World has three years to prevent dangerous climate change, warn experts
— Chicken Little
What would we do without experts?
Doom predictions on the first Earth Day in 1970:
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
— George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
— Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.“
— Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
— Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Oops. Guess the science was less settled than we thought.
Of course, failure has not diminished this heated rhetoric over the last 47 years. We’re always just a few years from climate catastrophe.
For another 107 examples, see this.