The usual burst of New Year's predictions is a reminder that when it comes to foretelling the future, there are two big differences between tribal cultures and ourselves.
Increasingly, we seem to expect dismal rather than optimistic predictions, especially in regards to the environment and public health. And we have developed more elaborate reasons to explain why most of these predictions turn out to be wrong.
Or perhaps we are just better at forgetting the failures. Hearing the predictions of a global warming catastrophe that accompanied last month's Kyoto conference on greenhouse gases, how many people remembered that less than twenty-five years ago, there was widespread panic about global cooling?
In the mid-1970s, scientific as well as popular magazines were warning about ominous signs of a world-wide decline in temperatures that would lead to devastating crop failures and political instability. Some of the very scientists who have been most active in recent years in promoting global warming fears, such as the American climatologist Stephen Schneider, had previously hitched their fortunes to this coming ice-age.
At least Schneider has been frank enough to admit the tactical considerations that lie behind such pessimistic predictions. In an interview with the anti-nuclear activist Jonathan Schell some years ago, Schneider said that to obtain broad public support for their causes, scientists "have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts that we might have ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest".
Some gloomy predictions seem to fill such an important cultural and psychological need for our elites that even a long and illustrious record of failure does not dent the credibility of those who make them. Since 1973, Lester Brown from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C. has been warning that world population is about to outgrow food production. In an article on environmental doomsday forecasts in its most recent issue, The Economist notes that in 1994, after 21 years of being wrong, Brown said "after 40 years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated consequences."
At least Brown has a consistent tally with his predictions. His comments were followed by three years of big increases in world food output. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Index of per capita food production gained over 5 per cent from 1993 till 1996 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available).
Such figures only seem to challenge Brown to redouble his efforts. Last August, he released another missive, called The Agricultural Link: How Environmental Deterioration Could Disrupt Economic Progress. The message: it's crunch time for agriculture, and the world is about to experience the "politics of scarcity".
Nevertheless, every year, when the Worldwatch Institute updates its State of the World report, journalists around the world respectfully report its forecasts, and neglect to enquire about the fate of earlier prophecies.
The American environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook has formulated a law of doomsaying which holds that the greatest success goes to those who predict dreadful events which will occur between five and ten years in the future. This time window is near enough to cause anxiety, far off enough for most people eventually to forget what was predicted, and long enough to allow for substantial book sales and paid lecture tours.
Easterbrook offers biologist Paul Ehrlich as a good example of a canny catastrophist. In 1968 Ehrlich declared that "the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large-scale famines in the next decade". A year later he predicted that by the mid-1970s, "smog disasters" would cause 200,000 Americans per year to drop dead. He also warned that American life expectancy would decline to as low as 42 years.
Warming to his task, Ehrlich began to venture outside the Easterbrook window of opportunity, and make longer-range predictions. In 1969 he told British biologists "if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".
Actually, he was a gambler, for in 1980 he accepted a wager offered by the economist Julian Simon, who had long ridiculed Ehrlich's predictions of devastating global shortages of crucial commodities. Simon bet that the real price of any five natural resources of Ehrlich's own choosing would be lower in 1990 than in 1980, because recoverable reserves would continue to outstrip demand.
Ehrlich lost, and he would still have lost even if the prices had not been adjusted for inflation. So what was the lesson he learnt? Did he stop making his wild predictions and apologise for misleading millions with foolish predictions? Of course not. He increased his attacks on Simon's supposedly unrealistic and dangerous views.
In their famous study of a 1950s doomsday cult focused on aliens in flying saucers, When Prophecy Fails, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues discovered that the failure of the world to end on the day predicted did not weaken the faith of those who had been strongly committed to the group.
On the contrary, the intensity of their involvement and the mutual support they gave each other after the world continued to exist meant that many of the cult's followers emerged even more convinced than before, and more dedicated to promoting their message to a wider audience. Festinger's findings are as valid for contemporary environmental doomsayers as they were for the eccentric cultists he wrote about forty years ago.
By now, my own forecast should be obvious. It is based on the simple futurological technique of extrapolation from the present. I can confidently predict that environmentalists will continue to warn that unless we follow their bidding, the world will go to hell in a handbasket.
It has been a winning formula for them to date, ensuring considerable public influence and financial rewards. But they are wrong. Don't allow their jeremiahs to distract you from having a happy New Year.
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