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Atop a laudatory obituary for Paul Ehrlich, a New York Times headline says that the author of The Population Bomb “faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
Premature? The proper word for an inaccurate prediction is “wrong.”
Imagine that the weatherman predicts that tomorrow will be bright and sunny, and in fact the day brings pouring rain. If you trusted the forecast and went out without your umbrella, you might be angry with the meteorologist. Eventually the sun will shine again, but no one will say that the meteorologist’s forecast was “premature.”
But don’t stop there. The Times is still asking us to buy into Ehrlich’s pseudo-scientific analysis. By describing his dire prophecies of mass starvation as “premature,” the Times strongly implies that they will eventually be realized. The sun will shine again someday. But will the many ecological catastrophes that Ehrlich predicted come to pass? The Times headline takes that for granted.
For decades, proponents of population control have used Ehrlich’s work as the basis for their policy recommendations. If he was wrong, and our world can sustain a larger population, their case collapses. Well, he was wrong; the world’s population has grown, but the population “bomb” turned out to be a dud. Yet the Times remains true to the cause. So his predictions were “premature.”