Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
For more than four decades, Americans have been subjected to a relentless drumbeat of environmental doom. They have been terrified by warnings of acid rain, the ozone hole, melting ice caps, drowned coastal cities, superstorms and mass extinctions. Then came Al Gore and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change.”
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” promised mass starvation in the 1970s. Instead, Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution fed a billion more people. Being wrong has never slowed down the doomsayers.
For more than four decades, Americans have been subjected to a relentless drumbeat of environmental doom. They have been terrified by warnings of acid rain, the ozone hole, melting ice caps, drowned coastal cities, superstorms and mass extinctions. Then came Al Gore and increasingly apocalyptic warnings about global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change.”
Today, we can see the consequences. Two generations of young people have been taught not to respect the environment, but rather to fear the future.
The numbers are disturbing. A Lancet Planetary Health survey of 15,793 Americans ages 16 to 25 found that 85 percent were at least moderately worried about climate change, including 58 percent who were very or extremely worried. More than half said climate change made them hesitant to have children.
Other research points the same way. A review of multiple studies found that stronger climate worry lines up with wanting fewer children or none at all.
Think about that. We have convinced millions of young people that the future is so bleak that they should reconsider having children.
Yet the picture of a dying planet bears little resemblance to the measurable world around us.
The Earth is getting greener. NASA reported that 25 to 50 percent of the world’s vegetated land greened significantly between 1982 and 2015 — an increase in leaf area roughly twice the size of the continental U.S. Researchers attributed about 70 percent of that greening to rising carbon dioxide.
So carbon dioxide is not merely an emission — it is plant food.
Agriculture tells the same story. The world now grows nearly three times as much grain on the same acre as it did in 1961. The cropland saved is close to the area of the U.S. and India combined. Credit better seeds, machinery, irrigation, modern farming, fossil fuel-derived fertilizer, and that carbon dioxide boost.
Our air is cleaner, too. EPA reports that emissions of the six main air pollutants fell 79 percent between 1970 and 2024, even as the economy grew 338 percent, Americans drove 195 percent more miles, and the population grew by two-thirds.
Prosperity has surged as well. The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from roughly 2.3 billion in 1990 to about 800 million today, even as the world population grew by nearly three billion. Life expectancy, literacy, and living standards are at record highs.
We have heard the doom and gloom predictions before. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” promised mass starvation in the 1970s. Instead, Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution fed a billion more people. Being wrong has never slowed down the doomsayers.
None of this means environmental problems are imaginary. It means they are problems to solve and not reasons to surrender.
Previous generations built dams, cured diseases, split the atom, crossed oceans, and landed men on the Moon. They faced world wars, depressions, and nuclear standoffs, real existential dangers. Their answer was not to stop having children. It was to build a better world for them.
Even Elon Musk, who believes strongly that man-made carbon dioxide threatens the climate, preaches innovation and expansion — not retreat and despair. That is the mindset young people need.
So teach the real problems we can do something about — not false climate doom. Teach the triumphs, not just the panic. Teach how human ingenuity cleaned our air and rivers, tripled crop yields, cut extreme poverty by two-thirds, and greened a massive share of the planet.
Parents, this one is on us. Ask your school district what your children are being taught about climate, and what they are not. Ask to see the curriculum. Ask whether a single one of these numbers appears in it. Then say so out loud at the next school board meeting.
Two generations have been taught to fear the future. Let’s teach the next one to build it.
In the annals of environmental alarmism, few figures loom larger than Paul Ehrlich and Michael Mann. Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist who died in March 2026 at age 93, authored The Population Bomb (1968), a bestseller that warned of imminent global famine, societal collapse, and resource wars driven by overpopulation. Mann, the Penn State climatologist, rose to prominence with his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which depicted a millennium of stable temperatures followed by a sharp 20th-century spike—becoming the visual cornerstone of IPCC reports and the climate movement.
In the annals of environmental alarmism, few figures loom larger than Paul Ehrlich and Michael Mann. Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist who died in March 2026 at age 93, authored The Population Bomb (1968), a bestseller that warned of imminent global famine, societal collapse, and resource wars driven by overpopulation. Mann, the Penn State climatologist, rose to prominence with his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which depicted a millennium of stable temperatures followed by a sharp 20th-century spike—becoming the visual cornerstone of IPCC reports and the climate movement.
