What if You’re Wrong?

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
— Richard Feynman

What do you believe that doesn’t match reality? Have you ever been spectacularly wrong about anything?

People leave comments on my work. Here’s a good example from a man named Graham Townsend:

Given the consequences of climate breakdown, and the likely public backlash against denialists, you may find yourself up in front of a Nuremberg-style tribunal a decade or so from now.

They never address what I actually write. They don’t know anything about climate. They just try to attack and bully me because I represent another tribe. Yet I stand firmly on the shoulders of giants like Feynman, knowing that experts are often — very often — wrong. Let’s investigate …

Famous last words

This ‘telephone’ has far too many shortcomings to be taken seriously as a means of communication. It has objectively no value.
— William Orton, President of Western Union, 1876.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC computer is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes. Fanciful as it seems, they could even weigh just one and a half tons.
—Popular Mechanics, 1949.

Why would we make this? The global potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at absolute most.
—IBM, to the guys who would eventually found Xerox, 1959.

There is no reason an individual would ever want a computer in their home.
—Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977.

The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is nothing more than a pipe-dream fueled by greed.
—Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, 1992.

I predict that the internet will go spectacularly supernova, and in 1996 it will catastrophically implode.
—Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, 1995.

There is no chance of the iPhone ever gaining significant market share.
—Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, 2007.

The internet will fade away because most people have nothing to say to each other. By 2005 it will be clear that the internet’s impact on the global economy has been no greater than the fax machine.
— Paul Krugman, renowned Economist, 1998.

Subscription models for music are bankrupt. I think you could make the Second Coming of Jesus himself available on subscription and it wouldn’t be successful.
— Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, 2003.

When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.
— Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson, 1878

Stock prices have reached a permanently high plateau.
– Yale economist, Irving Fisher, 1929

Mark my words: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.
– Henry Ford, 1940

Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.
— Thomas Edison, 1889

Everything that can be invented, has been invented.
—Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office, 1899

The Beatles have no future in show business. We don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.
– executives at Decca Records in 1962

The woman of the year 2000 will be an outsize Diana, anthropologists and beauty experts predict. She will be more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver.
— Dorothy Roe, 1950

The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.
— Horace Wrackham, 1903

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
— Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895

Lee DeForest has said that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …
— a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company, 1913

There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
— Albert Einstein, 1932

Look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop!
— Nobel Laureates Isidor Rabi and Polykarp Kusch to future Nobel Laureate Charles Townes about his work on the laser, 1939

There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers.
– Phillip Franklin, vice president of the White Star Line, which had produced the Titanic, 1912

Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
— Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946

I have no doubt that we’ll have nuclear-powered vacuum-cleaners in say, 10 years time.
— Alex Lewyt, CEO of a vacuum-cleaner company, 1955.

There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.
— T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner, 1961

Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will certainly flop. It has no chance of success.
— Time Magazine, 1966.

X-rays will prove to be a hoax.
– Lord Kelvin, Mathematician, Physicist and President of the Royal Society, 1883

Mobile phones will absolutely never replace the wired telephone.
— Marty Cooper, inventor of the mobile phone, 1981.

I don’t know… there just aren’t that many videos I want to watch.
— Steve Chen, founder of YouTube, expressing doubts about YouTube’s viability as a company. 2005.

Doomsday — predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970

Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
— Harvard biologist George Wald

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
— Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.
— New York Times

Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
— Paul Ehrlich, 1969

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.
— Paul Ehrlich, 1970.

Between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.
— Paul Ehrlich

It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.
— Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day.

By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions.
— Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor

Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support … the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.
— Life Magazine

Americans born since 1946…now have a life expectancy of only 49 years, and if current patterns continue, this expectancy will reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.
— Paul Ehrlich

I want readers to know that Paul Ehrlich remains a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and is now a faculty member at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil.
— ecologist Kenneth Watt

Humanity will totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver will be gone before 1990.
— Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences

Within 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.
— Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
— Kenneth Watt

By the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.
— U.N. official Mostafa Tolba, 1982

Seventy five percent of species could go extinct “in as little as 3 to 22 centuries.
— Anthony Barnosky

Failed climate predictions

I’m sorry to tell you that they’re gone. They’re all gone now:

The signs. They removed them. They had to. They were wrong.

My favorite piece on this is Michael Crichton’s Aliens Cause Global Warming, which he wrote in 2003.

The entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in five years.
— Al Gore, 2008

The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.
— Alexandra Occasio-Cortez, 2019

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia ,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

We can still stop the worst. But to do so we must turn a year of burning heat into a year of burning ambition. The era of global boiling has arrived.
— Antonio Gutteres speech, 2023

We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,
— Antonio Gutteres speech, 2022

We’re on a highway to climate hell.
— Antonio Gutteres speech, 2022

I am here to sound the alarm. The world must wake up.
— Antonio Gutteres speech, 2021

Reports and summaries of climate doom

American Enterprise Institute: Carpe Diem: 50 years of failed climate predictions.

New York Post: 50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh.

Rising seas will displace tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, creating massive, enduring instability.
—Pentagon report on climate threat, 2019

Energy Capital: Seven Big Failed Environmentalist Predictions.

Ten years to prevent catastrophe?: Discourses of climate change and international development in the UK press, peer-reviewed paper

James Hansen’s 1988 Predictions Compared to Observations, Energy & Environment; Dale R McIntyre

The UN has been predicting planetary disaster for 50 years.

NetZero Watch: Ten climate predictions for 2020 that went horribly wrong.

Some Failed Climate Predictions, by Andy May

Watts Up with That: 30 Year Anniversary of the UN 1989 “10 years to save the world” Climate Warning.

Earth Day At 52: None Of The Eco-Doomsday Predictions Have Come True, Climate Change Dispatch

Al Gore’s Climate Sequel Misses a Few Inconvenient Facts, WSJ

UN press release from the 1990s on how bad things will get.

Stop Blaming the Climate for Disasters, Nature

Is Climate Catastrophe Really Ten Years Away?, Fraser Institute