50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions
The Competitive Enterprise Initiative has compiled a great list of all the failed predictions of Environmental Apocalypses.
These aren’t general predictions of things getting worse, but explicit predictions that something will have happened by a particular date. They include:
- Dire world famine by 1975
- Everyone dead by 1989
- A new ice age by the 21st century
- Oceans dead by 1980
- US to have water rationing by 1974
- US to have food rationing by 1980
- Fossil fuel burning to drop temperatures to ice age by 1981
- Maldives will be underwater by 2018
- Famine by 2012
- UK to be Siberian by 2024
- Arctic will be ice free by 2013
If one did not have the hysterical predictions (which the authors rarely concede were wrong, even after they clearly are), then people would be less skeptical of the actual environmental challenges we have.