Climate Alarmism: Five Decades of False Predictions
We should all be burning to death in the sun
Climate hysteria has become more extreme lately and is moving further and further away from reality, although it is nothing new. By the 1960s and 1970s, advocates of catastrophism had already warned us: we have only a few decades, or even a few years to live, they said at the time. As for the Arctic ice, the countdown stops at midnight.
Unsurprisingly, none of those predictions came true. So here’s the story of one of the most aggressive and deceptive propaganda campaigns of all time.
We Are Doomed
A headline from the Daily Mail, June 29, 2017: “2020 is the deadline to avert climate catastrophe, experts claim in chilling commentary.” Too late, because The Observer had already alerted the world on January 17, 2009: “[The U.S.] President Has 4 Years to Save Earth.”
But even then, The Observer hadn’t been quick enough on the trigger. According to eminent scholars, we were all doomed to disappear in the 1970s. This was at least what one of those “experts” of the environment, Paul Ehrlich, had predicted in October 1970: the oceans, he had said, would be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.
Lake Erie dead? Yes, it was, during the winter of 2021 when 80% of its surface froze due not to global warming, though, but to a cold snap. Neither Lake Erie nor the oceans have succumbed to the increasing pressure of climate change in recent years. The same Paul Ehrlich had added that America would be subject to a “food and water rationing by 1974.” Forty-seven years later, the U.S. government has yet to report one case of an individual who is subject to food and water rationing.
Also in 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson, often considered “the father of Earth Day”, had quoted the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who “believe[d] that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Obviously, no such thing has happened.
In 1982, the director of the United Nations Environment Program, Mostafa Tolba, informed us that by “the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.” We’re still waiting for that catastrophe.
Then there was this other guru, Jim Hansen. To a reporter who had asked him, in 1988, how he foresaw New York’s environmental future 20 years later: “The West Side Highway [that runs along the Hudson River] will be underwater”, he had stated. “And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.”
In 2021, the West Side Highway isn’t resting underwater and not a single New Yorker has used duct tape to shut the windows. In June 2018, Radio-Canada praised Hansen and his predictions in one of its many complacent reports.
Sea-Level Rise and… Say Goodbye to the Snow
At the end of the 1980s, a few more experts turned their attention to sea level. This can be seen in this 1988 AFP article: “A gradual rise in mean sea level threatens to completely cover [the Maldives] in the next 30 years.” Today, none of the 1,196 small islands forming the Maldives in the Indian Ocean have yet been submerged.
In 1989, it was the turn of the director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program, Noel Brown, to say that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth because of rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. But as you already know, not a single nation has been wiped off the face of the Earth so far.
In 1995, the UN did it again by announcing this time that most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. Fortunately, they’re still there in 2022.
For those who love snow, it was not the time to celebrate in March 2000 when The Independent headlined: “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past”. The same newspaper, in May 2004: “Why Antarctica Will Soon Be the Only Place to Live, Literally”. The current population of this frozen continent is 1,500 inhabitants, depending on the period.
Al Gore, the Environmental Clown
We cannot talk about climate catastrophe without mentioning Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary on that issue, had won him numerous awards although it had been the subject of mockery for its many fraudulent aspects.
While promoting his famous documentary in 2006, Gore had argued that humanity had only 10 years left before it reached a point of no return. During the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, in December 2009, our man had suggested that the Arctic Ocean could be almost free of ice during summers as early as 2014. A year earlier, he had stated that the North Pole’s ice cap would have disappeared in 2013.
Of course, all those predictions turned out to be false.
How About an Ice Age?
While experts raised the specter of global warming as early as the 1970s, others told us that an ice age was impending. And we should already feel its preludes: in 1971, S. Ichtiaque Rasool, formerly of NASA, predicted its arrival between 2021 and 2031. Three years later, The Guardian headlined: “Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast”.
On January 5, 1978, The New York Times (NYT) quoted an international team of specialists who said they had found « no end in sight to 30-year cooling trend in the northern hemisphere.” British science writer Nigel Calder was just as concerned as the NYT: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind”, Calder warned in 1975 in the International Wildlife magazine.
Kenneth Watt, of the University of California, told us around the same time that “present trends would make the world eleven degrees colder in the year 2000”, which is “about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Then on February 21, 2004, The Guardian came back with another disaster: Britain will be plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020, it alerted.
Most recently, climatologist Willie Soon urged his fellow academics to pay more attention to the Sun’s activity, arguing that several decades of global cooling lay ahead.
Sources
AFP, Associated Press, BBC, Breitbart News, Fox News, Radio-Canada, Salon, Star Beacon, The Daily Mail, The Financial Post, Twitter #1, #2, #3, USA Today, YouTube
