Fiala quotes source with such spectacularly wrong predictions

The op-ed by professor Andrew Fiala in the June 27 Bee merits a response. He is relying heavily on opinions of Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich, who in 1970 declared that “Population will outstrip food supplies, and the death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death in the next 10 years.”

Mr. Ehrlich also said for the first Earth Day in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve to death. In 1970, Mr. Ehrlich predicted that air pollution would take hundreds of thousands of lives within a few years.

Mr. Ehrlich also warned in 1970 that Americans born since 1946 now had a life expectancy of of 49 years. He also predicted in 1975 that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rain forests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

Surely Prof. Fiala can’t expect us to put much stock in someone who continues to make such spectacularly wrong predictions, and he shouldn’t either.

This story was originally published July 8, 2015 at 6:51 AM with the headline "Fiala quotes source with such spectacularly wrong predictions."