Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsday Predictions Expose the Media’s Climate Alarmism Double Standard
24th March 2026
When Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich appeared on “60 Minutes” in 2023, he warned that humanity was on an unsustainable path and that “the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.” He explicitly linked overpopulation and consumption to climate disruption, claiming it was already killing people.
Ehrlich recently died at 93, and the media offered respectful tributes to his 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” yet almost no outlet asked the glaring question: why should anyone trust predictions from a man whose most famous forecasts were spectacularly wrong? In fact, all of his doom predictions were wrong—similar to the climate doom predictions of today.
Ehrlich predicted mass starvation would kill hundreds of millions in the 1970s and 1980s, that England would cease to exist by 2000, and that the U.S. would face widespread famine. None of that happened. Instead, the population doubled to 8 billion.
Prosperity soared. The Green Revolution—powered by better seeds, fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, and fossil-fuel-enabled agriculture—fed billions more people than Ehrlich believed possible.
This same pattern of failed apocalyptic forecasts now dominates mainstream climate information. For decades, prominent voices have warned of entire nations underwater, no snow in the U.K., mass extinctions by 2010, and permanent global famine with timelines that have quietly slipped while humanity has thrived.