Paul Ehrlich and Michael Mann, Both Used the Media to Hide Their Misanthropy
By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant
Mar 29, 2026
By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant
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In the annals of environmental alarmism, few figures loom larger than Paul Ehrlich and Michael Mann. Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist who died in March 2026 at age 93, authored The Population Bomb (1968), a bestseller that warned of imminent global famine, societal collapse, and resource wars driven by overpopulation. Mann, the Penn State climatologist, rose to prominence with his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which depicted a millennium of stable temperatures followed by a sharp 20th-century spike—becoming the visual cornerstone of IPCC reports and the climate movement.
Both built empires of influence in spite of actual data, but on a sophisticated mastery of media. When their core claims faced empirical scrutiny and outright falsification, they didn’t retreat into the lab. They doubled down in the public square, reframing failure as foresight, critics as villains, and uncertainty as conspiracy. This shared strategy—celebrity amplification, narrative pivots, and aggressive deflection—has papered over profound flaws in their thinking, with lasting consequences for energy policy and human progress.
Ehrlich’s case is the archetype of predictive collapse. The Population Bomb forecasted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve in the 1970s and 1980s, that India could never feed its growing population, that the U.K. would devolve into “a small group of impoverished islands” by 2000, and that U.S. life expectancy would plummet to 42 years. None of it materialized. The global population roughly doubled since 1968, yet per capita food production soared thanks to the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug’s high-yield crops, fertilizers, and irrigation.
https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/paul-ehrlich-and-michael-mann-both
