Yep, 40 years ago, a guy named Paul Ehrlich (who is still employed at Stanford University) scared everyone to death with his timeless tome, "The Population Bomb". By now, Earth's human population was supposed to have largely died out, and we were all - those remnants left, anyway - suriving today only because of a strong, top-down governmental system that decided who would reproduce (and when), who would be sterilized, and who would be subjected to eugenic removal.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon: not one of the tenured professor's doom-and-gloom "predictions" panned out. Oh, he got a lot of press, back in the day, and everybody was in a panic. But that was 40 years ago.
30 years ago, the panic had shifted to "Global Cooling" - and by now, glaciers were "predicted" to cover the surface of the globe, even extending to the equator. As was the case with Ehrlich's "population bomb", this latest march to Armageddon was entirely due to human activity.
But a funny thing happened along the way: none of the doom-and-gloom "predictions" panned out. Oh, it got a lot of press, and everybody was in a panic over global cooling. But that was 30 years ago.
20 years ago, after publication of "Since Silent Spring", everybody got into a panic over pesticides such as DDT. Once again, human activity was responsible for destroying the planet, we were all gonna die, and so on. It got a lot of press, and at this point, even Hollywood stars were drawn into the events - as though a Hollywood star somehow had a firm grasp upon science. Meryl Streep cried in testimony before Congress as she claimed that Alar on apples was going to kill us all. Very touching.
Of course, that was 20 years ago, and today we recognize that Alar never killed anybody, and that 30 million humans needlessly died of malaria because we banned the use of DDT. Today, DDT is back in use, but it's not a huge issue because we've been there and done that already. Nope, today, we have different things to get into a tizzy over.
Global warming: it's all your fault and we're all gonna die. It's been getting lots of press, of course, and nowadays politicians are joining Hollywood actors in deciding the "science" of Global warming. At this point, science has largely been removed from the discussion, which despite US restrictions regarding the blending of church and state, has now become in essence a New Religion. The language invoked among media and in governmental circles is clear in its theological dogma: those who dare to disagree that global warming events are entirely or largely due to human causes are routienly labeled as "deniers" or as "unbelievers"; transforming the issue from a scientific discussion into a purely religious battle.
Governmental agencies will not award grants to scientists who wish to probe the claims set forth by the adherents of the religion, and politicians at federal, state, regional, and local levels routinely set policy based not upon science, but upon the tenets set forth in the religion. Although in the US it is supposed to be unconstitutional for the state to establish a religion of any sort, it is clear from all present indicators that this provision has been trampled.