Consensus Science
The invaluable Carpe Diem blog has a compendium of 18 forecasts of doom that were made on or around the first Earth Day in 1970 -- all of which turned out wrong. Here is an example:
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “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.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: 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….”
Participants in the global warming debate today will surely recognize the formulation of these statements as representing a consensus scientific opinion.
For those of you too young to actively follow the news in the 1970s, Mark Perry is not cherry-picking cranks. These fearful quotations are representative of what was ubiquitous in the media of that time.
My school (Kinkaid in Houston) took speech and debate very seriously and had a robust debate program even in middle school. In 1975-1976 the national debate topic was this:
Resolved: That the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization
The short answer to this proposition should realistically have been: "you have got to be f*cking kidding me." But such were the times that this was considered a serious proposal worth debating for the entire year. In fact, in doing research, it was dead-easy to build up suitcases of quotations of doom to support the affirmative; it was far, far harder finding anyone who would argue that a) the world was not going to run out of everything in a few decades and b) that markets were an appropriate vehicle for managing resources. I could fill up an hour reading different sources predicting that oil would have run out by 1990 or 2000 at the latest.
