4 ms·

I'm pretty sure in the '70s I read the Earth would be a big ball of ice, but it's OK since if we didn't nuke ourselves the overpopulation will have killed us al

by bregma 7y ago

I'm pretty sure in the '70s I read the Earth would be a big ball of ice, but it's OK since if we didn't nuke ourselves the overpopulation will have killed us all off.

zacharytelschow 7y ago
Yep. The doomsdayers have a pretty impressive track record of being wrong. They're getting better with their marketing, at least.
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  Indoctrination has always been fairly solid in the US through the public schools systems, its only natural the budgets continue to increase and they get better and better at it. As a elementary school kid in the late 80's early 90's our school had everything from guest speaks, to posters, to t-shirts for everything from: -hold in the o-zone layer -D.A.R.E. -AIDs -nuclear bomb test drills It seemed one day over night the O-zone layer posters went away and now it was global warming. And sure all of that may make sense in terms of maybe a science class, but this was more of a general lets not teach and indoctrinate. Plus the AIDs stuff always seemed weird, teaching about sex/needles to kids as young as 6. I wouldn't be surprised if that all went away as well for the new topic de jure. I think DARE was also finally pulled from schools and had all kinds of other scandals surrounding the programs that were exposed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 7y ago
It's sad when people underestimate the amount of work that was done both to find a path through the threat of MAD-style militarization and the pressure of human population on the global food supply. Neither of these worst-case-scenarios were avoided by chance. They were avoided by the hard work of decades of politicians and scientists. The world was a single soldier executing a single order away from a superpower-scale nuclear launch at least one time (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831). Farming process improvement nearly tripled the yield of existing land in the past half-century (https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-land-spared-as-a-result-of-cereal-yield-improvements_v2_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-land-spared-as-a-r...). We do people a disservice to assume that just because we didn't personally solve a problem, the problem either didn't need to be solved or wasn't solved by human effort.
- wolco 7y ago
  I was part of securing the world against y2k.
- beerandt 7y ago
  I'd say the ww3 thing was exactly avoided due to chance. It's also wrong to assume that improvements only happened because of dire threats. It's not like we haven't been trying to increase agricultural yields for thousands of years.
minikites 7y ago
I'm pretty sure you didn't: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-climate-science-really-call-for-a-coming-ice-age/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-gl... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-t... >A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then.
- bregma 7y ago
  > I'm pretty sure you didn't: I'm pretty sure I did. No amount of quoting political activist sites or popsci journalism sites is going to change what I experienced. My experience of the 1960s was we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or be drafted and sent to "conventional" war. I didn't even live in a country with mandatory military service, but was subject to the cultural hegemony of one that did. My experience of the 1970s was we would all die of a nuclear holocaust, freeze to death in the coming ice age, or starve and freeze because we ran out of oil. My experience of the 1980s was that we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or subsist in a wasteland caused by no ozone layer and acid rain everywhere. My experience of the 1990s is limited: I had small children and a mortgage. Nothing existed outside of that for me. It's surprising how little you care about nuclear holocaust when you're chronically sleep deprived for months at a time and are concerned about making sure you have food clothing and shelter for a bunch of dependents. The last 20 years we're doomed by terrorists or maybe the reactionary governments that respond to terrorism, global warming, and possible nuclear holocaust. I'm not impressed by post-hoc studies with cherry-picked data used to assert a political position. All those publications are going to roast in the coming nuclear holocaust anyway.
dalth 7y ago
Hmmm, wasn't the overpopulation craze something from the 60s? It's funny how that turned out: exactly the opposite! I wonder if "climate change" will go that way.
- bureaucrat 7y ago
  Overpopulation excluded the factor of "technology innovation". Climate scaremongers are doing the same.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    TBH, most of the climate "scaremongers" I see in the news are pressing for transition to sustainable energy sources ASAP, and the concern is that the political work required to make it happen in a timescale that avoids severe ecological disruption is missing.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  We may discover some unrecognized phenomenon that regulates global temperatures (akin to the under-appreciated sociological phenomenon that increased wealth and access to birth control encouraged smaller families). But it's risky to assume that's going to come to pass when the failure mode is significant death of much of the human population if no such phenomenon emerges (and we have multiple examples in our solar system of planets that once could sustain life but are now not fit for human habitation due to global-scale climatological shifts, so the evidence we have suggests no such process exists).

