Since the 1960s Western Society has been in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon. Again and again we have seen the rise of some great fear, centered on a mysterious new threat to human health and well-being.
As a result, we are told, large numbers of people will suffer or die. Salmonella in eggs; listeria in cheese; BSE in beef; dioxins in poultry; the Millennium Bug; DDT; nitrate in water; vitamin B6; Satanic child abuse; asbestos; SARS; Asian bird flu—the list is seemingly endless. Indeed, we are currently in the grip of the greatest of such fear of all: that of a warming of the world’s climate which, we are officially told, could well put an end to much of civilized world as we know it, report Christopher Booker and Richard North. (1)
Nearly 40 years ago Stanford University population biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of imminent global catastrophe in his book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s, the world would undergo famines and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were also quite gloomy. “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (2)
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Steven Milloy notes, “Forty years later, no such mass starvation has come to pass. While there have been tragic famines resulting in millions of deaths since 1968, none occurred because global food production failed to keep pace with population growth, the core of Ehrlich’s hypothesis. Per capita global food production has, instead, increased by 26.5 percent between 1968 and 2005, according to the World Resources Institute. The number of people who starve to death daily declined from 41,000 in 1977 to 24,000 today, according to The Hunger Project, an organization combating global hunger.” (3)
Milloy adds, “Ehrlich also warned in The Population Bomb that man made emissions of carbon dioxide would cause catastrophic global warming. He suggested that a few degrees of heating could melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level by 250 feet even out-fearmongering Al ’20-foot tidal wave’ Gore on his best worst day.” (3)
