Earth Day is an annual celebration to support “environmental protection” — no, not primarily to promote good things like clean air and clean water, but to fight global warming, excuse me, climate change, via massive government regulation, control, and spend on a world scale. All this is justified by claims that doom is nearly upon us and can only be averted by radical change coordinated at gunpoint. Should you believe these predictions?
Well, look back at the predictions made on the original Earth Day in 1970. Not one of them came true. Some of these were highlighted in the news segment below — note the caliber of the people making these predictions — they are among the best and the brightest and yet they are still completely wrong.
Even Spock believed in 1979 that the Earth was doomed unless immediate action was taken, doomed not by Global Warming but by Global Freezing.
But haven’t predictions gotten better since then? No, no they haven’t. Here’s a nice list of failed climate change predictions made over the last 25 years. Note they have one thing in common: the dates for demise are soon, but not so soon that anyone will remember the prediction and come back to say hey, this never happened. It’s always doom awaits us in the near future, not immediately, not in the far future, but in that comfortable mid-zone.
By the way, now that we live in an age where we judge the merits of everything by the foibles of those who authored our current institutions, remember that the guy who invented Earth Day, a leftist named Ira Einhorn, murdered his girlfriend and mummified her body, which was found in his apartment 18 months later. He died in prison recently. More on his colorful history here. So when someone mentions Earth Day, be sure to say “But wasn’t that founded by a murderer?”
John Stossel, whose trademark is a balanced look at things, did a great segment on Earth Day and climate change generally. It’s worth watching.
Years ago, Penn & Teller invited Earth Day enthusiasts to sign a petition banning H2O, yes, water. Many signed, inadvertently revealing the scientific naivete of environmental activists. Since then, this has become a repeatable experiment, used in high schools to show why it’s important to be skeptical of politicized scientific claims.
One of the better documentaries on climate change, made by the talented director Martin Durkin, is The Great Global Warming Swindle. It is generally available free on youtube.
Lastly, if you want to know how climate change got started as a cause, check out this short film about the cherry-picking of data to support the cause. It’s not science, it’s politics.