Both built empires of influence in spite of actual data, but on a sophisticated mastery of media. When their core claims faced empirical scrutiny and outright falsification, they didn’t retreat into the lab. They doubled down in the public square, reframing failure as foresight, critics as villains, and uncertainty as conspiracy. This shared strategy—celebrity amplification, narrative pivots, and aggressive deflection—has papered over profound flaws in their thinking, with lasting consequences for energy policy and human progress.
Ehrlich’s case is the archetype of predictive collapse. The Population Bomb forecasted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve in the 1970s and 1980s, that India could never feed its growing population, that the U.K. would devolve into “a small group of impoverished islands” by 2000, and that U.S. life expectancy would plummet to 42 years. None of it materialized. The global population roughly doubled since 1968, yet per capita food production soared thanks to the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug’s high-yield crops, fertilizers, and irrigation.
Hunger rates plummeted; life expectancy rose globally by over 30 percent. Ehrlich himself famously lost the 1980 Simon-Ehrlich wager to economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich bet that prices of five metals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, tungsten) would rise over a decade due to scarcity; all fell in real terms, and he mailed Simon a check for $576.07.
Yet Ehrlich never revised his worldview. In interviews and follow-up books such as The Population Explosion (1990) and Betrayal of Science and Reason (1996), he insisted that his warnings were “way too optimistic” or that action had merely delayed catastrophe. On 60 Minutes in 2023, at age 90, he still predicted “the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to” within decades.
What sustained Ehrlich? Media complicity. He appeared more than 20 times on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, turning a dense academic tome into a cultural phenomenon and spawning the Zero Population Growth organization. Outlets amplified his lurid scenarios without any rigorous challenge.
Post-failure obituaries in 2026 often called his predictions “premature” rather than wrong—echoing his own spin that prophets avert the disasters they foresee. When pressed on the Simon bet, Ehrlich pivoted to broader environmental “limits” or biodiversity loss, never conceding that markets, technology, and human ingenuity had disproved his Malthusian core. This media playbook—alarm first, nuance never—shielded his influence. Policies inspired by his ideas, from India’s forced sterilizations to China’s one-child policy, inflicted real human costs: coerced demographics, gender imbalances, and lost human capital.
Yet Ehrlich’s celebrity insulated him; flaws were recast as moral urgency. The following quote is an example of Ehrlich’s perverse influence on the world: Prince Phillip saying, “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Michael Mann’s trajectory mirrors this media deflection, updated for the digital and legal age. His 1998 Nature paper (with Bradley and Hughes) produced the iconic hockey stick: flat temperatures for 900 years, then a blade-like rise post-1900. It visually clinched the case for unprecedented anthropogenic warming and dominated the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report.
But methodological flaws emerged quickly. Independent analysts Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated in 2003–2005 papers that Mann’s principal component analysis (PCA) used “short-centering”—subtracting data from a 20th-century mean rather than the full period. This statistical artifact mined for “hockey stick” shapes even from random red-noise data.
They also highlighted the over-reliance on flawed bristlecone pine proxies (known to be poor temperature indicators) and the infamous “hide the decline” trick from the Climategate emails, in which diverging tree-ring data after 1960 was obscured by splicing in instrumental records.
The 2006 Wegman Report to Congress called Mann’s work “obscure and incomplete,” validating McIntyre-McKitrick’s critiques. The National Research Council panel noted “moderate confidence” in recent warmth but highlighted uncertainties and proxy limitations in earlier centuries.
Mann’s response? Not a deeper engagement with the data, but a media offensive. In books like The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012) and The New Climate War (2021), op-eds, TED-style talks, and cable interviews, he portrayed himself as a besieged hero fighting a “denial machine” funded by fossil fuels.
Critics were not fellow scientists with statistical concerns but “contrarians” and industry shills. He pursued defamation suits against writers like Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for calling his work “fraudulent” or likening it to data “molestation” (comparing him to Jerry Sandusky). A 2024 D.C. jury awarded him over $1 million in punitive damages—though later adjustments and sanctions highlighted litigation tactics.
