Paul Ehrlich died on March 13 at 93. The US professor and scientist authored the fear-mongering Population Bomb in 1968, a global best-seller book that spawned the Limits to Growth tract of the so-called Club of Rome experts in 1972, which became the bible of childless woke couples and the green-left for decades.

Ehrlich spent his long career decrying over-population and global warming. His predictions were not worth a cup of warm spit but were lapped up by the ever-compliant media, especially the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Science Show lightweight Robyn Williams. That’s the programs title, although I feel the word ‘science’ should always be wrapped in ironic quotes.

The ABC search box throws up 119 Ehrlich hits, virtually all flattering. He spent years in Australia during research visits involving birds and butterflies. Every time he touched down Williams would commune with him on-air about imaginary planetary perils. He’d also cue Ehrlich to launch into diatribes about whatever was the latest irking the left. Here’s Ehrlich hosted by Williams, 2007:

If society is going to be saved we have to get together and understand human behaviour a lot better and how, under certain ethical constraints, we can change human behaviour… 

Everything, everything is going in the wrong direction and we don’t know where the cliff is at the moment. And that’s why we’ve got to recruit the social scientists into helping us, and it can be done…

You know something like 47% of Australians voted for John Howard to stay in office for another term. Now that’s insane, can there be that many ignorant people in Australia? There must be. In the United States you know, half the people in the country last time voted for George W Bush and the Bush crime family…

If hundreds of Australian scientists rose up and had said last year the world’s going to be destroyed if we vote for Howard and his like anymore: we’re not playing around… we cannot afford a John Howard, to put him back. What was he before – a crooked used car salesman? Get rid of them, get out there and picket them, get the scientific community together against them,at least we tried it in the United States… If you do this as an entire society you can have impact if you can get the media to co-operate.

It’s still more or less a free country, so fine and dandy for Williams to push such barrows, but shouldn’t he and his show be privately funded?

A typical Dorothy Dixer from Williams to Ehrlich was how it was explicable that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020. Ehrlich: “It’s a great mystery that we are all talking about. In part it is a failure of the educational systems…” Unlike Williams, ABC colleagues Stan Grant and Eleanor Hall did a professional interviewer’s job of standing Ehrlich up for his dud stuff.

The lamestream media continue globally to venerate Ehrlich. Sceptics mocked the New York Times obit (paywalled) that Ehrlich was not wrong, just “premature”. Its illustration was a 1991 pic of him walking past the Australian Museum in Sydney, which hosted a scary digital clock, “World Population Now”, at the time ticking over at 5,319,791,134 people. Does the Australian Museum now blush about it?

Ehrlich’s wallowed in supposedly-scientific prizes and awards along with at least 20 honorary doctorates. (Journo Robyn Williams has only seven). Ehrlich’s awards are variously for insect research and “science communication” — read that as code for climate hyping.[1] His doomism, starting with the three million sales of his Population Bomb book, paid much better than his academic stipend. The sample of decadal cash-flow is crude because I’ve converted the historic USD amounts to AUD in current dollars.

♦ 1980: With his wife, the Tyler Prize, sometimes called the “environmental Nobel” — $A700,000.

♦ 1990: he shares the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “Crafoord Prize” , a so-called mini-Nobel for ecology — $A440,000

♦ 1990: “Genius Grant” (that’s its literal name) from the Macarthur Foundation — $A1.2 million.

♦ 1993: his share of the Blue Planet Prize of Asahi Glass — $A700,000.

♦ 1995: the inaugural Heinz Award ($A840,000) from Democrat John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz, who inherited billions in 1991 when first husband John Heinz 111 died in a plane crash.

♦ 1998: Volvo Prize — $A400,000

♦ 2010: The lavish BBVA Award — $A1.2m.

Total: $A5.5 million

In 1987 he won membership of the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour, and in 2012 Britain’s Royal Society – about as woke as Britain’s vestigial military – elected him a member.Ehrlich was not just a trumpet for the climate-industrial-media complex. He also advocated punishment for couples having more than one child. The authorities should put sterilisers in the water supply, he told US media. As he gloated in 1990,

And it’s not the slightest question that if we don’t get the population under control with voluntary means, that in the not-too-distant future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.[2]

His chat host, Bryant Gumbel, responded with unintended comedy by displaying a button, “That’s good stuff!”

In that video Ehrlich wanted the US television authorities to mandate airing of his anti-population propaganda, along with a “tremendous amount” of spot commercials. He told Gumbel, “You ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television wherever they appear.”

Ehrlich claimed there would be nothing wrong with government “legislating the size of families … And people say, ‘Oh, that’s impossible. Government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.’ Well, I’ve got news. You know, it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have.” Here’s a snapshot of Ehrlich from the 1960s-70s:

♦ Population growth will bring ecological and global collapse, with wars over food and resources and tumbling life expectancy

♦ Mass famine deaths of hundreds of millions in the 1980s

♦ By 2000 the UK “will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

♦ 65 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s, taking the population down by 1999 to 22.6 million [currently 350m plus Biden’s 10-20 million illegal immigrants]

♦ Seas will rise such that “you’d tie your boat to the Washington Monument.”

♦ A “sixth mass extinction” will bring climate-driven collapse.

In the real world, food production continues to outpace population growth while farmland has barely increased. Cereal yields continue to climb and indexes of hunger and life expectancy show continual improvement, even in Africa. Problems stem not from planetary woes but from wars and socialist regimes.

