In most other fields, constant predictive failure brings negative consequences. … With the climate-industrial complex, the opposite seems true. Failed predictions are quickly forgotten, while refreshed rounds of alarm get amplified.

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Paul Ehrlich, who gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s peddling climate alarmism in the form of global cooling that would trigger massive worldwide crop failures and starvation before conveniently pivoting to global warming as it became more fashionable, has passed away at age 93.  

While death isn’t something that one seeks to celebrate, Ehrlich’s passing invites critical reflection – not merely on his own spotty record of prediction, but as a cautionary tale about the persistent appeal of climate alarmism untethered from reality.  

Ehrlich first rose to prominence in 1968 with his bestselling book “The Population Bomb,” which urgently claimed that the world stood on the brink of catastrophic overpopulation, mass starvation and societal collapse.  He asserted that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s.  He even suggested that as many as 65 million Americans could perish in the ‘70s due to famine.  

Those claims weren’t hedged or nuanced projections.  They amounted to definitive pronouncements, delivered with the confidence common to many on the political left, certain that history would soon validate his warnings.  

Ehrlich warned that climate change – in the form of a cooling planet, not a warming one – would shorten growing seasons and trigger famine.  He spoke ominously of declining temperatures that would lead to agricultural devastation and geopolitical instability.  

The ‘70s came and went, however, without mass starvation in the developed world.  Global food production increased, not decreased.  Agricultural innovation – what became known as the “Green Revolution” – dramatically improved crop yields across Asia and Latin America.  Far from collapse, the world enjoyed one of the most significant expansions in food availability in human history.  

As Ehrlich’s predictions proved unfounded into the 1980s, the mainstream media and climate consensus pivoted sharply toward global warming.  

Shamelessly and conspicuously, Ehrlich pivoted right along with it.  

He offered no apology, no reckoning with past errors, only a seamless transition from one looming catastrophe (cooling) to its diametric opposite (warming).  His narrative changed, but the ceaseless underlying alarmism proceeded intact.  

Not that Ehrlich didn’t suffer justifiable humiliation, however.  

The most famous – and objectively measurable – test of his pronouncements arrived in 1980 when he accepted a wager from economist Julian Simon.  Simon let Ehrlich pick five commodities that Ehrlich thought most likely to become increasingly scarce, and therefore rise in price.  Simon bet the opposite, that those five commodities would actually become more plentiful by 1990, driving their market prices down.  

Simon the economist remained confident in human ingenuity, believing that market forces would find new ways to discover and extract those resources, making them more abundant over the ensuing decade.  Obviously, Ehrlich’s belief that the earth was running out of resources would lead him to bet that those commodities would become more scarce and higher-priced by 1990.  

When the results arrived in 1990, Simon coasted to victory.  Every single one of the five commodities that Ehrlich himself was allowed to pick – chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten – had increased in supply and declined in price, even adjusted for inflation.  

Ehrlich’s worldview was thus put to the objective, verifiable test, and he was publicly humiliated.  

Despite that high-profile humiliation and exposure that his dire predictions of resource exhaustion and inevitable human decline were fundamentally flawed, Ehrlich somehow remained a celebrated figure in mainstream media and academic circles to the end of his life.  He remained treated not as the cautionary example he was, but as some sort of sage voice on environmental matters.  

In that way, Ehrlich’s career arc thus represents the broader climate-industrial complex – that sprawling network of extremist organizations, academic redoubts, arrogant bureaucrats and compliant corporate interests that collectively benefit from the public perception of perpetual climate crisis.  Billions, even trillions, of dollars in subsidies flow through that ecosystem, rationalized by projections that constantly fail to materialize as advertised.  

Accountability, however, always seems to remain elusive.  

In most other fields, constant predictive failure brings negative consequences.  Investors who place unwise bets lose capital.  Analysts who consistently make mistakes lose credibility.  With the climate-industrial complex, the opposite seems true.  Failed predictions are quickly forgotten, while refreshed rounds of alarm get amplified.  

None of this suggests that environmental challenges don’t exist or are unworthy of attention and correction.  By the same token, however, intellectual rigor, healthy skepticism and willingness to confront and acknowledge inconvenient facts – including the established record of those who constantly predict the dystopian future – remain essential.  

Paul Ehrlich’s legacy, then, isn’t simply that of a misguided scientist or public policy advocate. It’s a lesson in how easily fear can suffocate evidence, and how those who profit from that endless fear loop rarely get held to account, to the public’s detriment.