24 ms·
Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines that they used to help with their circulations: 1966 - Oil gone in 10 years 1968 - Overpop
by egberts1 5y ago
Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines that they used to help with their circulations:
1966 - Oil gone in 10 years
1968 - Overpopulation will spread worldwide
1969 - Everyone will disappear in a Cloud of Blue Steam in 1989
1970 - World will use up its natural resources by 2000
1970 - Urban citizens will require gas mask by 1985
1970 - Nitrogen buildup will make all lands unusable
1970 - Decaying pollution will kill all the fish
1970s - Killer Bees!!!
1970 - Ice Age by 2000
1970 - Americans will be subjected to water rationing by 1975 and food rationing by 1980
1971 - New Ice Age coming by 2020 or 2030
1972 - New Ice Age by 2070
1972 - Oil depleted in 20 years
1974 - Space satellites show New Ice Age coming fast
1974 - Another Ice Age?
1974 - Ozone depletion a great peril to life
1976 - Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent
1977 - Department of Energy says oil will peak in 90s.
1978 - No end in sight to 30-year global cooling
1980 - Acid rain kills life in lakes
1980 - Peak oil in 2000
1988 - Regional drought (that never happened) in 90s.
1988 - Temperatures in DC will hit record high (no records broken)
1988 - Maldive Islands will be underwater by 2018 (nope)
1989 - Rising sea level will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000.
1989 - New York City Westside Highway underwater by 2018.
1990 - Cellphones caused cancer
1996 - Peak oil in 2020
2000 - Children won’t know what snow is
2001 - WiFi causes cancer
2002 - Famines if we don’t give up eating fishes, meat, and diary
2002 - Peak oil in 2010
2004 - Britain will be Siberia by 2024
2005 - Manhattan underwater by 2015
2006 - Super Hurricanes!!!
2008 - Arctic will be ice-free by 2018
2008 - Climate genius Al Gore predict ice-free Arctic by 2013
2009 - Climate genius Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the world
2009 UK Prime Ministers says 50 days to “save planet from catastrophe”
2009 Al Gore moves ice-free Arctic prediction from 2013 to 2014
2010 - 4G cell tower causes cancers.
2013 Arctic ice-free by 2015
2014 Only 500 days before climate chaos
2019 - Hey Greta, we really need you to convince them this time.
2020 - Australian bush fires are caused by climate change.
2020 - 5G cellular towers causes cancers.
2020 - Polar bears could be lost by 2100
2021 - Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization
Ummmm, ok. Should I be unjading myself by now?
- dangerface 5y agoIt doesn't look like the la times ever used the headline "Everyone will disappear in a Cloud of Blue Steam in", the only results in google was for an Alex Jones book or something
- gunshai 5y agoSome what of crying wolf
- camjohnson26 5y agoAge old mistake of extrapolating current trends indefinitely into the future.
- YATA1 5y agoI remember reading something somewhere in the 1990s that the entirety of New Orleans was going to be underwater by 2020 and the only way you'd be able to visit Bourbon Street was by boat.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoYou might wan't to rethink your example here... You don't need a boat yet, but New Orleans has suffered incredibly in the last 20 years, both materially and spiritually, because of the hurricanes and flooding.
- YATA1 5y ago>You might wan't to rethink your example here... I might not... Katrina, Harvey, Betsy, 1915, etc. New Orleans is still there. It's not under sea like all the prophecies foretold.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoI guess the human toll of all those things aren't really all that meaningful when it is not visually apparent to an outside observer. Which does make this a good example of what is going in general, you are right!
- YATA1 5y ago>I guess the human toll of all those things aren't really all that meaningful Hilarious emotional appeal strawman. You can't even stay on topic after being proven wrong. Remember, New Orleans isn't underwater and it's past 2020. >when it is not visually apparent to an outside observer. I'm old enough to remember seeing all the pictures and videos of the aforementioned hurricanes. Don't project your ignorance on everyone else. > Which does make this a good example Yes, a good example of New Orleans still being there, all the highways are still there, the sports arenas are still there, there are over a million people that live there, etc.
- graeme 5y agoHow did you compile this 14 min after the article was posted?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoLike it was pre-prepared. Climate change articles get quickly jumped on here with energetic negativity and are often flagged out. It's fascinating to watch; but a sign of a healthy debate, it is not.
- user982 5y agoThat account copypastes it into climate threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30258365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30258365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27447861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27447861
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoIs there a way to flag accounts that copypaste talking points into these kinds of topics?
- egberts1 5y agoYes. It is called a “downvote” Meanwhile I got 27 up votes. Pitch in, accordingly to your needs.
- School-Cotton 5y agoWhy are you conveniently ignoring everyone asking you for sources?
- user982 5y agoClick the post's timestamp and tap "flag" and/or email concerns to hn@ycombinator.com.
