“And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that Yahweh has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of Yahweh, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that Yahweh has not spoken” (Deut 18:21–22)
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—“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
—“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
—“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
—“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
—“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
—“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
—“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
—“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
—“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
—“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
—“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
—“[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
—“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth WattProphecies from Earth Day, 1970. (Reason Magazine, 2000; HT: Freedom Works)
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The question is for these predictions is are totally false or just wrong in terms of time?
Hey, I can do that too! “The world is coming to an end! (someday) So give me money!” Nothing specific, just scare tactics. I’m calling bovine scatology on the obvious.
Global Warming is a pretty transparent boondoggle, and always was for those of us who remembered the 1970s and the fear-mongering for the imminent ice-age. Same people, standing at the same govt. spigots, with their wallets out.
Already the rhetoric is shifting to “ClimateChange,” which is an attempt to make this whole nonsense an open-ended rip off. So, no matter what the temperature or weather does, the money will keep on rolling in.
Corporate welfare, left and right, is the same corrupt scam of co-opting govt. power of coercion to enrich the few at the expense of the many. The grotesque nature of the Greens is how worthless human life is to them, and how sickly they dress themselves up in nobility and virtue. C.S.Lewis wrote about these people, who make themselves impervious to rehabilitation by cloaking their oppression in the language of salvation. “We’re crushing you for your own good.”
The solution to “govt. of, by, and for BigBusiness or WarProfiteers” is not the institution of “govt. of, by, and for the Nomenklatura” in the name of the proletariat. The solution is getting govt. out of the messiah-business.
God save us from all the influence peddlers, whether the Neo-con sort, or the SPLC sort.
Bruce,
There is a difference in being wrong in time and being wrong in concept. The dynamics for how climate change (which is has been the term for the past 5 to 10 years) works because of greenhouse gases is understandable and can be observed. Those who believe that we can consume as much as we want without causing any negative effects on the environment are thinking with their appetites. It is also an American mentality that contributes to this. Since our bordering countries are Canada and Mexico and we could care less what they think of us. At the same time, because we live in a consumer society, we have a consumer mindset that magnifies what we can get for ourselves and minimizes or denies the effects of our rate of consumption. Finally, we have the mindset from the current business culture that ignores externalities to focus on short-term profit.
At the same time, the scientific community is worried that its most liberal predictions about the current global climate change have been far too conservative.
Finally, the comparisons between the prophets and those predicting from science were done for what reason? After all, the prophets were claiming that their knowledge came from direct revelation. Scientists use systematic observation and reasoning while at the same time acknowledging their faults and limits. So the premise of the article is based on two groups of people who are not comparable.
But here is something to ponder. Who first predicted our war with Japan in WW II and when was the prediction made?
Curt,
I’m not impressed with your pseudo-intellectual posturing, and barely-concealed sense moral superiority. Nor especially with your penchant for identity-politics. You exemplify in left-leaning form all the problems with group-think that you discover in those on the right. A pox on both your houses.
You ask, “Who first predicted our war with Japan in WW II and when was the prediction made?” Predicted in what context? At what level of specificity?
Here’s my contextless (and therefore worthless and irrefutable) answer: LCDR Arthur H. McCollum, ONI, October 1940. What difference does it make, if you agree with me or not? His memo is a mere historical datum, and its significance is debated. That’s what historians do. It has no bearing on the truth of the sum of the Christian religion as expressed in the Reformed Confessions. The latter are founded on data which significance is beyond debate, because it is preinterpreted; it is revelation in 66 Books.
Curt, Christianity is a religion of Truth and Remnant. It is not about baptizing one group’s social concerns at another’s expense. There may well be more truth or more important truth on side A than on side B. We should seek truth always. But anointing the modern left or the right is a Faustian bargain and a distraction. It is the Devil’s trick to get Christians overinvested in some complex set of earthly interests, which they then confuse with the eternal kingdom priority.
Bruce,
I am not responding to the personal comments made. The person who made the prediction was a WW I opponent. This person predicted our war in the Pacific based on our then pursuit of colonialism in the Pacific. And when Japan’s gov’t described their participation in WW II, they said it was an effort to cleanse East Asia of Western colonialism–that they wanted to pursue their own version of the Monroe Doctrine was what they didn’t want people to read between the lines.
The person who predicted this war was Helen Keller in 1916. And for all those years in between 1916 and 1941, one could have leveled the same criticism of her that was leveled against those who are currently predicting serious and destructive global climate change.