The Sky is Falling - Wednesday Edition
Our consensus delivered in under 30 minutes … or it’s free!
Ed. note: I’m on vacation in Colorado this week … thought I’d leave you a couple of excerpts from “The Sky is Falling: A Global Warming Survival Guide” to keep you going through the week….
With all the talk about a scientific consensus on global warming, we thought we’d take a look at some of the great consensuses consensi group-thinks and their consequences throughout history. Today, the Top 5.
Top 10 Consensus Forecasts Throughout History
5. Consensus: Beta technology superior to VHS. First in a long line of lessons for gadget freaks that marketing and distribution count just as much as technology.
Winners: X-rated film buffs who have choice of two formats, U.S. economy
Losers: Movie buffs who are forced to buy DVDs a few years later.
Unintended consequence: Sex films become mainstream as Traci Lords crosses over into legitimate film work
4. Consensus: Population explosion will doom mankind. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, scientists and intellectuals forecast global Armageddon due to world’s rapidly expanding population.
Winners: Paul Ehrlich, Stanford professor whose 1968 book, The Population Bomb, forecast mass starvation in America and Europe before 1980. Tom Monaghan who, in the same year, became sole owner of Domino’s Pizza. By 2005, Dominos had 7,875 stores in more than 55 countries, approximately 145,000 employees, and revenues of $1.5 billion.
Losers: Stanford students … Ehrlich had tenure.
Unintended consequence: Humanity flourishing.
3. Consensus: The Earth revolves around the Sun. Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expected them to be wrong about the nature of the Universe. After all, it was in the Bible.
Winners: All of us as Galileo becomes the “father of science” despite imprisonment and threats from the religious right of his time.
Losers: All those kids in school in the 1600s who had to re-do their science projects and make new Styrofoam and hanger models of the solar system.
Unintended consequence: Boy becomes a man on class field trip to the Hayden Planetarium, nearly 365 years to the day after Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter. (Thanks, Betty Ann.)
2. Consensus: The Red Sox will never win a World Series. Curse of the Bambino had been raised to near dogma after over 80 years of post-season frustration.
Winners: Major league baseball.
Losers: Barry Bonds. Nothing to do with this … he just is.
Unintended consequence: Boston Tea Party no longer ranks as the town’s most raucous public demonstration.
1. Consensus: Global warming. Rapidly giving Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds a run for its money as the greatest media hoax of all time. Despite repeated announcements labeling it as a work of fiction, people thought that the world was in imminent danger. And the same goes for Orson Welles’ radio hoax.
Winners: Politicians who see votes and money; sensationalist media outlets that recognize a good story when they see one.
Losers: Other lifesaving research that could be funded with money we’re wasting on something we can’t predict or control.
Unintended consequence: Al Gore resurrected.
global warming, climate change, The Sky is Falling, A Global Warming Survival Guide
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