Climategate emails revealed Mann urging colleagues to “keep them honest” via peer-review gatekeeping. Media outlets amplified this victim narrative, often framing the hockey stick as “settled science” while downplaying methodological concessions. The Hockey Stick graph’s broad conclusion—recent warming is real and somewhat concerning—holds in later studies, but Mann’s original reconstruction’s precision and statistical robustness do not. By controlling the story, he preserved its iconic status.
The parallels are striking. Both Ehrlich and Mann built careers on singular, visually compelling claims that captured public imagination: exploding population bombs and hockey-stick warming. Both encountered the historical evidence—technological abundance for Ehrlich, statistical artifacts and proxy issues for Mann—yet refused substantive retraction.
Media became their shield: Ehrlich via broadcast charisma and sympathetic obituaries; Mann via books, lawsuits, and “denier” framing that delegitimizes debate. Both shifted goalposts—Ehrlich from starvation to “planetary limits”; Mann from one graph’s details to an unassailable “consensus.”
This media mastery has real-world costs, particularly for energy sanity. Ehrlich’s scarcity mindset justified anti-growth policies that starved developing nations of infrastructure. Mann’s graph underpins net-zero mandates that prioritize intermittent renewables over reliable, abundant energy from nuclear, natural gas, and advanced fossils.
The consumer principles—abundant energy, reliability, adequate infrastructure, economic development, human health, and capital formation through profits and prudent debt—stand in direct opposition to one another. Billions flow annually into PR, lobbying, and communications promoting “climate emergency” narratives that echo Ehrlich’s doomsaying and support Mann’s “science.”
These “climate crisis” campaigns have had a profound effect, discouraging capital investment in high-density power sources, inflating energy poverty, and hindering human flourishing. Developing nations cannot industrialize without cheap, dispatchable power; Western grids risk blackouts from over-reliance on weather-dependent sources.
The energy sanity movement—advocates for pragmatic, pro-human abundance—must counter this asymmetry. Where Ehrlich and Mann command legacy media megaphones and institutional capture, sanity proponents need coordinated counter-narratives: data-driven exposés of failed predictions, transparent cost-benefit analyses of energy transitions, and celebration of tech triumphs like shale gas or small modular reactors.
Ehrlich’s death in 2026 offers a moment for reflection: his ideas didn’t die because the media never let them. Mann’s ongoing influence proves the playbook persists.
Ultimately, Ehrlich and Mann exemplify how media can transmute flawed science into cultural dogma. Their thinking contained kernels of truth—population pressures and greenhouse gases merit attention—but apocalyptic certainty and methodological shortcuts undermined credibility. By mastering spin over substance, they delayed the very progress they claimed to champion.
True environmental stewardship demands abundant, reliable energy to lift billions from poverty, not media-fueled scarcity myths. The Anti-Ehrlich/Mann committee have united to offset the “climate crisis” PR juggernaut. Once discredited, energy and environmental policy will reflect the reality of energy humanism: humans thriving not by fearing limits, but by innovating past them.
When Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe rose recently in the House of Lords to speak on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, one could not have anticipated the detour his remarks would take. Instead of focusing solely on the grave ethical questions surrounding assisted dying, Lord Brooke turned his attention to population growth and its supposed role in climate change.
When Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe rose recently in the House of Lords to speak on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, one could not have anticipated the detour his remarks would take. Instead of focusing solely on the grave ethical questions surrounding assisted dying, Lord Brooke turned his attention to population growth and its supposed role in climate change. In words that startled many in attendance and later provoked widespread commentary, he declared:
…this century’s growth in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion – a 25% increase in 25 years. Just think what the 2025 numbers would be if abortion had not been legalised or there had not been wide-scale usage and advocacy of contraception. Indeed, the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children that we would have had. Had the churches had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have, facing the difficulties we have with climate change.
