The Vindication of a Public Scholar : Forty Years After The Population Bomb Ignited Controversy, Paul Ehrlich Continues to Stir Debate For all of the things the popular book got wrong (or had mistimed), it got many other issues right. The book, which was about so much more than simply population, remains impressively prescient. “All of the junk we dump into the atmosphere, all of the dust, all of the carbon dioxide, have effects on the temperature balance of the Earth,” the Ehrlichs wrote,