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A professor famous for predicting the imminent demise of the human race at regular intervals since the 1970s has predicted the imminent demise of the human race.
Paul Ehrlich, who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says it's definitely on this time. In a tinned statement issued on Friday, the arm-waving prof lays it on the line:
There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence ... the window of opportunity is rapidly closing ...
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said ...
"If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on," said lead author Gerardo Ceballos.
The original article can be found at The Register, with coverage of the cited study coming from ScienceMag.org
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @03:28PM
Heres the thing, if astronmers said its very likely that big asteroid is going to hit us I would take them seriously. Why? Because they have a track record of successfully predicting the positions of heavenly bodies. If archimedes said he could build some ridiculous machine, the king was right to trust him. Why? Because he performed a feat of pulling a large ship onto shore using only his own manpower.
Where is the corresponding track record of successful predicitons from these biologists and climatologists? They have none, therefore whether right or wrong, they are acting like cranks. The only conclusion you can come to is that many areas of mainstream science are currently overrun by cranks. So now what do we do?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:26PM
So naturally we should not do anything and wait for collapse. THEN we'll start listening to him because he was proven correct.
We should not listen to the structural engineer when he tells us that the bridge supports are cracked and need to be replaced lest the bridge collapses. Where has he actually predicted a bridge collapse and it happened? Bah! We'll wait until one of his collapses occurs, then we'll know he's not a crank. Until then, he just tries to conflate and confuse us with all that "engineer-y" mumbo jumbo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:35PM
I would only listen to an engineer who had previously predicted otherwise unexpected collapses or built bridges that did not collapse. It sounds like you would listen to the guy screaming it on the street corner. How do YOU determine who is credible?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:00PM
There is a massive, MASSIVE, track record of successful predictions from Biologists and Climatologists. Doomsayers, not so much....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:33PM
People often make these claims but then when you ask for specific examples you find out the "predictions" are stuff like "A is positively correlated with B". Yea well that's a 50-50 chance right there even if you have no idea what you are talking about. But I am interested in examples of successful science so if you know of any real predictions (ie precise ones) that came true I would love to read the papers.