No sense of history

It's a lovely day for another mass extinction. It's coming, and boy howdy are you gonna be sorry:

Earth is entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence, researchers have declared.  

A team of American scientists claim that their study shows 'without any significant doubt' that we are entering the sixth great mass extinction on Earth.

Without any significant doubt. And we have it from a great authority:

And such a catastrophic loss of animal species presents a real threat to human existence, the experts warn, as crucial ecosystem 'services' such as crop pollination by insects and water purification in wetlands is also put at risk. 

At the current rate of species loss, humans will lose many biodiversity benefits within three generations, according to Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who led the research.

'We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting on,' Prof Ehrlich said.

Do you remember Paul Ehrlich? He's been around a while. He's warned us before:

"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." 

He said that around 1970. He also said this:

"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [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." 

The starvation was so unbelievable that it never happened. So what happened? Norman Borlaug kicked his ass. So did Julian Simon.

If you're going to be wrong, you couldn't be more wrong than Paul Ehrlich has been over the course of his career. Ehrlich has managed to outlive his critics (Simon) and his betters (Borlaug). There will always be a market for Cassandras. But you have to know the history and you're not likely to get it from the MSM.