Search
Close this search box.

The ever receding climate goalpost: UN IPCC & Al Gore ’12 years to save the planet’ (again)

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-climate-goalpost-ipcc-and-al-gore-12-years-to-save-the-planet-again/

Ah, it’s beginning to sound like a broken record. The same message over and over again. It’s as if these folks don’t pay attention to history.

The United Nations has once again issued another dire climate change report (SR15, see it here) claiming we must act before it’s too late. Summary here. In the meantime, the audit of faulty climate data suggests the rush to judgment is unwarranted. See our WUWT story: BOMBSHELL: audit of global warming data finds it riddled with errors

The media has dutifully reported this latest round of climate “tipping points.”  The latest UN report has extended the climate deadline by which we must allegedly empower the UN bureaucrats to save the world until 2030 or just 12 more years!

Former Vice President Al Gore has also joined in, piggybacking on the UN for yet another tipping point warming.

Bear in mind, he once before said we have 10 YEARS, back in 2006 with his “An Inconvenient Truth”:

 

Even NASA’s lead global warming advocate, Dr. Gavin Schimidt, has had enough of the UN and media’s climate tipping points.

Schmidt tweeted on October 7: I agree…that framing this report as ‘we only have 10 years to act’ as done by the  Washington Post in their headline is neither correct nor helpful. Making better decisions on emissions is always going to be helpful – whether it’s now, in 5 years or in 20 years.”

CNN reported on October 8: “Governments around the world must take ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, says a stark new report from the global scientific authority on climate change.”

But as the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide® to Climate Change reveals, climate tipping points have a long history of repetition, moved deadlines and utter failure. The book documents that the earliest climate “tipping point” was issued in 1864 by MIT professor who warned of “climatic excess” unless humans changed their ways.

Book excerpt: 


Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from author Marc Morano’s new 2018 best-selling book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. The section below is excerpted from  CHAPTER 13: “The Ever-Receding Tipping Point”:

 

1864 Tipping Point Warns of “Climatic Excess”

“As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’” —MIT professor Leo Marx

The climate change scare campaign has always relied on arbitrary deadlines, dates by which we must act before it’s too late. Global warming advocates have drawn many lines in the sand, claiming that we must act to solve global warming—or else.

“We are running out of time. We have to get an ambitious global agreement,” warned then–UN climate chief Christiana Figueres at the 2014 People’s Climate March. “This is a huge crisis.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Al Gore sought UN climate agreement—immediately. “We have to do it this year. Not next year, this year,” he demanded. “And of course the clock is ticking because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

Gore has warned repeatedly of the coming tipping point. Climate change “can cross a tipping point and suddenly shift into high gear,” the former vice president claimed in 2006.

Laurie David, the producer of Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, said in 2007 that “we have to have action we have
to do something right now to stop global warming.”

Prince Charles has also warned that time is running out. “We should compare the planet under threat of climate change to a sick patient,” urged the heir to the British throne.

“I fear there is not a moment to lose.”

“The clock is ticking. . . . Scientists believe that we have ten years to bring emissions under control to prevent a catastrophe,” reported ABC News.

But these “tipping points” and “last chance” claims now have a long history. The United Nations alone has spent more than a quarter of a century announcing a series of ever-shifting deadlines by which the world must act or face disaster from anthropogenic climate change.

Deadlines Come and Go

Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning
the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.

Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year.

The Last Chance

Michael Mann warned that the 2015 UN Paris summit “is probably the last chance” to address climate change. But the reality is that every UN climate summit is hailed as the last opportunity to stop global warming.

New Lyrics to an Old Tune
Newsweek magazine weighed in with its own tipping point: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find
it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” That warning appeared in an April 28, 1975, article
about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.

Here, courtesy of the great research published at Climate Change Predictions, is a sampling of previous “last chance” deadlines that turned out to be—well—not the last chance after all.

Bonn, 2001: “A Global Warming Treaty’s Last Chance” —Time magazine, July 16, 2001

Montreal, 2005: “Climate campaigner Mark Lynas warned ‘with time running out for the global climate, your meeting in
Montreal represents a last chance for action.’” —Independent, November 28, 2005

Bali, 2007: “World leaders will converge on Bali today for the start of negotiations which experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change.” —New Zealand Herald, December 3, 2007.

Poznan, Poland, 2008: “Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery warned, ‘This round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.’” —Age, December 9, 2008

Copenhagen, 2009: “European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference that it was ‘the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return.’” —Reuters, February 27, 2009

Cancun, 2010: “Jairem Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, sees it as the ‘last chance’ for climate change talks to
succeed.” —Telegraph, November 29, 2010 Durban, 2011: “Durban climate change meeting is “the last chance.” Attended by over 200 countries, this week’s major UN conference has been described by many experts as humanity’s last chance to avert the disastrous effects of climate change.” —UCA News, November 28, 201140

 

“Serially Doomed”
Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott explained. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter. Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).


More at Climate Depot and also The Daily Caller

Share: