False Environmental Prophecies

Five False Prophecies of Impending Doom

During my lifetime many prophets of doom have predicted the end of the world. As I look around me it appears that, so far, they have been wrong. Let’s look at the prophecies and probe deeper into why they were made.

In my academic career, beginning in college in the 1960s, I heard repeated predictions of the apocalypse; the world was about to be destroyed, or at least mangled so as to be unrecognizable. There were dozens, probably hundreds of these predictions. In this video I would like to look at five of the best known prophecies of doom, why they are wrong, and what prompted their conception.

Let’s start with nuclear holocaust. When I was in high school my parents rented a house that had a bomb shelter. It was about 6 x 10 and you could barely stand up in it. It had a two week supply of food that had been there for years. I’ll bet it was really good but we never tried any. Doomsters were preparing for an all-out nuclear exchange that would leave the earth uninhabitable—at least for two weeks. What one did after that I don’t know. A famous novel written in the 1950s called On the Beach was the story of a post-apocalyptic world where the last surviving humans expired on a beach in Australia. Years later I went in to an office at the University of Colorado. The program assistant was looking really glum. I asked him, What’s wrong? He said he was mourning the end of the world in a mushroom cloud. But he said he had recently read one hopeful sign. Studies had shown that cockroaches could survive a nuclear blast. So at least life would not be totally extinguished. Ah. Good idea. Let’s place our hope in cockroaches.

If you are old enough, you remember the end of the Soviet Union in 1990. After that the fear of nuclear Armageddon became much less. But for about four decades it paralyzed many.

Another Apocalyptic theory is overpopulation. I have already covered this topic in a previous video but when I was a college student and for a couple of decades thereafter it was the big, impending disaster. It was the global warming of that era. The apocalypse of overpopulation would lead to the apocalypse of mass starvation. Hundreds of millions would die. Movies were made of people cannibalizing each other to stay alive because food supplies had diminished. An environmental group, the Worldwatch Institute, put out a handbook every year, and every year it started out the same way. “Humanity is rapidly losing its ability to feed itself.” What actually happened was the opposite. The agricultural revolution in seeds, herbicides, and pesticides dramatically increased our ability to feed ourselves so that right now, in 2021, the entire world produces more food per person than at any time in the history of the human race. You hear a lot about starving people these days but the problem is not lack of food. Usually it is due to social factors like politics, war, or the collapse of the family. We can now produce enough food to give everyone on the planet an excellent diet.

A third recently predicted apocalypse was - we are running out of resources, particularly oil. At the University of Colorado one day I had a student rush into class declaring, “We are running out of oil. I just went to a lecture and the professor warned us that we would soon have no gas for our cars.” I said, “Scott, I think the good professor is mistaken. I don’t think we are running out of oil.” “Oh, but he used statistics and everything.” I said, “I’m sure he did. But for one thing we have no idea how much oil there is.” Scott said, “Oh, he factored in unknown reserves.” Even some of the students laughed at this. I said, “Scott, you can’t factor in the unknown. That’s why we call it the unknown.” A term coined back in the 50s was “peak oil.” It meant that we would soon hit our peak production of petroleum and then production would decline until there was no more oil. Actually there has always been lots of oil, we just didn’t know how to get at it. But that all changed 15 years ago with the fracking revolution. We now are able to access so much more of our oil that we essentially have an infinite supply. Many years ago I read a book by the director of the Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn. He said the only way to know the scarcity of something is its price. As it becomes more scarce, the price goes up. By that measure we now have a greater abundance of virtually every natural resource than we have ever had in history. Our supply of resources is not diminishing. It’s accelerating.

The fourth apocalypse is global……..cooling. In 1975 Newsweek ran a cover article predicting apocalyptic global cooling and spoke of ominous signs of a cooling earth which would drastically reduce food production. It said the evidence was “massive” and that scientists were nearly unanimous in their conclusions. The article expressed fear that the politicians would do nothing to stop the cooling in time to avoid disaster. Some even suggested covering the arctic ice with black soot so it would absorb more heat and raise the earth’s temperature. Of course it didn’t happen, and many of the people who were predicting a catastrophe of cold moved seamlessly into the next catastrophe,

Number five, global warming, which has recently been rechristened climate change, a catch-all term for everything bad. I need to make it clear that I am not disputing those who claim the earth might be warming. It’s always doing one or the other—cooling or warming. And I won’t disagree with those who claim mankind has a role in it. We might. What I am challenging is catastrophic global warming, that the warming will destroy life on earth as we know it. And that we have to give politicians all our money and all control over our lives. That apocalyptic vision is absurd, and those who promote it are a far greater danger to earth than any warming might be.

