Former U.S. vice president Al Gore speaks during a conversation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, May 25, 2022. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from May 22 until May 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Humanity only has a few years to act before the world may irreversibly plunge into an environmental catastrophe of global proportions, climate experts warned in a recent report. Their calls are muffled, however, by a ballast of dozens of past dramatic predictions that have failed to pan out.
Environmental experts have been predicting upcoming doom for many decades. Most, though not all, of the prognostications involve climatic cataclysm that appears to be just around the corner, only to fizzle out as the deadline approaches.
As the failed predictions pile up, climate experts appear to be more cautious in making their predictions too specific. The current general consensus among climate change proponents is that extreme weather events, such as droughts and storms, will become more prevalent or intense.
The recently released short-form report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that unless carbon emissions are cut drastically and promptly, the planet will warm roughly an additional 1.1-2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100 (pdf). That would lead to “high” or “very high” risk of wildfire damage, permafrost degradation, biodiversity loss, dryland water scarcity, and tree mortality on the land, and loss of warm-water corals in the sea. Most of the severe risks are asserted with moderate or low confidence, meaning that underlying evidence is lacking or inconclusive.
The full IPCC report hasn’t been released yet.
One of the most famous climate experts, Michael Mann, criticized the IPCC for being “overly conservative” in predicting catastrophic consequences of climate change, “including ice sheet collapse, sea level rise, and the rise in extreme weather events,” Inside Climate News reported.
But it’s been exactly these kinds of bold predictions that have undermined experts’ credibility in the past.
Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has collected some such failed predictions in his book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” Geologist and electrical engineer Tony Heller, who frequently criticizes what he considers fraud in current mainstream climate research, has made it a recurring theme of his climate science blog to point out failed and dubious predictions.
Examples are plentiful, stretching far into the past:
December 1939
“All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting,” the Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier reported.
“It may without exaggeration be said that the glaciers—like those in Norway—face the possibility of a catastrophic collapse,” the paper quoted Prof. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geologist, saying from a report to the Geographical Society after his Arctic expedition.
In fact, arctic ice was seen receding since 1918, according to a 1923 New York Time article.
“Last Winter, oceans did not freeze over even on the north coast of Spitzbergen,” article said.
By comparison, this winter, sea ice did reach the shore of Spitzbergen, though in low concentrations.
Back then, however, the meltdown seemed nowhere near done.
May 1947
“The possibility of a prodigious rise in the surface of the ocean with resultant widespread inundation, arising from an Arctic climate phenomenon[,] was discussed yesterday by Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a noted Swedish geophysicist at the University of California Geophysical Institute,” an article in The West Australian read.
“The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study the conditions on a global basis,” Ahlmann said.
February 1952
“The glaciers of Norway and Alaska are only half the size they were 50 years ago,” said Dr. William Carlson, an Arctic expert, according to a newswire run by The Cairns Post in Australia.
March 1955
“There are now six million square miles of ice in the Arctic. There once were 12 million square miles,” said Arctic explorer Adm. Donald McMillan, according to Rochester, New York’s Democrat and Chronicle.
October 1958
“Some scientists estimate that the polar ice pack is 40 percent thinner and 12 percent less in area than it was a half-century ago, and that even within the lifetime of our children, the Arctic Ocean may open, enabling ships to sail over the North Pole,” The New York Times reported, noting that the Arctic ice sheet was about 7 feet thick at the time. Currently, the ice is about 7 feet thick, too.
By the 1960s, it appears that worries about a melting Arctic became not as immediate, only to be supplanted by other environmental concerns.
November 1967
“It is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine,” The Salt Lake Tribune reported, citing Paul Ehrlich’s prediction of famines by 1975.
Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and author of “The Population Bomb,” proposed lacing staple foods and drinking water with sterilizing agents to cut the growing population of the United States, according to the report.
April 1970
“Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century,” The Boston Globe reported, saying that pollution expert James Lodge predicted that “air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the new century.”
October 1970
Ehrlich went on to predict that America would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980, California’s Redlands Daily Facts reported.
July 1971
“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age,” said atmospheric scientist S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Columbia University, The Washington Post reported.
January 1972
“We have 10 years to stop the catastrophe,” said Maurice Strong, then-U.N. environmental secretary, regarding world’s environmental problems, according to a Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
December 1972
Two Brown University geologists wrote a letter to President Richard Nixon, reporting that a conference attended by “42 top American and European investigators” concluded “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.”
“The present rate of cooling,” they said, “seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century, if continuing at the present pace.”
January 1974
“Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast,” The Guardian reported.
June 1974
“Another Ice Age?” a Time Magazine headline asked.
“Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” the article said.
January 1978
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere,” The New York Times reported.
A year later, the paper was reporting the opposite.
February 1979
“There is a real possibility that some people now in their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will have melted, a change that would cause swift and perhaps catastrophic changes in climate,” The New York Times said.
May 1982
Mostafa Tolba, then-executive director of the U.N. environmental program, said that if the world didn’t change course, it would face “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust’’ by the year 2000, according to The New York Times.
