How was your Earth Day?

Did you hear doom and gloom tree huggers warn that if we don't change our behavior there will be catastrophic consequences? You probably did. Earth Day is the most holy day in their religion. Earth Day is now 40 years old. Have the tree huggers ever been correct?

On the first Earth Day in 1970, prominent biologist Barry Commoner wrote, "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation." He was not talking about global warming Back then it was the threat of global cooling. That same year, ecologist Kenneth Watt said, "If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." Wow. That was a big miss.

And a New York Times editorial proclaimed: "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Before their apocalyptic predictions of the 70's, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and prominent prophet of population doom, predicted in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, that the world would have more than seven billion people by 2000, and that "massive famines" would occur soon, "possibly in the 1970s, certainly by the 1980s."

The world's population in 2000 turned out to be six billion. As the world population doubled, food consumption per person in poor countries increased from 1,900 to 2,600 calories a day while malnutrition fell from 45 percent of the population in 1949 to 18 percent today.

Forty years from now, people will laugh at those who now claim we are on the precipice of another global catastrophe. They are always wrong and always will be.