Soon to join Paul Ehrlich's "Famine -1975!" on the remainder tables...

Remember 1975?

Hundreds of millions starved to death!

Remember how the civil government collapsed under the pressure and we had that military junta in Washington?

And only one man saw it happening – Paul R. Ehrlich!

Oh, right, that didn't happen. That was only what Paul Ehrlich predicted in his doom crying book "Famine - 1975!"

1975 came and went pretty much as any other year from the standpoint of the complete absence of the utter ruin of civilization.

For those who don't recall, Ehrlich was the author of the influential 1968 book, "The Population Bomb." Ehrlich had a tremendous notoriety for his Malthusian predictions. The notions that Ehrlich played on found their way into movies like "Soylent Green" and even an episode of "The Name of the Game" - directed by Steven Speilberg(!) - all of which led to the a "malaise" among people growing up in the 1970's that the future would be filled with nothing but despair and shortages. (I debated the topic of "Scarce World Resources" in 1974, and the future we argued about was grim indeed.)

Apparently, though, Ehrlich's grim prognostication were so bad, the book isn't listed on his Wiki site.

My favorite story about Ehrlich is the "Ehrlich-Simon wager":

The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served."
In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up - and why not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer - "nearing depletion," as he'd said - and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian Simon character to eat his words. So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P. Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in."

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon.

Then they sat back and waited.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.

Which is how it came to pass that in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07.

Simon offered to go double or nothing. Ehrlich refused, which was just as well, because Simon would have won the second bet.

For anyone who had grown up during the '70s with all the talk about "limits to growth" and "scarce world resources" and the rest, Simon's besting of Ehrlich provided a great moment of schadenfreude.

Ehrlich nonetheless received a "MacArthur Genius Award” in 1990.

And now we turn to Noble prize winner Al Gore and his book “The Inconvenient Truth.”

Listen for the sounds of that Global Warming epic going down the memory hole with “Famine – 1975!” because it just may be possible that Earth’s global temperature is somehow – in some way we are not sure about – related to the Sun’s energy output!!!

And recent observations indicate that that sunspot activity is at an all time low, which correlates to solar energy output, which means that we are potentially looking at a cooling phase, as has been the case this decade.

As Robert Heinlein observed, “It never pays for a prophet to be too precise.”