Some observers were horrified. Nikki da Costa, a former Director of Legislative Affairs at No 10, asked pointedly in a widely viewed and commented upon X post whether Lord Brooke was “advocating for assisted dying as a tool of population control” and noted that it was “an extraordinary contribution suggesting human life be actively sacrificed to prevent climate change”. The Spectator’s Madeleine Grant was even more scathing: “This was without doubt one of the most surreal speeches I have ever heard in my years covering Parliament,” she wrote, adding that “This peer’s Assisted Suicide speech was truly bonkers.”
Yet Ms Grant may be mistaken in dismissing the speech as “truly bonkers”. After all, Lord Brooke’s intervention was not a moment of madness but a faithful expression of a worldview that has haunted the Western imagination for over two centuries. It was Malthus who first planted the seed. The peer’s remarks are best understood as another manifestation of the Malthusian virus – an intellectual contagion that has never ceased to infect the minds of Western elites.
The Ghost of Malthus
The origin of this intellectual affliction lies with Reverend Thomas Malthus, who at the close of the 18th Century published his famous essay predicting that humanity would inevitably outstrip its food supply. Population, he said in his famous formulation, grew geometrically, while food production only arithmetically. Famines, wars and pestilence would be nature’s cruel corrective. History has demonstrated just how wrong he was.
Human ingenuity – expressed through the agricultural revolutions and petrochemical fertilizers, industrialization, and trade – continually confounded his dire predictions. Yet Malthus’s grim worldview survived because it offered the powerful a convenient lens: social ills could be explained not by policy failure, but by the simple fact of “too many people”. It is yet another example of Brandolini’s Law at work: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
The lineage of Malthusian thought is unmistakable. In the 19th Century, Britain’s 1834 Poor Law cut welfare to the indigent on the theory that helping the poor only encouraged them to breed. In the early 20th Century, Malthus’s shadow fell heavily over the eugenics movements in Britain, the United States and Europe, which categorized the poor, disabled and minorities as “unfit”. Nazi Germany gave those ideas their most horrifying expression.
After the war, eugenics became discredited, but the impulse never disappeared; it re-emerged under the banners of “family planning” and “population control”. India’s coercive sterilisations during the Emergency of the 1970s, often carried out with Western aid money, testify to the persistence of this mindset. China’s one-child policy, brutally enforced with forced abortions and sterilizations, is another reminder.
In the West, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) thundered warnings that hundreds of millions would starve – “We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years” – while the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) confidently predicted ecological and economic collapse unless population and resource use were restrained. Both works proved spectacularly wrong. Yet, as is so often the case, bad ideas outlast their refutation. The Malthusian impulse endures precisely because it appeals to the intellectual pretensions of elites. It reassures them that they need to act as philosopher-kings, protecting our “fragile planet” from the growing masses.
A New Mask: Climate and the Green Tyranny
Today, the Malthusian virus has donned a green mask. Its logic permeates much of the rhetoric around climate change. Lord Brooke’s speech is a case in point: a peer in the British Parliament, speaking without embarrassment about population reduction – through abortion, contraception, homosexuality, even assisted dying – as a tool to combat climate change. His words echoed Jane Goodall’s musings at Davos that the world would be better off with a population at the level it was 500 years ago, about half a billion souls. Such sentiments, however shocking when spoken plainly, are widely shared in elite political circles.
The historical record shows where this logic leads. During the 1970s, US policymakers under Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200, classified for over a decade, framed population growth in developing countries as a threat to American strategic interests. Aid programs were tied to family planning goals. At the very moment when Indira Gandhi’s government in India was coercing millions of poor men into sterilisation, the flow of international funds for “population programs” continued unabated. In China, the one-child policy, enforced with terror, was applauded by international institutions as enlightened policy. In Africa and South Asia, aggressive campaigns to promote long-acting contraceptives targeted poor women with little regard for informed consent. Behind the rhetoric of choice and progress lay the old Malthusian disdain for the fecundity of the poor openly espoused by the Gates Foundation.
Today, the same mentality drives what Rupert Darwall aptly terms the “Green Tyranny” which exposed the roots of the “totalitarian climate industrial complex”. The World Bank and IMF insist that poor nations adopt anti-fossil fuel policies as conditions for loans. The wealthy West, which built its prosperity on coal, oil and gas, now denies those very tools to countries still mired in poverty. Instead, they are forced to accept unreliable and costly wind and solar projects, locking billions into energy poverty. This is not compassion; it is carbon colonialism. It is Malthus reborn, dressed in the garb of climate virtue.
