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“Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of fearmongering environmentalists have proved wrong. Why should we believe them this time?” Yes, some predictions by environmentalists have proved incorrect, favorite examples of critics being a prediction made in 1980 by Paul Ehrlich, John Harte, and John Holdren about rises in prices of five metals, and predictions made in the Club of Rome forecast of 1972. But it is misleading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that proved wrong, and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that proved right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort: e.g., overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage. As regards the first of Simon’s two predictions, continuation of our current population growth rate would yield 10 people per square yard of land in 774 years, a mass of people equal to the Earth’s mass in slightly under 2,000 years, and a mass of people equal to the universe’s mass in 6,000 years, long before Simon’s forecast of 7 billion years without such problems. As regards his second prediction, we learn in our first course of chemistry that copper is an element, which means that by definition it cannot be made from other elements. My impression is that pessimistic predictions that have proved incorrect, such as Ehrlich’s, Harte’s, and Holdren’s about metal prices or the Club of Rome’s about future food supplies, have on the average been much more realistic possibilities at the time that they were made than were Simon’s two predictions.

Basically, the one-liner about some environmentalist predictions proving wrong boils down to a complaint about false alarms. In other spheres of our lives, such as fires, we adopt a commonsense attitude towards false alarms. Our local governments maintain expensive firefighting forces, even though in some small towns they are rarely called on to put out fires. Of the fire alarms phoned in to fire departments, many prove to be false alarms, and many others involve small fires that the property owner himself then succeeds in putting out before the fire engines arrive. We comfortably accept a certain frequency of such false alarms and extinguished fires, because we understand that fire risks are uncertain and hard to judge when a fire has just started, and that a fire that does rage out of control may exact high costs in property and human lives. No sensible person would dream of abolishing the town fire department, whether manned by full-time professionals or volunteers, just because a few years went by without a big fire. Nor would anyone blame a homeowner for calling the fire department on detecting a small fire, only to succeed in quenching the fire before the fire truck’s arrival. Only if false alarms become an inordinately high proportion of all fire alarms do we feel that something is wrong. In effect, the proportion of false alarms that we tolerate is based on subconsciously comparing the frequency and destructive costs of big fires with the frequency and wasted-services costs of false alarms. A very low frequency of false alarms proves that too many homeowners are being too cautious, waiting too long to call the fire department, and consequently losing their homes.

By the same reasoning, we must expect some environmentalist warnings to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environmental warning systems were much too conservative. The multibilliondollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms. In addition, the reason that alarms proved false is often that they