In their latest sky-is-falling prediction, Chicken Little environmentalists predict extinction of the earth's marine species by 2048. 

According to a Science Magazine report, the Earth's marine populations will disappear by 2048 if current trends continue, resulting in less food for humans.  According to Boris Worm, lead author of the article, all species will vanish, from mussels and clams to tuna and swordfish.  Ocean mammals, including seals, killer whales and dolphins, will also allegedly disappear. 

But beware.  This is merely the latest environmentalist false alarm concocted to frighten Americans into accepting more bureaucratic coercion. 

Consider that the earliest environmentalist hysterics predicted that the world would run out of food during the 19^th Century.  In the 20^th Century, they began predicting global cooling.  Later on, as you know, it was global warming.  In between, the world was supposed to run out of oil by 1980, and food soon thereafter. 

These false alarms would be amusing, were it not for the fact that they often lead to destructive government policies. 

Thomas Malthus is perhaps the father of doomsday environmentalists.  He famously prophesized in 1798 that farm production couldn't possibly keep pace with "overpopulation," and that worldwide starvation would occur in the mid-1800s. 

Still waiting. 

Undeterred, Paul Ehrlich curiously chose to resurrect Malthus's theory in his 1968 book The Population Bomb.  Disregarding the obvious likelihood that his assertions would soon be disproven and ridiculed, he boldly stated, "the battle to feed humanity is over.  In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."  In fact, Ehrlich went so far as to bizarrely label this event "The Great Die-Off." 

It gets even more bizarre, believe it or not. 

In 1990, a persistent Ehrlich pronounced that "starvation and epidemic disease will raise death rates over most of the planet," causing "deaths of many hundreds of millions of people in famines." 

In the real world, however, famine and epidemic disease have occurred due to political oppression, rather than some sort of "overpopulation" or agricultural failure. 

Climate-change alarmists have an equally embarrassing record of prediction, alternating between global cooling and global warming over the past century. 

On February 24, 1895, the New York Times ran the following headline:  "Geologists Think the World May be Frozen up Again."  On October 7, 1912, the Times announced that a professor "Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age." 

On March 27, 1933, however, the New York Times reversed course and announced global warming:  "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise." 

Still following? 

Climate alarmists again reversed course in the 1970s, switching back to "Global Cooling."  On December 29, 1974, the New York Times proclaimed cooling temperatures, and warned, "the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade." 

Newsweek Magazine joined this global cooling chorus in 1975, pleading that "there are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth." 

Obviously, alarmists again reversed course within the decade, switching back to "Global Warming." 

It's enough to make a time-traveler dizzy. 

The simple fact is that climate fluctuations are the norm throughout the Earth's history, and result from natural causes.  After all, the Ice Age certainly didn't end due to the internal combustion engine (although Al Gore is probably working on that theory as we speak).  Ignoring this, the environmental movement repeatedly floats hysterical predictions about climate change (although obviously unable to choose between cooling and warming), overpopulation, resource eradication, worldwide starvation, and extinction. 

Columnist George Will famously recalls a former classmate who bizarrely asserted that "the proof of Trotsky's genius is the fact that none of his predictions have come true."  Similar logic apparently applies among environmentalists – despite failed prediction after failed prediction, their doomsday forecasts persist. 

The reason?  Very simply, environmentalism provides leftists a vehicle by which they impose their social and economic agenda upon the world, including a reluctant United States.  As French President Jaques Chirac revealingly stated in 2000, the Kyoto Protocol constitutes "the first component of an authentic global governance." 

So keep the Science Magazine report of marine extinction by 2048 in context – namely, the embarrassing 200-year record of environmentalist hysteria.