks to the movement to ban or discontinue the use of DDT, up to 700-million people a year contract mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, encephalitic viruses, bot flies or the worms that cause the grossly disfiguring elephantiasis. Over a million people die because of mosquitos every year, making it the deadliest creature on Earth.

Meanwhile, agricultural technology companies continue to make more effective, better targeted and less harmful products, and genetic engineering is helping to reduce the need for toxic pesticides in farming. It is spring as I write this, and birds are twittering cheerfully outside my window.

Clearly, history proved Rachel Carson wrong.

Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009 said that we had “50 days to save the world” from climate catastrophe. Five years later, in 2014, the French foreign minister declared that we have “500 days to avoid climate chaos”. When Barack Obama became president, James Hansen, who now is a self-described climate activist, said that he had “four years to save the Earth”. A few years later, Tim Wirth, the head of the UN Foundation, said that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to avert a climate catastrophe.

Sixteen years ago, a major British newspaper ran an infamous story declaring that snowfalls are now just a thing of the past. Snow will become “a very rare and exciting event”, the article said, quoting Dr David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Of course, the UK has seen several winters of record snowfalls since 2000.

“We are now at the threshold of making reliable statements about the future,” wrote  Daniela Jacob of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in 2001. No we aren’t.

Prince Charles, speaking in July 2009, said we had 96 months left to “save the world” from consumerism and capitalism. Of course, a royal, first in line to the throne of England, does not have to concern himself with the grubby business of producing goods and making money. Taxpayers and vast swathes of land ensure he’s safely swaddled from cradle to grave. It’s easy for the rich and leisured classes to swan about, advised by top environmentalists, claiming that we have only a few years left to prevent “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it,” as batty Prince Charlie puts it.

His prediction has nine months left to run. Like all the other worthies, history is about to prove Prince Charles wrong.

A few months ago, I wrote a paean to the power of scientific predictions. Its purpose was two-fold: to celebrate the successes of the scientific method, and to contrast the predictions of science with the prophesies of doom that have dominated so much of the discourse about human progress and the state of the planet.

The ability to make accurate predictions is a hallmark of good science. Conversely, making false predictions implies either that a statement is not based on science, or that it is based on bad science.