by Rod D. Martin
April 22, 2017

Just in case you wonder why some of us bristle at the very idea of “settled science” (which is by definition an oxymoron), and even more so by the claims to it of certain leftists, behold: a list of the “settled” truths of the first Earth Day, 1970, most of them the work of Paul Ehrlich, still a feted “scientist”, leading Stanford professor, fellow of the Royal Society and hero of the left.

1. It’s already too late to save the world from mass starvation, due to runaway pollution and overpopulation.

2. 200 million people will be starving to death by 1980, a large percentage of them in Europe and the United States.

3. By 1985 air pollution will be so extreme that all people everywhere will have to wear gas masks when outdoors.

4. All crude oil will be gone by 2000, making cities unlivable and the transport of what few crops can still be cultivated impossible.

5. But it won’t matter because virtually all land will be so polluted that it’s unusable by 2000.

6. By the year 2000 literally the entire world will be in irreversible famine.

7. Civilization will end by 2005.

All of that was “settled science” too. But looming over all of it was the growing concern by many scientists (and their funders in government, who saw all of this as justification for the state to take over every aspect of human life, you know, to stave off the certain disaster) that even the Great Famine of 1980 might be overtaken by this:

8. By 1980 the Northern Hemisphere will be destroyed under the historically unprecedented lightning-fast advance of glaciers in a new Ice Age.

Happy Earth Day, 1970. Its hard to imagine why they bothered, unless you imagine they knew all this was BS designed to stampede the world into socialism (and higher spending on research grants).

Oh wait….

The details of the disaster we must DO SOMETHING ABOUT RIGHT NOW change over time. The script — and its purpose, and even its specific players like Ehrlich — do not.