The Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb Part I

Written by climatediscussionnexus.com on April 4, 2026. Posted in Current News

One thing that frustrates alarmists is skeptics hitching their pants up to their chest and saying it’s the third apocalypse in their lifetime and nothing happened or words to that effect.

But if you reach a certain age it does strike you that you have been subjected to silent spring, nuclear winter, mass famine, global cooling, runaway heating and who knows what all, yet a record number of people are now alive while things like extreme poverty and mass starvation are at all-time lows.

Which brings us to Paul Ehrlich, highly successful and popular merchant of doom, especially his best-selling 1968 dud The Population Bomb, whose predictions of mass early death didn’t even keep him from living to age 93 before finally decreasing the surplus population.

Didn’t he read his own books? Because a lot of people did, and they had disastrous consequences from policy to mental health. And what’s remarkable isn’t just that Ehrlich was as popular as he was wrong, especially with the chattering classes.

It’s that the same kinds of people, and often the same people, who believed Ehrlich in their naïve youths believe in climate alarmism in their supposedly wiser years. And that although the supposed problems are wildly different, the supposed solutions are extraordinarily similar, and all involve commoners giving up just about everything they like including freedom to direct their own lives.

Almost as if there were an appetite for that kind of thing on high. And here it is not out of place to say that Ehrlich was not just wrong, he was arrogant and nasty. Because there also seems to be an appetite for that kind of thing on high.

It is important to the story to grasp that Ehrlich was proved wrong almost immediately. The opening line of his 1968 best-seller was:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”

But they didn’t, except where their own governments starved them. As the Washington Post editorialized, “The dire predictions in ‘Population Bomb’ are thoroughly discredited but still causing damage.” To put it mildly.

So now consider an MSN headline from March 17, 2026, from a British publication called Metro: “This is how many people will die by 2050 if we don’t curb climate change”. OK, it’s only might and it’s not hundreds of millions. But naturally it rants on, initially quoting “Matthew Todd, a climate change campaigner and author” that:

“‘This is not a future problem. It’s happening now, and it’s speeding up.’ The Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of experts convened by the UN, warned in 2023. Nevertheless, global fossil-fuel emissions have continued to rise and set records, even as politicians aim to limit warming between 1.4 and 2°C.”

Same apocalyptic tone, same alliance of journalists and doomsaying experts with dismal track records. Here we go again… even though such people are usually trailing clouds of discredited hyperbole or just plain error. Interestingly enough we went to check Todd’s record on X and found that “@MrMatthewTodd has blocked you” without us ever interacting. So Ehrlich’s spirit lives on in many ways including his openness to discussion. But check Todd’s feed for yourself… though be prepared for shrill panic with many obscenities.

On the “nasty” front, Roger Pielke Jr. recounts his own experience “when I crossed paths Paul Ehrlich” because the late journalist Daniel Greenberg had written “a highly favourable review of The Climate Fix” by RPJ arguing for, of all things, scientific integrity. In response, rather than attacking the book or even its author, Ehrlich, along with Stefan Ramsstorf and the dreaded Michael Mann, launched a savage public attack on the character of the reviewer.

Greenberg did not back down. He replied to his assailants:

“Your correspondence concerning my review of Roger Pielke’s book ‘Climate Fix’ has provided me with a deeper understanding of the widespread public skepticism toward climate science. In your hands, apple pie and motherhood would come under public suspicion. Have you considered taking a remedial reading course?”

And to Pielke Jr. himself Greenberg sent a note that included describing “Mann, Ehrlich, and Rahmstorf” as “a scurrilous bunch…. They’re gravediggers of science.”

And of course in fact, Ehrlich did attempt to bring motherhood under public suspicion and was strikingly, strangely successful. Including being invited on Johnny Carson’s hugely popular, even iconic Tonight Show no fewer than 20 times. But he was wrong, “laugh-out-loud wrong”, and wrong in ways that did indeed help dig a grave for the credibility of science.

On the “discredited” front, the Washington Post editorial said of Ehrlich:

“He wrote that ‘hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death’ during the 1970s. The actual number of people who died in famines that decade: Under 4 million. It was under 2 million in the 1980s, and under 1 million in the 2000s, as the world’s population continued to climb.”

Many terrible ideas find a receptive audience. (As with John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment Interest and Money which told politicians that spending more than you had would make you rich for reasons neither they nor their constituents could understand but which both desperately wanted to believe.) And Ehrlich struck a chord with people already disgusted by the masses and disposed to think they must seize control in this crisis, whatever it might be, and save humanity from its shabby self at whatever cost.

It’s one thing if someone is proved wrong long after the fact. As arguably Keynes was, after the late 1930s and especially the 1940s appeared to confirm his arguments. Not Ehrlich. To continue quoting the Post:

“Ehrlich’s errors aren’t a case of hindsight being 20/20. These advances in crop yields, known as the Green Revolution, were already in progress when Ehrlich wrote ‘The Population Bomb.’”

What’s more, and it was revealing in ways he evidently neither intended nor perceived, as Roger Pielke Jr. noted, near the end of his life Ehrlich Xed out with typical snark:

“60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones”.

As Matthew Wielicki added, “Exactly the problem!” The key point being not the arrogance of saying “no basic ones” but the fact that his parade of demonstrable error wasn’t caught by “science”.

Not by academia. Not by the awarding committees. Not by science journalism or popular journalism. Instead, in defiance of all they claimed to hold dear, and uphold, they continued to lionize this man because they liked his recommendations too much to note that he was consistently, smugly, unpleasantly wrong. And of course it prompts us to ask why anyone should trust that same science establishment on the next scare, or the one after that, which is global warming.

source climatediscussionnexus.com

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