Ep. 334: Do Catastrophic Predictions Come True?
Guest: Patrick Moore
In the course of our lifetimes, we have been bombarded with dire warnings about the fate of the planet.
In the late 60s, Paul Ehrilich’s book “The Population Bomb'' predicted the Earth would not be able to feed three and a half billion people. Today, there are more than 7.8 billion people and climbing. Ehrilich was wrong. Not only are we feeding more people, the percentage of people who are undernourished has been steadily falling since 1990.
In the 1970s, the news about climate indicated we were headed for another ice age. That didn’t happen.
The Maldives are supposed to be underwater by now, based on a 1988 prediction. That 30-year prediction was revised in 2015 to happen in 30 years from now.
In the early 2000s, polar bears were apparently on the brink of survival. National Geographic wrongly published a photo of an ailing polar bear with the headline, “This is What Climate Change Looks Like.” The magazine has since said it “went too far” with the caption. Recent population numbers of polar bears are up from 24,000 in 1984 to more than 26,500 at a minimum today.
Last year, we interviewed a scientist who was part of an expedition to the Gulf of Alaska in search of plastics in the ocean. His thesis was that plastics are impacting salmon in the Gulf of Alaska. Upon his return from five weeks of sampling, he was speechless. At first, he thought he had made a mistake. Months later, after reviewing his work and analysis, all he could say was that he didn’t find plastics in the Gulf of Alaska in the winter of 2019.
And today, as we write this introduction, we read that ice has covered the Sahara Desert, and recently it snowed in Madrid and Malibu, California. What is going on? Patrick Moore, one of the controversial environmentalists on the planet, says, “Predictions of invisible threats aren’t real.” He says we’ve been duped.
We invited Dr. Patrick Moore to join us for a Conversation That Matters about predictions of catastrophic threats.