With Robyn Williams, a typical “Science” show effusion came on October 9, 2021. The show’s precede claimed “coral reefs are dying as we watch” (they’re now in their 5th year of record or high GBR cover). Cranking the hype to 11, the precede continues,

We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of species…As we approach the COP26 [Glasgow] climate talks Paul Ehrlich joins Robyn Williams to reflect on where we find ourselves, how humanity has produced such a mess, and possibilities for our future.

Williams boasts that his ABC show has been using Ehrlich and others since 1975 inception for climate crisis purposes. Like the NYT the ABC later bought Ehrlich’s excuse that he just blew the timing. Interviewed on Radio National’s PMEhrlich ranted that giving civilisation only a 10% chance of survival is conservative because others say only 1%. He hints that doom arrives around 2060-70 or “it could be less” with climate “poisoning the planet”. That’s more comforting than his forecast in 2018, when he told The Guardian the collapse of civilization was “a near certainty in the next few decades.” He also told the “Science” show (November 27, 2004) that Australia would “go down the drain” ahead of the US.While Ehrlich castigated economists, his own nous for economics can be judged by this December 2013 ABC interview. The world, he said, couldn’t afford to have China and India develop their coal. Instead, Australia should use its ‘outstanding science’ to ramp up solar energy technology. It could then generate “an incredible economic boom” by exporting it to the massive energy users. Williams replied by stroking his idol for what he called “the sheer intelligence of being aware of this”.

Ehrlich was not the only crazed alarmist whom Williams has brown-nosed and lionised on his “Science” show. Step forward Harvard’s Professor Naomi Oreskes, acclaimed author of denialist-smiting Merchants of Doubt (2010) and a slim but dense tome The Collapse of Western Civilisation, a View from the Future  (2014). That book forecast climate heat so searing that by now the entire Australian population has perished.

Like Ehrlich, Oreskes has been showered with honours for her corpus (should that be ‘corpse’?) of science writings, including Caltech’s Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and the British Academy Medal, 2019. The ABC search box gives her 61 mentions, and three guest platformings by Williams “Science” show (2011, 2014 and 2025). In their 2014 chinwag  the pair enthuse about her book predicting the heat deaths of Western households’  pups, kittens and goldfish.

One reader told Oreskes she

started crying when the pets die, so I didn’t mean to upset people too much … I was just trying to come up with something that I thought people wouldn’t forget about, and I thought, well, Americans spend billions of dollars every year taking care of their pets, and I thought if people’s dogs started dying, maybe then they would sit up and take notice.

Oreskes writes, in bold type no less:

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal. A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment. 

Robyn Williams: Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things … And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.

 Oreskes: Well, exactly. It was about bringing it literally home, literally into your home, your family, your pet, the dog or cat that you love who is your faithful and trusted companion.

But surely Oreskes’ pet doom forecast isn’t Peer-Reviewed Science™? Yes, her book is kosher, she insists.

Well, it’s all based on solid science. Everything in this book is based on the scientific projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we did was to add to the social and human aspects to it.

The ABC introduced that Oreskes episode with a typical lie: “The Earth’s climate is changing at the highest of predicted rates.” Fact: The past 40 years’ warming was barely half of what the orthodox modelling predicted. The ABC in those days had the decency  to include my correction in its precede. Robyn Williams was so proud of his Oreskes’ interviews that he included her in the highlights of his 50-year retrospective last year.

Other environmental scaremongering from the 1960s included, amusingly, global cooling and a possible ice age that was said likely to beset the planet within the next 10 years.

The alarmists, embarrassed, have claimed that the “cooling scare” is a myth peddled by sceptics. Not so! Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on January 9, 1975, urgently sought a report on global cooling from the Academy of Science President Geoff Badger  concerning its likely impact on farm exports.[3] The Academy, which had not yet been captured by green-left apparatchiks, told Gough in an 80-page report a year later to calm down because cooling, if any, would be on a geological, not political, time frame. Such sanity later departed the Academy, and with it any check on the Australian left’s rush to “net zero” and the national fuel chaos we now endure. The ABC’s “Science” show has cheered it all on by platforming for decades the charlatan and snake-oil merchant Paul Ehrlich and the likes of climate-alarmist Naomi Oreskes.

******

[1] Ehrlich’s career might have inspired our Professor Lesley Hughes, a guru of the Climate Council whose original specialty included stick insects and ant-tended butterfly ejaculations.

[2] Chat GPT insists there is no video evidence of this. My link shows the contrary.

[3] Hard to get more top-level concern about the possible ‘ice age cometh’ than this letter… Cyclone Tracy had devastated Darwin three weeks earlier; Rex Connor was telexing a Pakistani con man who lived on peanuts and potato crisps, asking him to raise $US4 billion; Jim Cairns was nipping at Gough’s heels as PM-in-waiting. But Gough wanted to know about the global cooling scare. The report finished with

We conclude that there is no evidence that the world is now on the brink of a major climatic change. There is ample evidence that the world’s climate has changed widely during the geological past, and while there is every expectation that it will continue to change in the future, the time scale of these changes is in the range of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years rather than decades or centuries.

It cannot be too strongly emphasised that year-to-year variability is an inherent feature of global and regional climates and that…large fluctuations leading to severe droughts and floods are bound to occur from time to time. (page 9)

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