September 1988
The small island nation of Maldives was threatened to be completely covered by “a gradual rise in average sea level” in 30 years, Agence France-Presse reported, noting that “the end of the Maldives and its people could come sooner if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992, as predicted.”
Scruffy_USN_Retired
on 8:16 am March 27, 2023 at 8:16 am
The world is coming to an end, The world is coming to an end, The world is coming to an end.
People/Democrats have been saying this for decades. Follow the money, who is getting rich over this claim?
Make no mistake, the world as we know it will come to an end, but God has told us how, but not when it will come to an end as we know it. When God decides it is time, nobody or nothing can affect God’s will.
These are the true believers in their religion of secular socialist Consumption, who trust only in their imaginations, not in the real-world empirical creations of God. like overzealous preachers and promoters of an American Armageddon, ruling in fear, totally ignoring the power of Creation and the Creator who designed his people to adapt, and take dominion over earth;
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
These creepy creeping liberals would make man into the image of themselves,,, of a democrat donkey too stupid not to eat off the same grounds where they defecate. They are the creeping things that creep on this earth that WE THE PEOPLE are designed to take dominion over. Do not be deceived by their American offered imaginary ill winds designed by them to rule by their only offerings of fear itself. When in doubt, freeze them out.
Lies and ignorance drive Climate Change catastrophe. The Globalists of the world want control and power over all the people. Big money goes out to climate so called scientists to come up with drastic figures to drive the false hysteria. People must also understand the reasons for this. Power,control and money.. The true evils of modern extreme Marxist beliefs. They can’t stand that individuals having freedom and control of their own lives. They also use brainwashing as has been the case for clime change. Schools even teach children how to fight climate change. Then you throw in the false narrative of demonizing CO2, a most important part of keeping our world green and strong. CO2 is not a toxin as some try to get people to believe. It also dies not heat up the earth but helps plants to survive and grow. Again the evil ones as I call them, basically just want to control you and how you live. Big money and big power is pure evil.
Since the 70’s we have been subjected to the hysteria of gloom and doom which hasn’t even come close to happening still they keep changing the parameters of their prediction, all of it it pretty much based on the same data just twisted in a different direction. They made fake documentaries, convinced an innocent appearing young marxist to wring our hearts, none of which came close to the reality of the climate itself. Isn’t it time for the real scientists who have been muzzled by the ‘settled science’ group to speak out?
I have only one thing to say to these CON ARTIST. Unfortunately it’s nasty and not appropriate in this forum. I’ll put it the best way I can. GO HAVE CARNAL KNOWLEDGE WITH YOURSELF. There, said and done.
Al Gore is nothing but a con man. He makes millions off of the stupid people. Brain dead fools who don’t know anything about climate. Go look at Al Gore mansions! Would you be surprised. He flys around in a private jet and drives a big car. But your supposed to get a horse or a electric car and not have heat. One day he will get his returns on lying to the American people all for personal gain. Just like John Kerry and his lies.
The truth be known, it not the past messages hurting the so called experts, it’s that the experts are phony experts making predictions for monetary gain and political gain! If the real experts were to get their message out the real truth would be known!
I studied ecosystems modeling in college in the 70’s when it was in its infancy. I quickly learned that even the simplest ecosystems are so complex that it is impossible to include all the variables into a model. The first thing you do when creating any computer model is to try to figure out what parameters are the main indicators for the system you are trying to model. You make your best guess, then run the model and see how closely your model mimics the real world. If you can use past data, and your results reflect what the system looks like now, you have a decent model and you can start using it to predict future behavior. If your model’s output doesn’t match the real world, you go back and change the model. Yet climate scientists continue to use the same models over and over to try to scare people in to taking actions that will cause much more damage than anything the actual climate ever will.
I use the moniker xbioman because I left Biology and science in general after I found out that the only way to survive in the business is to generate results that reflect what the people funding the research want to see. This is true at so many levels now. How do you think we got a food pyramid that says Fruit Loops are a healthier breakfast than eggs and toast? How is it that so many climate models continue to forecast the complete collapse of the entire Earth’s ecosystem? As others have said, follow the money. Thank God for people like Bjorn Lundberg, and Dr. Roy Spencer at the U of Alabama. At least there are a few sane voices out there.
When you’re running a con job, you have to continually change your B.S. in order to keep the mark hooked. It would seem people would have gotten wise to it by now, but just like phone scams there always some suckers who will fall for them. By the way, I know a Ugandan king who only needs $5,000 to get his throne back and he is willing to pay back double when he does. If you’re interested I have been designated his liaison.
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The world is coming to an end, The world is coming to an end, The world is coming to an end.
People/Democrats have been saying this for decades. Follow the money, who is getting rich over this claim?
Make no mistake, the world as we know it will come to an end, but God has told us how, but not when it will come to an end as we know it.
When God decides it is time, nobody or nothing can affect God’s will.
