Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.

April 22, 2009, 4:00 am

Earth Day is past now, but this article is so popular we’re pinning it at the top of the home page today so everyone looking for it can find it.

Luckily, we haven’t run out of oil, but have exhausted our supply of 70s fashion.

Luckily, we haven’t run out of oil, but we have exhausted our supply of 70s fashion.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

Source: http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Pee Poo

When I first saw the Peepoo bag I thought it was a joke, but after reading about it I realized it’s quite a novel idea. Basically it’s a plastic bag to go to the bathroom in, which is why I thought it was a joke, but this simple little bag employs some sophisticated sustainable solutions and solves some pretty daunting problems.

In the developing world clean water and sanitation are very scarce. This is due to over population and lack of infrastructure and poses a serious health risk to the affected populations. In these parts of the world not only do they lack the infrastructure to attain clean water, they also lack the infrastructure needed to deal with all their waste, so they end up contaminating the little water they have. Around the world, one child dies every 15 seconds from to contaminated water. For them the saying “Don’t piss where you drink” isn’t a clever metaphor, it’s a real life challenge.

More

Source: http://greenupgrader.com/7230/improving-sanitation-with-the-peepoo-bag/

Quote

“Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate and unrelated groups — Science, Religion, Sex, Relaxation, Work etc. The main emphasis in his language, his system of storing knowledge, has been on the identification of objects rather than on the relationships between objects. He is now forced to use his tools of reasoning separately and for one situation at a time. Had man been able to see past this hypnotic way of thinking, to distrust it (as did Einstein), and to resystematize his knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally, he would now enjoy the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with his life in its entirety.

Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view (that is, his own basic relation with the outside world which determines how he stores his information). He can restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approaching them more sanely.

It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album.”

–Quote from the liner notes of The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators

Babies & Beats

Press Release: Newborn infants detect the beat in music (Dutch | Hugarian)

Researchers have found that newborn infants are able to detect the beat in music. The results support the theory that a sense for detecting a regular beat, termed ‘beat induction’, is innate or possibly learned already in the womb. Beat induction is probably fundamental to the origins of music, because it allows clapping or making music together, dancing to a rhythm, etc. István Winkler, Henkjan Honing and colleagues investigated beat induction in sleeping babies two or three days after birth.

Since it is not feasible to observe behavioral reactions in newborns, the researchers used scalp electrodes to measure electrical brain signals. The babies wore self-adhesive ear?couplers (see photo) through which a simple, regular rock rhythm was delivered, consisting of hi-hat, snare, and bass drum. Several variants of the basic rhythm were constructed by omitting strokes on non-significant positions of the rhythm. These variants were played to the infants, with a “deviant” segment, missing the downbeat, occasionally interspersed. Shortly after each deviant segment began, the babies’ brains produced an electrical response marking that they had expected to hear the downbeat but had not. This innate sense of rhythm is probably essential for bootstrapping verbal communication and music appreciation, the researchers say.

The research was conducted at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam at the University of Amsterdam within the EmCAP (Emergent Cognition through Active Perception) collaborative project funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme for ”Information Society Technologies” (contract no.: 013123).

Article #08-09035: “Newborn infants detect the beat in music,” by István Winkler, Gábor P. Háden, Olivia Ladinig, István Sziller, and Henkjan Honing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106

Source: http://cf.hum.uva.nl/mmm/newborns/index.html

In Defense of the Value of Social Neuroscience

Matthew Lieberman is associate professor of social neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. In recent weeks, he’s also rebutted the claims of a recent paper, “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience,” which explored the high correlations between measures of personality or emotionality in the individual–such as the experience of fear, or the willingness to trust another person–with the activity of certain brain areas as observed in an fMRI machine. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Lieberman about why most fMRI correlations aren’t false, the “reward” of intense grief and why accepting unfair offers seems to activate brain areas involved with self-control.

LEHRER: Your field of research has come under fire in a recent paper titled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience.” What’s the authors’ argument and have they identified a significant problem in this field?

LIEBERMAN: In their paper, Vul and colleagues suggest that brain-personality correlations in many social neuroscience studies depend on invalid methods and thus are “implausibly high,” “likely…spurious” and “should not be believed.” These claims are incorrect. These analyses use standard procedures for drawing inferences and protecting against false positives. The correlation estimates will tend to be somewhat higher than the true value, but there is no evidence to suggest that these correlations are meaningless or “voodoo” science.

The argument that Vul and colleagues put forward in their paper is that correlations observed in social neuroscience papers are impossibly high. There’s a metric (the product of the reliabilities of the two variables) that determines just how high of a correlation can be observed between two variables. They suggest that because, on average, this metric allows correlations as high as 0.74, that social neuroscientists should never see correlations higher than that.

Given the gravity of the claim, it’s important to get this [figure] right, but they do not. Here’s their mistake: it’s not the average of this metric that determines what can be observed in a study, but rather the metric for that particular study or at the very least, the metric estimated from prior use of the actual measures in that study. Just because the average price of groceries in a supermarket is $3 does not mean you cannot find a $12 item. In fact, a study that I’m an author on (and is a major target in the Vul et al. paper) is a perfect example. The reliability of the self-report measure in our study is far higher than the average they report allowing for higher observed correlations. They knew this [fact], but presented our study as violating the “theoretical upper bound” anyway.

More

Source:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=defense-social-neuroscience