Watch: In 2023, CBS ’60 Minutes’ Promotes Paul Ehrlich Warning of Doom for Earth- But in 1970s, Ehrlich Claimed Billions Would Die From Global Cooling
Paul Ehrlich's failed predictions from the video: "We'll never be 7 billion people in the year 2000."
Ehrlich's spectacular failed predictions from 1970s: "As you know, we're already cooling the planet. If the weather changes, which now seems to be entrained in the United States of the wrong kind, our corn production may go on a great deal of our wheat production and we may be hungry very, very fast because we do not have that large as reserve supply in the United States.
More flashback doomsday rhetoric: "That disaster will take the form of famine, plague or war. Every person you add to the planet increases the chances of a thermonuclear war. Everybody in this room may die 20 years young, simply because we're using hard pesticides. We're close to famine in the United States we're very close to a worldwide plague that could kill virtually everybody. Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity. Every person you add to the planet dramatically increases the chances of having a worldwide plague which could kill almost everyone. These growth rates are preposterous they cannot be sustained."
On Sunday night, CBS’s flagship news program, “60 Minutes,” highlighted warnings from a Stanford University biologist named Paul Ehrlich. In the broadcast, Ehrlich claimed, “humanity is not sustainable… for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths.”
But that claim was debunked in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Plos Biology, by leading scientists, including the Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy, nearly a decade ago.
And newly-available archival footage shows Ehrlich claiming that global cooling, not global warming, would result in global famine.