These are the true believers in their religion of secular socialist Consumption, who trust only in their imaginations, not in the real-world empirical creations of God. like overzealous preachers and promoters of an American Armageddon, ruling in fear, totally ignoring the power of Creation and the Creator who designed his people to adapt, and take dominion over earth;
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
These creepy creeping liberals would make man into the image of themselves,,, of a democrat donkey too stupid not to eat off the same grounds where they defecate. They are the creeping things that creep on this earth that WE THE PEOPLE are designed to take dominion over. Do not be deceived by their American offered imaginary ill winds designed by them to rule by their only offerings of fear itself. When in doubt, freeze them out.
Lies and ignorance drive Climate Change catastrophe. The Globalists of the world want control and power over all the people. Big money goes out to climate so called scientists to come up with drastic figures to drive the false hysteria. People must also understand the reasons for this. Power,control and money.. The true evils of modern extreme Marxist beliefs. They can’t stand that individuals having freedom and control of their own lives. They also use brainwashing as has been the case for clime change. Schools even teach children how to fight climate change. Then you throw in the false narrative of demonizing CO2, a most important part of keeping our world green and strong. CO2 is not a toxin as some try to get people to believe. It also dies not heat up the earth but helps plants to survive and grow. Again the evil ones as I call them, basically just want to control you and how you live. Big money and big power is pure evil.
French physicist Joseph Fourier first used the term “greenhouse effect” in 1824.
They epotiomise the “Boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Since the 70’s we have been subjected to the hysteria of gloom and doom which hasn’t even come close to happening still they keep changing the parameters of their prediction, all of it it pretty much based on the same data just twisted in a different direction. They made fake documentaries, convinced an innocent appearing young marxist to wring our hearts, none of which came close to the reality of the climate itself. Isn’t it time for the real scientists who have been muzzled by the ‘settled science’ group to speak out?
Still tons of money to be made by these snake oil salesmen and their followers/believers keep them going. IMO
I have only one thing to say to these CON ARTIST. Unfortunately it’s nasty and not appropriate in this forum. I’ll put it the best way I can. GO HAVE CARNAL KNOWLEDGE WITH YOURSELF. There, said and done.
Don’t you realize … it’s racist to ignore the propaganda???
According to the immoral, woke Democrats it is racists to ignorer or contradict any of their propaganda or destructive agendas.
THese days, what ISN’T seen as racist?
Al Gore is nothing but a con man. He makes millions off of the stupid people. Brain dead fools who don’t know anything about climate. Go look at Al Gore mansions! Would you be surprised. He flys around in a private jet and drives a big car. But your supposed to get a horse or a electric car and not have heat. One day he will get his returns on lying to the American people all for personal gain. Just like John Kerry and his lies.
You mis-spelled the word “experts” in the headline!!! Proper spelling is “con artists”!!!
What does it take to MAKE one an expert? I think failing on every prediction made, would STRIP THEM OF any such title.
What does it take to make one an expert?
For the Left: Political connections and/or common cause….and a white jacket. (Clipboard, if you got one.)
For conservatives: Forget it. No amount of knowledge will get you heard.
Divide the word “expert” used in this article:
Ex or has-been: a person or thing that is no longer effective, successful, popular, etc.
(S)pert: drip under high pressure.
Conclusion: expert is just a has-been drip under high pressure.
This people are in it for the money. I ask you, how does paying to muck up the air save the planet?
The truth be known, it not the past messages hurting the so called experts, it’s that the experts are phony experts making predictions for monetary gain and political gain! If the real experts were to get their message out the real truth would be known!
I studied ecosystems modeling in college in the 70’s when it was in its infancy. I quickly learned that even the simplest ecosystems are so complex that it is impossible to include all the variables into a model. The first thing you do when creating any computer model is to try to figure out what parameters are the main indicators for the system you are trying to model. You make your best guess, then run the model and see how closely your model mimics the real world. If you can use past data, and your results reflect what the system looks like now, you have a decent model and you can start using it to predict future behavior. If your model’s output doesn’t match the real world, you go back and change the model. Yet climate scientists continue to use the same models over and over to try to scare people in to taking actions that will cause much more damage than anything the actual climate ever will.
I use the moniker xbioman because I left Biology and science in general after I found out that the only way to survive in the business is to generate results that reflect what the people funding the research want to see. This is true at so many levels now. How do you think we got a food pyramid that says Fruit Loops are a healthier breakfast than eggs and toast? How is it that so many climate models continue to forecast the complete collapse of the entire Earth’s ecosystem? As others have said, follow the money. Thank God for people like Bjorn Lundberg, and Dr. Roy Spencer at the U of Alabama. At least there are a few sane voices out there.
When you’re running a con job, you have to continually change your B.S. in order to keep the mark hooked. It would seem people would have gotten wise to it by now, but just like phone scams there always some suckers who will fall for them. By the way, I know a Ugandan king who only needs $5,000 to get his throne back and he is willing to pay back double when he does. If you’re interested I have been designated his liaison.
Fools are soon parted with their money.. Proverb unknown author.