Do environmentalists endanger the planet?

Back in 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. And again in 1949, the Secretary of the Interior declared that the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight.

In 1968, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor Professor Paul Ehrlich predicted a major food shortage in the U.S, and "in the 1970s…hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Around 1970, Ehrlich produced "The Population Bomb", then in 1991, "The Population Explosion". He forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.

Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." At the first Earth Day celebration in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

A report was written in 1972 for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them."

In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000." Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 confidently predicted, "..civilisation will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against the problems facing mankind."

That was the same year that Senator Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." And in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas left.

We have always had scaremongers proclaiming scarcity in order to inflate prices or sell books. The facts, if anyone is interested, are totally different. According to the American Gas Association there's a 1,000 to 2,500 year supply of gas. There is also at least 250 years worth of coal left in the US. And probably enough world oil to last another million years at the current rate of human usage.

There are more inconvenient truths. The greenhouse effect is a necessary result of water vapour in earth's atmosphere. Without greenhouse, earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit (-17C) and we would perish.

Most climate change is due to the orbital eccentricities of earth and variations in the sun's output and moon’s orbiting. Natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined. Termites are the species putting the most CO2 into the atmosphere.

Heat from emissions cannot rise more than a few hundred feet from ground level. It is simply too cold any higher up. At the level Boeings fly, at altitude 10,000m, the outside air is -50C and there is still half the atmosphere above that. That air level is not getting any warmer or cooler due to Man and happens to be the altitude range where most weather is generated.

Given that doomsayers have always been wrong, in 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have authorised?

In 1970 when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling, the threat of an ice age and of millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should have been undertaken to prevent such a promised-for calamity?

If any action was enacted, the warmer 1990s would have required a hugely expensive reversal.

When Ehrlich calculated in 1970 that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent that dire outcome? How many useless billions would have been mis-spent, money that could have better contributed to the fight against poverty, disease and starvation?

We have no reason to think that current environmental alarmism is any more correct, now that they have switched to manmade "climate change". We cannot conclude that today's green taxes will in any way change or stabilize our climate.

The planet is fine; it has happily been here for 4.5 billion years. It is not suddenly madly out of control just because of cars and trucks.

This is indeed a New Age, but not a progressive one for mankind. Science has been hijacked by governments controlled in turn by the international corporate which also owns and orchestrates most media. As long as profit generates from the creation of poverty, we can never fix the latter.

Until it is realised that prosperity is of spirit and not investment, that power rests with people instead of over people, and that truth has nothing to do with money or taxes, we will continue to be enslaved by profit-driven alarmism.

Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is a longrange forecaster for Australia's Channel Seven.