- 5y ago
- toper-centage 5y agoWhile some of those were hard misses, maybe were indeed possible scenarios if nothing had been done. Since the 60s governments world wide have enacted progressively stricter regulations for industry emissions, industrial waste treatment, car emissions, appliance efficiency, CFC use, car fuel chemistry, etc etc. We would be in a much, much worse state if nothing had been done. And yet some of those are happening now. Permanent snowy mountains are now bare; insects are dying at alarming rates; yearly record temperatures, both harsher summers and harsher winters. It's not news that newspapers use sensational headlines to sell more.
- School-Cotton 5y agoI picked one of these arbitrarily, “Manhattan underwater by 2015”, and couldn’t find any evidence of the LA Times ever having claimed that, but I did find that people have been claiming, incorrectly, that the ABC (Australia) said that. So unless you post sources for these, people should assume you are a troll.
- lkbm 5y agoThe only source I can find on this list are previous HN comments. Searching for some of them is turning up nothing outside of that. Do you have a link to these, or a better search option than Google or the latimes.com's search? EDIT: Also found a screenshot of the list on Reddit. Seems it's been bouncing around for a few years, never with any supporting evidence.
- dpedu 5y agoHmm. While I agree with the premise here I decided to track down some of these articles by putting some of them into a search engine. I found a subset of this list here, with links to sources. But most of the sources aren't LA Times: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-eco-pocalyptic-predictions-the-so-called-experts-are-0-50/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e... But others, I couldn't find at all: - 4G cell tower causes cancers. I'm not sure what to think about this list. I would be extremely interested in the source articles, if they're actually out there.
- egberts1 5y agoI did say “some” but LA Times too did chime in with The Guardians (UK). https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphone-5g-health-20160808-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cellphone-5g-health-2...
- School-Cotton 5y agoYou said "these are some of..." not "some of these are...". "X1, X2, X3 are some of Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} is a subset of Y. "Some of X1, X2, X3 are Y" means that {X1, X2, X3} intersects Y. But you said the former!
- egberts1 5y agoSmart Aleck!
- gr8tnwz 5y agoNews organizations designing headlines for attention does not undermine the data driven truth; resource consumption is real. Sorry the modeling techniques haven’t been as perfect as you’d prefer. Your inability to be swayed by Anglo-gibberish is formidable but you’re a non-entity to me and I don’t have to optimize for your preferences. Sit back down in your bubble and accept on a rock of 7 billion+ you are just one. TL;DR your evidence is insufficient and I’m likewise as unmoved by it as you are from your perspective. Yes very big strong mtn man effort though cutting and pasting text to reiterate a repetitive rhetorical point as evidence of how stoic you are.
- egberts1 5y ago(yawn). It’s a pet project of mine and a fun one at that (of many hobbies).
- gr8tnwz 5y agoYes, I did have a big old yawn at your list. Thanks for confirming you understood the sentiment.
- InitialLastName 5y agoOne might think you would also have sources to reference any of these articles (given it's your "hobby") but you're curiously silent when people point out most of these articles never got written.
- egberts1 5y agoThe bandwidth is being spent toward making a web page of my news clippings.
- chimprich 5y agoAre you sure about those headlines? A Google search for 'latimes "Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization"' [0] reveals two hits - both of them previous comments of yours on this site. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Volcano+caldera+ready+to+wipe+out+civilization%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Volcano+caldera+ready+to+...
- btrettel 5y agoIgnoring the fact that cherry picking the worst headlines says little about the average quality of journalism, I started looking into these claimed headlines and found that many were not in the LA Times, some were not headlines (they seem to be from the article text), and some don't seem to exist as described (like "5G cellular towers causes cancers" and "Volcano caldera ready to wipe out civilization"). I'm not a fan of CEI, but you can see scans of some of these articles here: https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/ https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
- egberts1 5y agoYou said “all”. I said …”some” …
- btrettel 5y agoThe word "all" never appeared in my post. You wrote "Here are some of the many of Los Angeles Times’ newspaper headlines". A reasonable person would understand that quote to say that the headlines are from the LA Times, but it's only some of the many bad headlines the LA Times has had.
- alphakappa 5y agoYou are mixing in random headlines that were not the results of my scientific consensus (cellphones and cancer?) and headlines that warned of the bad possibilities if nothing was done. The fact that scientific and other advancements have helped avert some of the issues we were warned about shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a failure of the warning but the opposite.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 5y agoSo, I just choose one example (1971), because most claims about 1970's Ice Age articles are overblown. I found no LATimes articles with the title "New Ice Age coming by 2020 or 2030" There were five times that "New Ice Age" was used in print, and of those 40% seem to be referencing an upcoming artistic event's theme (Holiday on Ice). The main article about an ice age in 1971 would have been on October 24th, 1971. The front page of the LA Times did indeed feature the words "Ice Age" on the bottom of the front page in the "articles inside" block. It did not use the words "New", "coming", "by", "2020" or "2030" in the article title. I would ask for sources on your list.