Two of my favorite things are conspiracy theories and doomsday predictions.  So I read this list of 10 failed doomsday predictions eagerly.  Rightly, it's got lots of erronious religious doomsday predictions in there.  Though to be fair, several are obscure.

But I notice that our "Skeptical Inquirer" somehow manages to miss two quite recent doomsday predictions:  the Coming Ice Age and Ehrlich's famously wrong Population Bomb.

The Coming Ice age I can see: it wasn't ever really big in popular imagination or in science (thought it was big enough that I remember seeing it on the cover of Newsweek back in the day).

But how can you miss the Population Bomb?  It was a huge hit, capturing popular imagination and leading to a wealth of "disaster" films that used it as a centerpoint (like Soylent Green). 

Could it be, perhaps, that it's because a lot of the pushers of Population Bomb hysteria just happen to have moved into Climate Change, and our brave Skeptic prefers to attack cults that died out a hundred and fifty years ago than challenge today's wild-eyed doomsayers?

Naah, it couldn't be.  I've gotta stop being so skeptical.

Posted by: plebian at 04:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 197 words, total size 1 kb.