The sky is falling, the sky is falling, cried Chicken Little.  The children's tale resonates today as hundreds of scientists are running around like chickens with their heads cut off (to extend the metaphor) screaming about projected catastrophic consequences caused by rises in sea level.  Like Chicken Little, there is an outside chance they may be right -- but the evidence says no.

Remember the predictions by scientist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb?  According to the groupthink of the early part of the modern environmental movement, by the year 2000, earthlings will be living on top of each other awaiting the end of times due to the absence of clean air, water, food, and shelter if birth rates were not curtailed immediately.

As it turned out, the theory of unintended consequences trumped the certitudes of eminent scientists.  Not only did the earth not run out of resources, but nations that took Ehrlich's eschatological predictions seriously now find themselves on the brink of extinction caused by low birth rates.  In Western Europe, where trendy social planning platitudes take root and thrive, Ehrlich's advice was adopted, and birth rates declined.  Germany's birth rate -- which is the number of births per 1,000 inhabitants - is now 7.88.  That's down 16% in the last ten years and the lowest in the country's history.  Other countries whose rates have declined include Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal -- with slipping birth rates in every Western European country except Spain and the U.K.  

The reality is that ethnic populations are shrinking, creating the necessity to import foreign immigrants to perform basic work and pay the taxes to fund the quasi-socialistic systems.  Most of these "guest workers" are Muslim.  In a huge irony, by falling for the overpopulation hoax, nations have not saved the earth and its resources -- they have ensured their own demise.  Not only were the scientists wrong in their population growth predictions, but those who believed them have endangered their very existence.

Here is another example.  Environmental scientists insisted in the 1970s that fossil fuels were diminishing at an alarming rate.  This belief, the linchpin of the alternative energy movement that permeates ecological thinking today, turns out to be wrong.  It is now estimated that the U.S. will be completely free of the need to purchase oil beyond the Western hemisphere by 2020 -- and completely independent by 2032 due to new techniques that extract oil from shale and the ocean floor and by applying hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to previously passed-over deposits.

The list of false prophecies is long.  The Y2K Millennium prediction by scientists that the world's computers would cease working after the turn of the century in 2000 caused the expenditure of billions of dollars and months of anxiety.  Remember when the SARS virus and Ebola were on the verge of causing a gigantic pandemic that would reach into every nook and cranny of human population?  Or that coffee and Alar in apples were killing us all?  Or the financial "scientists" who insisted that free markets regulate themselves?

How about the certitudes of Marxism, a "scientific theory" of the future of society that instead was responsible for the deaths of 100 million people, until the horror came to an end in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Therein lurks the real danger of falling for theoretical predictions.  If the future does not turn out like they hope, devotees retrench and harden their commitment to their disproved manifestos.  If the workers of the world did not live up to the certainty of communism, Stalin had them eliminated.  Climatologists are not likely to knock off those that disagree with them -- but they continue war by other means, pushing legislation and regulations that are economically harmful and ceaselessly proselytize their righteous views in academia, government agencies, and the media (who never saw a press release they didn't like on the danger to the environment).

One thing you can count on is that no one can predict the future.  And this is especially applicable to the environmental sciences.  The track record is abysmal, yet the more these people are proved wrong, the more they harden their commitment.  As Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg uncovered, the recent environmental movement that has such a grip on our society was founded on faulty scientific data.  Fueled with earnestness and anti-capitalist rhetoric since the 1960s, today's green activists  march right by evidence that challenges their premises and prognostications.

And there is the Climategate scandal, uncovered by leaked documents at U.K.'s University of East Anglia's global warming think-tank, that exposed fabrications masquerading as environmental fact.  Or the accepted premise that earth was losing 40,000 species a year, to climate scientists a shocking result of mankind's rape of the earth.  A little research divulged that this "fact" emanated from a British ecologist who "estimated" that there are several hundred thousand species we have yet to discover.

He figured that we must be losing a percentage of these phantom species regularly -- and the scientific community and media actually fell for it.  These are the people and data we are asked to believe while we evacuate the coastal areas of the United States?

Yes, sea levels are rising.  But the consequences are unknown.  To force communities near the shore to prohibit development based on the track record of environmental scientists will cause dangerous, uncertain, and unintended consequences -- all in the name of politically motivated theorist who would rather fantasize about the end of the world than believe in the practical ability of human enterprise.