How the population scare predicted today’s climate hysteria – The Spectator World
What did happen is that those who believed in Ehrlich s predictions caused a different but very real suffering. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Ehrlich s book inspired the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the World Bank, and other groups to undertake cruel depopulation programs throughout the 1970s and 80s. In Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh, millions of people were sterilized, often against their will.
In India, many states required sterilization in order for citizens to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, pay raises, and even an education. And in China, according to Smithsonian author Charles Mann, a one-child policy led to as many as 100 million forced abortions, often in unsanitary conditions, causing needless infections, sterility, and even death.
Unfortunately, Paul Ehrlich was not the first presumed expert to foretell a world-shaking catastrophe that would inspire the most awful of remedies. In 1798, a British writer named Thomas Robert Malthus published his own warning about the growth of the world s population, arguing it would inevitably outpace the food supply and lead to famines, wars, mass poverty, and eventually rapid depopulation.
Just as with The Population Bomb, the dire prophecy outlined in Malthus s widely read Essay on the Principle of Population failed to come true. But not before convincing many of his countrymen to stop supporting charities for the indigent and, in 1834, persuading British Parliament to pass the New Poor Law, which cut back relief for the destitute and limited its provision to the very workhouses novelist Charles Dickens famously condemned.
The latest end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenario is, of course, climate change, and its weaknesses have already become apparent. Its first predictions about the rapid extinction of polar bears and the death of the Great Barrier Reef have not only proved false, but both are flourishing more than ever. And despite the alarmist media death counts following every hurricane or other natural disaster, the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database estimates that the real number of 2022 climate-related fatalities will be the lowest in twenty years.
via thespectator.com
I remember seeing a story in Time magazine in the late ’70s about a woman who decided to be sterilized because she read Prof. Ehrlich’s unfortunate book. I’ve often wondered what became of that then-young woman. Did she come to regret her irreversible decision? Should one hope she did, or not?
I don’t know what to think about climate either. I’m probably a luke-warmer, in that I suppose there probably is some human-caused warming, but that humanity will adapt to the new warmer conditions, some of which will be good, like bigger wheat crops in Canada. But this suspicion is just that. It floats on top of a much deeper ignorance. Yet for all my ignorance, I know there’s something hypocritical about flying about in private jets and sporting on big yachts, while preaching to the proles that they must consume less meat and live in smaller houses. That’s just the surface of the climate vision for us lesser humans. The display of corruption in virology we are being treated to, and the influence big money obviously plays in biosciences, for example, have not done anything to increase my confidence in what the Science (TM) is telling us about climate change. And watching some most unworthy people make serious money on various climate grifts depletes my confidence further. If Peter Zeihan is to be believed, the PRC’s population is so far from reproducing itself that it faces catastrophic collapse within the next 10 years. Not all of this was brought on by the now universally rejected one-child policy, but it surely made China’s position much worse. But then, perhaps we should be thanking Dr. Ehrlich. Indeed, perhaps he was a CIA mole who preached exactly the wrong, but from the US’s point of view, the right message to China. He might even believe it himself, which is why science only advances by one funeral at a time.