What can we say about a man who predicts the end of the world by a certain date, based on nothing more than his weird, idiosyncratic beliefs, and, then, when the date rolls around....

...and turns out to be completely wrong, picks a new date.

Well, if we're environmentalists, we give him prizes and awards. [See Ehrlich, Paul.]

In 1968, Ehrlich predicted the end of the world by famine during the 1970s.

Notwithstanding the fact that by 1980, none of his predictions had come true, Ehrlich still felt enough of the prophetic fever that he made a bet with Julian Simon based on his prediction that the world was running out of natural resources.  He lost the bet in a spectacular fashion and wised up enough to refuse Simon's offer to go "double or nothing."

None of that stopped the left from showering Ehrlich with all kinds of awards, or from continuing to make prophecies, such as the one he was awarded in 2009 in then Socialist Spain:

One major problem is the growing population. According to Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, there will be two and a half billion more people by the middle of the century, and each new person will have a disproportionately greater impact on the environment. The United States is the fastest growing industrialized nation.


"Americans should go childless, or limit themselves to a single offspring, as an act of patriotism," said Ehrlich, who warns that expanding consumption will damage our life-support systems – causing a decline of food security and depletion of water recourses – and a possibly severe decline in standards of living. "All of the additional mining, harvesting, building and manufacturing to provide for growing numbers of people increase greenhouse gas emissions and cause greater climate disruption," he said.

Ehrlich believes it will take drastic measures to stave off global catastrophe. Even if everyone implemented all the environmental solutions suggested by Al Gore in his movie “The Inconvenient Truth,” it "would delay the end of civilization by 17 hours," Ehrlich said.

So, more than 30 years after his failed prophecy, Ehrlich is still rescheduling judgment day.

Unfortunately, Ehrlich's lunacy isn't followed by a handful of crazy cultists.  No, Ehrlich and other environmental doomsayers managed to persuade the Chinese government to join their apocalyptic cult, which then induced China to institute its disastrous "One-child policy," with the concomittant forced abortion policy.

As James Taranto points out in yesterday's column, even though the failed prophecies of Environmentalists are far more damaging than any prophecy made by an obvious loon like Harold Camping, the media keeps it powder dry when it comes to failed Environmentalist predictions:

Something else bothers us about the media mockery of Harold Camping, as justifiable as it may be. Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule? Reuters notes that "Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994." Ha ha, you can't believe anything this guy says! But who jeered at the U.N.'s false prediction that there would be 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010? We did, but not Reuters.


Doomsday superstitions seem to fulfill a basic psychological need. On the surface, the thought that God or global warming will destroy the world within our lifetimes is horrifying. But all of us are doomed; within a matter of decades, every person alive will experience the end of his own world. A belief in the hereafter makes the thought of death less terrifying. But so does a disbelief in the here, after. If the world is to end with us--if there is no life for anyone after our death--we are not so insignificant after all.

To reject traditional religion is not, as the American Atheists might have it, to transform oneself into a perfectly rational being. Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.

Or the attention paid to Camping may just be ideological point scoring coupled with the need to distract attention away from fellow travelers and their failed prophecies.