Recently the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Steven Koonin, a long-time professor at CalTech and one of Obama’s chief science advisors. He talked about his new book, Unsettled, which is a review of the climate science literature. Koonin concludes that, quote ‘humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The deficiencies of climate data challenge our ability to untangle the response to human influences from poorly understood natural changes… In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.’ End of quote

These apocalyptic predictions of the alarmists are no more to be believed than the earlier editions. Many of them don’t care about saving the planet.  They just want more power.

For many others, environmentalism has become a kind of religion, a cultic faith that gives life a purpose and a cause. But this prophecy will be as wrong as all the others.

I was in a debate at the University of Colorado and my opponent said we should adopt his ideas even if he was wrong because they were harmless. But he is tragically mistaken. Misguided environmental policies have been among the most destructive in history. Let me give a few examples. When Professor Ehrlich told the world there were too many people the Chinese government took him seriously as did a number of other countries. In 2012 the journalist Mara Hvistendahl wrote Unnatural Selection, a book about population policies around the world. She said demographers estimate that the world should have 163 million more girls than it has. 163 million girls have been terminated through sex selection abortion and infanticide. Most at the altar of the overpopulation god. That’s 20 holocausts. It’s an unspeakable tragedy based on a false prophecy. 

Another example we find primarily in Africa. Back in the 1960s environmentalists concluded—incorrectly as it turned out—that DDT was a dangerous pesticide and should be banned. DDT is to this day the best mosquito killer ever created. Steven Milloy of junkscience.com estimates that the banning of DDT has caused the premature deaths of about 1 million African children a year. Another terrible tragedy because of false prophecy. 

Bjorn Lomborg is an environmental scientist who runs an institute in Denmark. He says that fear of global warming catastrophe is causing many wrong-headed policies. By turning from fossil fuels to renewables we have driven up the price of energy drastically. He coined the term “energy poverty” to describe poor families having to make huge sacrifices just to pay their energy bills, bills that are driven up by environmental policies designed ostensibly to save the planet. Wealthy westerners can pay more for energy to make themselves feel better but higher energy costs are really paid by the world’s poor. Lomborg estimates that in Africa there are 4 million premature deaths a year because villagers cook with wood or animal dung. This releases a large number of particulants into their small huts that wouldn’t be there if they could afford electricity. 

And how many young women have I talked to who would love to have children but are going childless in order to save the planet. This is so sad and it stems from false prophecies of doom.

What’s behind all this? Bad theology. A wrong view of God. In Romans 1:21-23 Paul says of mankind in general: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”

When men stop worshipping, and thanking, and believing in the true God they do not then believe nothing. They try to replace the true God with substitute gods. A very common God-substitute is the worship of nature as Paul notes in this passage. The true God of Scripture sits above nature and is in absolute control of it. In Psalm 33:6 we read that He brought the world into being through the Word of His mouth. In Matthew 10:30 Jesus says His father controls nature down to the tiniest detail. 2 Peter 3 says that history as we know it will, indeed, end but not before Almighty God decides to end it.

The greatest need of every man or woman is to kneel before the true God of the universe and trust Him to work out every detail in the natural world and in their personal life. You come to Him through Jesus Christ. Give your life to Him today. Your fear of the future will be removed and replaced with His peace.

Be sure and check out the many resources I have listed below. Thank you for listening. May our God bless you this day in a mighty way.



Robert Tracinski on false environmental prophecies: https://thefederalist.com/2015/04/24/seven-big-failed-environmentalist-predictions/

A collection of false prophecies: https://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-2010-stupid-predictions-from-first-earth-day

Rachel Carson was wrong about DDT: https://www.safechemicalpolicy.org/malaria-legacy/

Women are choosing not to have children: https://futurism.com/the-byte/women-choosing-not-have-children-because-climate-change

The impact of our declining birthrate: https://spectatorworld.com/topic/shrinking-global-population-climate-change/

Interview with Steven Koonin who says that climate science is anything but settled(to read the whole interview a subscription to the Journal is required): https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsettled-review-theconsensus-on-climate-11619383653?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

The original Newsweek article warning about global cooling: https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/the-cooling-world-newsweek-april-28-1975.pdf