No apocalypse

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

But the apocalypse has not happened in any of the 51 years since Ehrlich and other scientists predicted it. He thought global population would overwhelm the capacity of the world to produce food, and then hundreds of millions would die of starvation. 

He was right in this . . the number of people was growing (though the rate of growth has been slowing ever since). About the time of his predictions and the first Earth Day, global population was 3.5 billion. Today it's over 7 billion. 

He was wrong in this . . the earth had much more capacity to produce food (and other resources) than he or anyone else knew. Famines did not engulf the world. In fact, a billion people have risen out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years. Human beings, increasingly free to innovate, did this.

So here's what we can say about apocalyptic predictions: it's very hard to predict the future. Take apocalyptic predictions - even from scientists - with a healthy skepticism.