The Global 2000 Report to the President

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since November 2006.

The Global 2000 Report to the President was released in 1981 by the Council on Environmental Quality. It was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter on May 23, 1977, and was directed by Gerald O. Barney.

It was based on computer models to make projections for the future based on trends for the 1960s and 1970s.

It concluded with:

If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the worlds people will be poorer in may ways than they are today.

[edit] Publication

Julian Simon notes that the data in this Report on species extinction is NOT based on scientific evidence. (Julian Simon and Norman Myers "Scarcity or Abundance," p. 36.) Doomsday predictions about species extinction is based on Myers' book "The Sinking Ark." And Myers himself admits that there is no concrete data about species extinction. Yet he talks about "hazarding a guess" and other suppositions -- guesses that say that we are losing a 100 species every day! (Cf. Norman Myers, The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species (New York: Pergammon Press, 1979), 4-5.)

For a more detailed study about the credibility of doomsday predictions, read, "The Skeptical Environmetalist" by Bjorn Lomborg.