by bregma 7y ago

I'm pretty sure in the '70s I read the Earth would be a big ball of ice, but it's OK since if we didn't nuke ourselves the overpopulation will have killed us all off.

zacharytelschow 7y ago

Yep. The doomsdayers have a pretty impressive track record of being wrong. They're getting better with their marketing, at least.

throwaway_tech 7y ago
Indoctrination has always been fairly solid in the US through the public schools systems, its only natural the budgets continue to increase and they get better and better at it. As a elementary school kid in the late 80's early 90's our school had everything from guest speaks, to posters, to t-shirts for everything from: -hold in the o-zone layer -D.A.R.E. -AIDs -nuclear bomb test drills It seemed one day over night the O-zone layer posters went away and now it was global warming. And sure all of that may make sense in terms of maybe a science class, but this was more of a general lets not teach and indoctrinate. Plus the AIDs stuff always seemed weird, teaching about sex/needles to kids as young as 6. I wouldn't be surprised if that all went away as well for the new topic de jure. I think DARE was also finally pulled from schools and had all kinds of other scandals surrounding the programs that were exposed.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 7y ago

It's sad when people underestimate the amount of work that was done both to find a path through the threat of MAD-style militarization and the pressure of human population on the global food supply. Neither of these worst-case-scenarios were avoided by chance. They were avoided by the hard work of decades of politicians and scientists. The world was a single soldier executing a single order away from a superpower-scale nuclear launch at least one time (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831). Farming process improvement nearly tripled the yield of existing land in the past half-century (https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-land-spared-as-a-result-of-cereal-yield-improvements_v2_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-land-spared-as-a-r...). We do people a disservice to assume that just because we didn't personally solve a problem, the problem either didn't need to be solved or wasn't solved by human effort.

wolco 7y ago
I was part of securing the world against y2k.
beerandt 7y ago
I'd say the ww3 thing was exactly avoided due to chance. It's also wrong to assume that improvements only happened because of dire threats. It's not like we haven't been trying to increase agricultural yields for thousands of years.

minikites 7y ago

I'm pretty sure you didn't: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-climate-science-really-call-for-a-coming-ice-age/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-gl... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-t... >A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then.

bregma 7y ago
> I'm pretty sure you didn't: I'm pretty sure I did. No amount of quoting political activist sites or popsci journalism sites is going to change what I experienced. My experience of the 1960s was we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or be drafted and sent to "conventional" war. I didn't even live in a country with mandatory military service, but was subject to the cultural hegemony of one that did. My experience of the 1970s was we would all die of a nuclear holocaust, freeze to death in the coming ice age, or starve and freeze because we ran out of oil. My experience of the 1980s was that we would all die in a nuclear holocaust or subsist in a wasteland caused by no ozone layer and acid rain everywhere. My experience of the 1990s is limited: I had small children and a mortgage. Nothing existed outside of that for me. It's surprising how little you care about nuclear holocaust when you're chronically sleep deprived for months at a time and are concerned about making sure you have food clothing and shelter for a bunch of dependents. The last 20 years we're doomed by terrorists or maybe the reactionary governments that respond to terrorism, global warming, and possible nuclear holocaust. I'm not impressed by post-hoc studies with cherry-picked data used to assert a political position. All those publications are going to roast in the coming nuclear holocaust anyway.

dalth 7y ago

Hmmm, wasn't the overpopulation craze something from the 60s? It's funny how that turned out: exactly the opposite! I wonder if "climate change" will go that way.

bureaucrat 7y ago
Overpopulation excluded the factor of "technology innovation". Climate scaremongers are doing the same.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  TBH, most of the climate "scaremongers" I see in the news are pressing for transition to sustainable energy sources ASAP, and the concern is that the political work required to make it happen in a timescale that avoids severe ecological disruption is missing.
shadowgovt 7y ago
We may discover some unrecognized phenomenon that regulates global temperatures (akin to the under-appreciated sociological phenomenon that increased wealth and access to birth control encouraged smaller families). But it's risky to assume that's going to come to pass when the failure mode is significant death of much of the human population if no such phenomenon emerges (and we have multiple examples in our solar system of planets that once could sustain life but are now not fit for human habitation due to global-scale climatological shifts, so the evidence we have suggests no such process exists).