Bad Predictions

When scientists and others predicted a decade or two ago that global warming was going to make our planet uninhabitable by the year 2020 or so, many people took them at their word and were willing to support all sorts of economically destructive policies that would've ruined the lives of millions of people had they been enacted. Indeed, those who support the "Green New Deal" are still determined to foist those policies upon us.

Nevertheless, predictions about the future, even when coming from the lips of eminent scientists, should be understood as extrapolations based on the assumption that all the variables that are factored into the prediction will remain constant or on the same trajectory as when the prediction is made. In fact, however, the trajectory of those variables frequently fails to remain constant.

For instance, in 1968 ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford wrote a book titled The Population Bomb in which he predicted that global population would exceed food resources by the end of the century, and the world would suffer vast starvation and world wars due to mass migrations. It never happened.

In 1971 an organization of scientists called The Club of Rome predicted that the world standard of living would peak in 1990 and then decline inexorably.

Here's an excerpt from the link:

Their doomsday manifesto was translated into 30 languages and sold more than 12 million copies. Their solution to the impending economic collapse was for world governments to reduce the world supply of food by 20 percent so that people would be forced to have fewer children, or starve.

They simply assumed that the world’s supply of resources is fixed while the demand for resources grows at a compound rate—which guarantees that demand will exhaust resources. They completely ignored the fact that humans have been endlessly creative in thinking of ways to substitute more plentiful resources for less plentiful ones. We have figured out how to use nuclear fuels and solar energy in place of fossil fuels, e-mail in place of snail-mail, and plastic in place of wood, metal, and glass.

In the 80s and 90s prognosticators were predicting either a shortage of photographic film or a shortage of silver because silver was being rapidly consumed in the production of photographic film. The shortage never came about because within a few years digital technology made film obsolete.

Similar predictions were made during the 70s and 80s that demand for paper would soon outpace paper production making paper exorbitantly expensive, but digital technology emerged that dramatically reduced paper use. Likewise, we were told back in those decades that we were rapidly running out of oil and that by the end of the century our standard of living would suffer serious decline because fuel would be so scarce. That was before the discovery of new oil deposits, the development of fracking and other technological advances opened up vast supplies of fossil fuels.

Currently, we're being told that global warming caused by the use of those fossil fuels will force multitudes of people to migrate from torrid climes to more temperate latitudes crowding masses of humanity into ever shrinking living spaces. However, if global warming occurs on the scale that folks like Al Gore have been predicting, which is doubtful, vast regions in Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland will become habitable that aren't habitable now.

Examples of similarly failed predictions could be multiplied, but the point is that no one knows what the future will bring. Scientists are not prophets. No one knows what inventions will be developed in the years ahead.

History teaches, though, that doomsday predictions, especially when they forecast disaster several decades down the road, have a very poor track record for accuracy, and that it's wise to be skeptical of such predictions when they're thrust upon us by a sensationalist media and "experts" who should be more cautious.