https://www.cfact.org/2020/01/18/doomsday-climate-predictions-wrong-then-wrong-now/
Doomsday climate predictions: wrong then, wrong now
How many doomsday predictions about the Earth’s climate must fail before they finally get broadly ignored and dismissed out of hand? Considering the track record of climate predictions that turned out to be false, we are well passed the moment of ridicule.
The latest climate prediction fiasco, about glaciers disappearing in Glacier National Park by 2020, is the latest reminder of the falsity of the man-made global warming movement. It’s 2020; the glaciers remain.
Predictions of climate catastrophe drone on, and get more hysterical, including many from the same people whose credibility was destroyed long ago. Yet, the climate alarmists remain undaunted and impervious to embarrassment. Instead, they simply move the goal posts by predicting more planetary weather Armageddon in the future and proposing more insanely expensive solutions to “address” it (notice they rarely promise to reverse assumed man-made warming).
It is not just actors like Ted Danson or Jane Fonda who make absurd climate predictions, but scientists, government bureaucrats and especially politicians continue this longstanding racket.
In the years leading up to the first “Earth Day” in 1970, there were so many climate predictions that ended up being laughably wrong, it’s hard to pick favorites. Stanford University biologist, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, is perhaps the best known alarmist of that period. He claimed by the late 1970’s there would be massive food shortages leading to starvation of hundreds of millions of people. He wasn’t alone in predicting famine due to the planet’s supposed fragility from over-population. Note: half a century later, the world’s population has more than doubled and the global poverty rate is its lowest in history.
Mr. Danson, who in the 1980’s made his career in the hit television series Cheers, in 1988 predicted ten years hence, the planet’s oceans would be dead, and that mankind would soon follow as a result. In 2007, in a rare occurrence of journalism, he was asked about this prediction, to which he responded it was “hyperbole” as a means to “draw attention to the issue.” Danson went on to claim that 70 percent of the world’s fisheries “are at the point of collapse.” That, too, was nonsensical.
In the climate alarmist world, predictions that turn out false means never having to cease making more of them – and still be taken seriously. Ted Danson keeps right on going, having gotten arrested with Ms. Fonda and other actors while protesting last October in Washington, D.C. for drastic action on climate.
Actors are entertainers, and few of them should be taken seriously on public policy and especially climate science. Politicians, on the other hand, have the power to govern our livelihoods and cost us lots more money with their climate agenda, which makes them dangerous.
Former Vice President Al Gore is probably the best known climate charlatan among the political class in America. Since the 1980’s he has made a litany of predictions that never came to pass, as Climate Depot has documented, including from his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, and his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Mr. Gore is not as ubiquitous as yesteryear, but a new generation of politicians has taken up his mantle, most notably, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gore’s climate zealotry has become dogma in the Democratic Party, particularly among its presidential candidates, who are more hysterical as they double down on a new set of climate predictions – willfully ignorant of their historical folly.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, never ceases to predict an “existential crisis” that looms for the planet. Pete Buttigieg claims the planet will be at the “point of no return” by 2030 if no action is taken. Michael Bloomberg has spent some of his enormous fortune to influence climate policy, including a commitment to put the U.S. coal industry out of business.
Presidential candidate Tom Steyer may be the most obsessed, with his vow to immediately “declare a state of emergency” on climate change. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes that all new buildings in America be “carbon neutral,” to somehow cool the Earth. Even Joe Biden, who long claimed to be a product of working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, has since jettisoned those roots—real or imagined—and recently threw blue-collar energy workers under the bus.
The recent story about the signs being replaced at Glacier National Park that predicted the glaciers would be gone by 2020 is just the latest capstone of decades of climate predictions gone bust. The blizzard of such demonstrable climate falsehoods in the last half century alone have made no impact on so much of the political class that governs our lives, as the doomsday predictions continue.
Author
- CFACT
CFACT, founded in 1985 by Craig Rucker and the late (truly great) David Rothbard, examines the relationship between human freedom, and issues of energy, environment, climate, economics, civil rights and more.