When Earth Day Predictions Go Predictably Wrong – Reason.com

When Earth Day Predictions Go Predictably Wrong – Reason.com:

• It’s time to stop freaking out about humanity's imminent demise.

"...As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute reminds us in an article about "18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day in 1970," 

• back in 1969, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born." 
• He added that by 1975, "some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions." 
• In 1970, he revised his prediction for the worse to warn us, as Perry writes, that "between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the 'Great Die-Off.'"

..."The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. 
The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. 
The same applies to our planet. 
The Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. 
What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have."

So, cheer up! 
And stop freaking out about predictions of our imminent demise."