Thorner: Perennially Wrong Scientist Once Again Predicting An Apocalypse

By Nancy Thorner, Opinion Contributor

CBS kicked off 2023 with a bang with its 60 Minutes program in early January featuring Paul Ehrlich, who alongside host Scott Pelley, discussed their belief that human population growth may be too much for the Earth to sustain and would end humanity as we know it.

It is unfortunate that there was not someone to counter the rhetoric of Paul Ehrlich. Instead, the propaganda of the 60 Minutes program was undoubtedly believed by many of its listeners left terrified that too many people are destroying the planet and that we are doomed if we don’t act now.

Elrich is best known for his now discredited 1968 book, The Population Bomb, co-authored with his wife Anne, in which it was claimed that overpopulation would cause global food shortages and “greenhouse gasses” would heat the oceans, melt the polar ice caps, and growing human populations would snuff out nature.

Their combined work, not surprisingly, led to accusations of alarmism – something Ehrlich still wholeheartedly embraces.

As Ehrlich told 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley in their program interview, “I was alarmed. I am still alarmed. All of my colleagues are alarmed.”

Elrich continued,

“I know there’s no political will to do any of the things that I’m concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Ehrlich is known for his failed past predictions. Here are some of them:

In 1972, Ehrlich predicted that water rationing would occur in nearly 2,000 municipalities and that hepatitis and epidemic dysentery rates would go up 500 percent.
Neither event took place.

In 1972, Ehrlich said that because of a shift of the jet stream caused by air pollution, a permanent drought would occur in the Midwest, turning it into a desert. And in reaction, the economy would start to fail.

This too, has not happened.

Climate change as an apocalypse threat to humanity

A nuclear apocalypse is more likely to occur than the current hyped-up and promoted doomsday climate change scenario

As stated by Judith Bunbury,

“Climate change today is considered different to climate change at any other time in Earth’s history because of its link to human activities. But large-scale changes in climate have occurred before, some gradual and some extremely rapid. Ancient civilizations experienced this, as we do, through changes in their physical environment.”

And further research by Bunbury revealed that ancient civilizations learned to adapt to climate changes.

100 reasons why climate change is natural

And ten years later, after 100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made were released by the European Foundation, they are still viable today.

1). There is no real scientific proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gasses from man’s activity, and,

2). Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

Doomsters will not fade away

There will always be influential groups of doomsters predicting that the future and the present never looked so bleak. And the hype, hysteria and wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue as a way to control the populace – and make people richer for promoting such propaganda.