False Prophets

Rachel Carson, who had once been trained in zoology, led the way in this arena of ill-founded conclusions regarding subjects about which she had no expertise. (i.e., DDT)

Butterfly expert Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb foisted him into public view with his utterly false predictions that the battle to feed humanity was over and that 10 million children would starve annually by the end of the 1970s.

Dr. Ernest Sternglass predicted in 1969 that all children in the United States would perish from the fallout of our nuclear tests.

Carl Sagan predicted a nuclear winter and that the early 1990s Kuwait oil fires would have a permanent affect on world climate.

Barry Commoner predicted the "virtual death of marine life" in rivers by 1980 due to zero oxygen levels caused by pollution from fertilizers.

Samuel Epstein alleged a prominent herbicide caused cancer and industrial pollution was creating an epidemic of cancer. These allegations were rejected by real science, but in the interim they made Epstein very famous.

Irving Selikoff, whose opinions served as a basis for Environmental Protection Agency standards on asbestos, predicted 40,000 deaths per year from asbestos from 1967 to 1977. The actual number was 522 worldwide.

In 1976 Stephen Schneider supported the view that the Earth was entering a little ice age. Now he is a leading proponent of the theory of global warming.

Even the revered oceanographer Jacques Cousteau was not above exaggerating. After a speech to UCLA students, a young reporter by the name of Dana Rohrabacher, who happened to be a scuba diver, asked Cousteau if he wasn’t being too pessimistic about the difficulty of obtaining fish, clams, oysters, and lobsters from the oceans in the future. Cousteau came up to his face and said, "Did you not hear me? Within 10 years the oceans will be black goo, totally dead, destroyed. The oceans will be lifeless."

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