The Facts Destroy the Myth
What makes this obsession with “too many people” especially perverse is that it bears no relation to the facts. Global fertility rates are falling everywhere. Japan and South Korea are shrinking at alarming rates, with birthrates far below replacement. Europe is greying. Even in India, long the poster child for overpopulation, fertility has dropped sharply and is below replacement levels in many states. The United Nations projects that global population will peak around 2080 at just over ten billion and then begin to decline. Demographers now warn not of an exploding population but of collapsing fertility and the economic, social and geopolitical crises it will unleash.
Elon Musk has called the overpopulation panic “the most nihilistic lie ever told” and he is right. The true risk to civilisation lies in the opposite direction: declining populations, shrinking workforces, imploding welfare states and the loss of dynamism that comes from youthful societies. The old scare about “too many mouths to feed” looks grotesque when confronted with the reality of societies that cannot replace themselves.
Meanwhile, the human record of progress is undeniable. Over the past two centuries, life expectancy has risen dramatically, literacy has spread across continents, infant mortality has plunged and absolute poverty has fallen to historic lows. Famines that once killed millions have been virtually eliminated and food production has grown faster than population. The Club of Rome’s charts and Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation now stand as embarrassing monuments to intellectual hubris. Humanity has flourished, not declined.
Julian Simon, the economist who demolished Ehrlich’s alarmism in their famous wager, explained why. The ultimate resource, Simon argued, is not land, oil, or minerals, but the human mind. Each new person brings the possibility of innovation, invention, and creation. Scarcity is not the enemy but the spur of progress. Human ingenuity multiplies abundance. Simon has been proven right. The prices of raw materials fell, not rose, over time, as technology and free enterprise found substitutes, increased efficiency, and opened new frontiers.
Killing the Virus
Why, then, does the Malthusian virus persist? Why does it resurface in each generation, despite its long record of error? The answer lies in its utility for elites and their useful idiots among Left-wing ideologues in tow. It flatters the elite self-image as enlightened custodians of a supposedly fragile world. It offers simple, moralistic answers to complex problems. And it cloaks their misanthropy in the language of science and virtue. It is not the failures of government planning that are blamed for poverty or environmental stress, but the fertility of the poor and their oppressive weight on the natural world.
Lord Brooke’s intervention in the House of Lords is telling. A former trade unionist who once spoke for working men and women now parrots the prejudices of aristocrats who always saw the poor as surplus mouths to feed. His remarks illustrate how deeply entrenched the Malthusian mindset is, even among those who should know better. He, like many in the intelligentsia, has imbibed the idea that fewer people equal a better world. In doing so, he betrays not only his own origins but also the fundamental duty of politics: to serve human flourishing, not human diminishment.
The antidote is clear. We must expose the long history of failed Malthusian predictions. We must resist policies that treat people as problems to be managed rather than possibilities to be embraced. We must insist that development, energy abundance and human creativity are the true paths to environmental stewardship and prosperity. And above all, we must defend a moral framework that prizes human flourishing. As Alex Epstein argues, the goal is not to minimise human impact on an untouched pristine nature, but to maximise human well-being through the intelligent use of resources and good stewardship of the environment.
Julian Simon’s insight should be our compass. People are the solution, not the problem. More minds mean more ideas. More ideas mean better technologies, richer cultures and deeper prosperity. Human flourishing is not the enemy of nature but the highest expression of it. We are stewards, yes, but also creators. To fear humanity is to deny what makes us unique.
Lord Brooke’s words are not just eccentric ramblings. They are a symptom of a deeper sickness that has haunted the Western mind since Malthus. The virus keeps mutating and spinning off new variants – from famine to climate, from eugenics to green ideology – but its core remains the same: the belief that humanity is a plague on the Earth. It must be challenged at every turn. Malthus was wrong in 1798, wrong in 1968 and wrong today. The future belongs not to the prophets of doom, but to those who believe in humanity’s creative potential to solve problems and to build a better world. Lord Brooke should be ashamed of himself.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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