The UN has been predicting planetary disaster for decades, usually scheduled to happen in about a decade’s time. In 1972 – half a century ago – Maurice Strong, the first UN Environment Programme director warned that the world “had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe”. In 1982 his successor, Mostafa Tolba, the then head of the UN Environment Programme told the world that it had just 18 years before “an environmental catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust”. Yet 2000 came and went and we just partied like it was 1999…

In 1989 the official was warning that we have to fix climate change by 1999 or “climate change goes beyond human control”. By 1990 Tolba was warning the world must fix global warming before 1995, “otherwise, we’d lose the climate struggle”. Now 20 years past that date when it was going to be too late, we are still hearing the same claims again.

As sea levels would rise we were told that the Maldives islands would be under water over a decade ago, they’re actually building more luxury hotels. We were told the source of the great Ganges river in the Himalayas, the glaciers, would have melted long ago. The great Ganges river still flows and the glaciers are still there. The Australian Great Barrier reef would be dead, it is alive and thriving. We were told by the UN Food Programme in the sixties that Earth could not feed a growing population and that the future was bleak with much of humanity facing starvation. The earth’s population has more than doubled since the sixties with fewer people in absolute poverty…

Don’t believe the doomsters. Don’t bet against humanity’s ingenuity…