Doomsday’s coming (Circa 1970)

Global warming or more accurately global climate change is threatening our way of life and our very life.  If you listen to the scientists and the environmentalist, you’ll be frightened out of your wits.

But the doomsday speakers, the bad news bringers, the bearer of ill tidings have been with us for centuries.  You only have to go back to the 1970’s to see how bad things were going to be in our lifetime.

The Washington Policy Center in Seattle has put out this list of predictions from the 1970’s.

“By 1985 . . . air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one-half.”  Life magazine, January 1970.

“. . . . civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

By 1995 “. . . somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all species of living animals will be extinct,”  Senator Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley Look magazine, April 1970.

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor” . . . the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

The world will be ” . . . eleven degrees colder in the year 2000.  This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”  Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world, as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deterioration and possible extinction,” The New York Times, editorial, April 20, 1970.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

“. . . air pollution . . . is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Erlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.

There are more, many more examples of utterances and predictions made by renowned lecturers and scientists.  But the purpose of this piece is to get you to think more clearly the next time someone predicts the demise of some species or the coming global crisis in warming.

Incidentally, the winter of 2007-2008 was the coldest and snowiest winter in a century.  North America had the most snow in 50 years, Wisconsin had the highest ever recorded, Michigan has the snowiest winter since snowfall records were first kept in 1880.

Baghdad had the first snow in its recorded history, Amman, Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem and Damascus all had the heaviest snow in recent memory.   And, don’t forget, we had snow, right here in Thurston County in May.