By John Eidson
As reported by Fox News, a 2015 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change compared 117 computer model projections during the 1990s with the amount of warming that actually occurred. Of the 117 projections, only three were roughly accurate. On average, the computer models predicted twice as much warming as that which actually occurred. The projections wildly overestimated global warming, so much so that it’s hard not to suspect that something fishy may have been behind the lopsided results.
Amid a relentless drumbeat of global warming hysteria dating to the early 1980s, NASA data showed that the period Feb. 2016 – Feb. 2018 was the greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years. So at least for that two-year period, apocalyptic forecasts of climate doom weren’t just wide of the plate; they weren’t even in the ball park.
Another indication that global warming forecasts have been embarrassingly off base was reported in the UK Express, which ran a story in 2018 with the headline “Climate change is ‘not as bad as we thought’ say scientists,” followed by the subheadline “Climate change is likely to be markedly less severe than forecast, study claims.”
For four decades and running, a virtually endless trail of horrifying predictions of imminent climate collapse has been trumpeted by an unquestioning western media. But despite the alarm bells, not one of those Chicken Little predictions has been on target, which brings me to the dire prediction described below.
“Risk of megadrought in southwestern U.S. could exceed 99%”
In 2015, California and much of the southwestern U.S. was in the final stage of a severe four-year drought. The same year, a terrifying study published in Science Advances forecast that man-caused climate change is making a catastrophic megadrought in the region a virtual certainty before the end of the century.
According to the study’s authors, the risk of a megadrought could exceed 99 percent. “This will be worse than anything seen during the last 2,000 years and would pose unprecedented challenges to water resources in the region,” said Toby Ault, a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University and one of the authors of the study. He continued, “As we add greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—and we haven’t put the brakes on stopping this—we are weighting the dice for megadrought conditions.”
I have a question for Professor Ault. But first, here’s an inconvenient piece of climate history which those who incite fear about droughts hope and pray voters will never discover:
Studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence have documented multiple extreme droughts in the southwestern U.S. over the last 1,000+ years, including several which lasted more than twenty years—that’s FIVE TIMES longer than the relatively puny 4-year drought that hit California and other parts of the Desert Southwest in 2012-15.
Twenty years is a long time, but some past droughts in what is now the southwestern U.S. lasted even longer. Much longer.
One that began in the year 850 AD crawled on for a mind-boggling 240 years, and that megadrought occurred more than a thousand years before the climate fear industry dreamed up the man-made global warming theory in the early 1980s. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the drought of 850 was so severe that it led to the demise of an entire civilization—the Mayan Empire. And that drought wasn’t alone. Fifty years before it began, another megadrought, one which lasted 180 years, was just winding down.
With that bit of climate history in mind, here’s my question for Professor Ault: What caused those megadroughts?
The professor and his co-authors know the answer, but don’t want you to know. They certainly can’t blame megadroughts of the last 1,000 years on the Industrial Revolution, which didn’t begin in earnest until the 1800s, a full millennium after those severe droughts wreaked havoc on what is now the southwestern U.S. and parts of what is now Mexico. Since they can’t scapegoat man’s use of fossil fuels for having caused those ancient environmental calamities, how do they and their allies in the climate fear industry hope to frighten you with the specter of an “unprecedented” megadrought that could be “99% certain”? They pray you will never learn about Earth’s climate history, that’s how.
Earth’s climate history is no friend of global warming fearmongers
Absent historical context, extreme weather can be overhyped in ways that lead the uninformed to conclude that unpleasant things like severe droughts never happened before humans began using fossil fuels. In fact, extreme climate events have occurred with monotonous regularity for a long, long time.
According to the Nature Education Knowledge Project, Earth has had a climate going all the way back to the Archean Eon, from 3.9 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. Only God knows how many megadroughts occurred over that time. But whatever the number, it has to be off the chart. When the next one arrives—and one most certainly will—Professor Ault will have been right about one thing: its cause will be Earth’s ever-changing climate, the same vexing culprit which caused the megadrought of 850 AD and 100% of the multitude of other seemingly endless droughts which have plagued the planet since time immemorial. Professor Ault’s prediction that greenhouse gases will be to blame for the next one is speculation based on what likely will be yet another in a long line of dire “studies” that left egg on the face of its authors.
In my Canada Free Press article “Green is the new Red,’ I explain why I believe beyond a shadow of doubt that global warming alarmism is the most brazen scientific hoax the world has ever seen.
A 1968 electrical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and now retired, John Eidson is a freelance writer in Atlanta, and a regular contributor to The Blue State Conservative.