Dr. Who's Time Machine

It's a funny old world!  I woke up this morning and found that Dr. Who's 'phone box in my front garden.  There was no-one in it, he was probably off somewhere saving the cosmos, so I thought to myself, why not?  I stepped in, shut the door and pressed the first knob I saw and suddenly, whoosh, there I was travelling back in time.  Amazing - straight back to 1980 - my dear, the fashions!  Anyway, I found myself parked on a street corner in Washington, USA, right next to a rather startled looking news-stand owner.  So, before he panicked I quickly bought a few papers and mags and returned to the time machine.  The first one I opened was Newsweek, and my goodness did I get a shock.  here's what I read:

"The year: 2000. The place: Earth, a desolate planet slowly dying of its own accumulating follies. Half the forests are gone; sand dunes spread where fertile lands once lay.

Nearly 2 million species of plants, birds, insects, and animals have vanished. Yet man is propagating so fast that his cities have grown as large as his nations of a century before."

Crikey, I thought, must have missed that one, really must take more water with it.  Hang on, I thought, what was Newsweek's source for this doom and gloom back in 1980 and then all became clear -  it was Jimmy Carter's mammoth, 1,600-page, Global 2000 report, commissioned by himself at vast expense to the tax-payers of America (Gee, thanks, Buddy, can you spare dime?  Take that as  a 'no', shall I?)  This colossal waste of money and several Brazilian rain forests sold 1.5m copies in 8 languages and was intended by Carter to be his bequest to the nation and, indeed, the world.  Well, thanks, Jimmy, ol' boy, but in view of the fact that it was almost totally wrong  I think I'd rather have the Brazilian trees back again.

Here are some of his forecasts, or to be precise, the forecasts of the, er, 'scientific' consensus of 1980, beginning with the famous (infamous?) executive summary:

"If present trends continue, the world will be more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now...the world's people will be poorer...the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better...for most people on earth life will be more precarious in 2000."

Happily, even back in 1980, there were a few men possessed of independent and shrewd judgement, what today the HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) would call 'deniers', prepared to come out and face down the consensus.  Hermann Kahn, the founder of the Hudson Institute, joined forces with Dr. Julian Simon (he of the famous wager with Paul Erlich, the doom-monger, that the prices of 5 basic raw materials would fall, not rise because of scarcity forecast by Erlich - Simon won!)  These two wrote a refutation of Carter's nonsense which they renamed Globalbaloney 2000. Paul Erlich dismissed their paper, The Resourceful Earth, with the sneer that "the one thing the earth isn't running out of is imbeciles".

Let us do some checking.  The doomsters forecast an oil price in 2000 of $80-100.  In fact it was $25-30, an error of between 300-400%.  They went on to forecast "a 100% real increase in food prices by 2000".  In fact (as opposed to phantasy), world food production rose by 25% so that by year 2000 food prices had fallen by 50%.  So what about the 'population explosion, so beloved by the likes of Paul Erlich?  Well, by 1999, the world population did increase to 6 billion but that was less than the forecast of 6.35 billion, and considerably less than the previous European effort at doom-mongering, 8 billion.  As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out, the rise in population "did not erupt because people suddenly began breeding like rabbits.  Global population exploded instead because people stopped dying like flies!"  The "more precarious life", forecast by Carter et al, seems not to have happened in India, China, Indonesia and Mexico where mortality rates for children fell by 50% (let me repeat that - fell by 50%!) between 1980 and 2000; and life expectancy increased by 10-15 years from the mid-1970s.

So the doomsters were proved wrong on almost every count and you might think that they slunk away in shame.  Not a bit of it.  They claim that things only improved because of their timely warnings and interventions!  So who followed Jimmy Carter into the White house in 1980?  Why none other than Ronald Reagan who blithely ignored all the faint-hearts and pushed a free-market agenda, supported, I might add, by 'that woman' over on this side of the pond.  Well, the last time I looked, the world was still here and more or less the same.  Happy days and if you're offering, mine's a large one - and no water - cheers!

I am indebted to Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute and the American Spectator from whose article in July/August 2000 I have mostly sourced the post above.  I had saved it somewhere in my computer's memory and only stumbled upon it a few days ago.  Unfortunately I cannot find a link.

Comments

[dearieme]

On the whole, paper is not manufactured from wood from rainforests. Change of cliche required there. Otherwise, spot on. But the Enlightened Ones will scream that the predictions were valid, it's just that armaggedon has been slightly delayed.

[David Duff]

Funny you should say that. I was only watching one of my favourite 'Crash-Bang-Wallop' movies last night concerning a Bank hoist and they mentioned then that dollar bills are actualy printed on cotton - or something equally surprising.

As for armaggedon, just so long as it's "slightly delayed" for 20 years that should see me out!

[Clairwil]

I must admit I'm slightly sceptical of these apocalyptic visions that are held up to us every few years.

For a start we've only been recording weather patterns for a very short time. Who knows how haywire the climate was before we started taking notes? I have no objection to being warned of possibilities but we are always told that these things will happen unless we change our wicked ways. New puritanism?

I wonder how much of this stuff is to do with marketing the green industry. Then again I am sure the manufacturers of jute shopping bags and vastly overpriced ethnic gewgaws carved from renewable sources couldn't possibly be doing it for profit.

[David Duff]

"Who knows how haywire the climate was before we started taking notes?"

Well, according to the 'scientists' who spend their time analysing tree rings and ice-cores, they know everything. Unfortunately, many of them are very reluctant to disclose all the data upon which they based their theories - see the previous post. Why they are so shy is impossible to tell but one suspects!