I thought I'd analyse the sources for the claims made in the following article:
Embarrassing Predictions Plague the Global-Warming Industry
No particular reason why I picked this article... I found it at random &, heck, it's
shorter than this one.
Alleged prediction
It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.- - Presidential advisor Daniel Moynihan 1969
It appears Moynihan did indeed claim such a thing as it's here in the Nixon library...
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibr ... l10/56.pdf
...of course he did use the word "could" so I suppose we 'could' let it slide.
Note: continuing to read this post
could lead to you spontaneously combusting.
Alleged prediction
Move Where (to escape the cold)? The Brutal Buffalo (NY) winter might be common all over the United States. Climate experts believe the next Ice Age is on its way. According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone expected. - In Search of - “The Coming Ice Age” 1978
Indeed this was claimed
in the Leonard Nimoy narrated documentary.
Alleged prediction
In New York City by 2008 The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. 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. There will be more police cars. Why? Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up... Under the greenhouse effect, extreme weather increases. Depending on where you are in terms of the hydrological cycle, you get more of whatever you’re prone to get. New York can get droughts, the droughts can get more severe and you’ll have signs in restaurants saying “Water by request only.” - James Hansen Grist Magazine June 1988
There are,
nowadays, various competing theories on the
context in which
James Hansen said this or whether he meant
2028 rather than 2008 (no-one denies he made the claim).
Here’s a
2001 Salon article in which the claims are discussed
& promoted.
It should be noted that James Hansen
is alleged to have 'edited' the 1930's to help promote 'global warming'.
Alleged prediction
‘New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now,’ - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sept. 17, 1989
It
appears the claim was made however the source article seems to be a
silly one about fashion predictions.
Alleged prediction
In 1971, another global-cooling alarmist, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich said “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,”
I, naively, assumed this would turn out to be a falsely attributed claim... Nope it’s fully admitted & even features in
his wiki article. The claim is discussed in
this 1971 ‘New Scientist’ magazine.
Alleged prediction
The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010 some 50 million “climate refugees in ”the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, would be frantically fleeing from those regions of the globe. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee,” by 2010, population levels for those regions were actually still soaring.
There appears to be no way to verify this as the report has been memory-holed &
just leads to a load of 404’s.
Certainly however UNEP were claiming at the time that climate refugees existed...
on Vanuatu.
However come 2015 and EVEN the MSM (
& IPCC) show
some (limited) scepticism towards such claims...
IPCC wrote:However it is also likely—in other words there is a 66 per cent to 100 per cent probability—that overall there will be either a decrease or essentially no change in the number of tropical cyclones.
Alleged prediction
On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press ran an article headlined: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” In the piece, the director of the UNEP’s New York office was quoted as claiming that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.
Sigh... This incredible claim (made by a Noel Brown) is still
in the AP archives.
I think we 'could' call it utter bullshit.
Alleged prediction
In its final 2007 report, widely considered the “gospel” of “settled” climate “science,” the UN IPCC suggested that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 or sooner. It turns out the wild assertion was lifted from World Wildlife Fund propaganda literature. The IPCC recanted the claim after initially defending it.
Hmmm we have a "could" again... certainly the claim
was made & then retracted.
However it far predates WWF propaganda. Here’s a
1999 ‘New Scientist’ promo featuring the prediction.
Alleged prediction
March 2000, for example, “senior research scientist” David Viner, working at the time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, told the U.K. Independent that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he was quoted as claiming in the article, headlined “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The very next year, snowfall across the United Kingdom increased by more than 50 percent. By December of 2009, London saw its heaviest levels of snowfall in two decades. In 2010, the coldest U.K. winter since records began a century ago blanketed the islands with snow.
Geez... Yes he apparently did say that UK children “just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
The actual link to this story has been memory-holed however, and as is often the case, wayback machine
provides an invaluable service for media skeptics.
Alleged prediction
In early 2004, the CRU’s Viner and other self-styled “experts” warned that skiing in Scotland would soon become just a memory, thanks to alleged global warming. Yet in 2013, too much snow kept many Scottish resorts closed. By 2014, the BBC, citing experts, reported that the Scottish hills had more snow than at any point in seven decades.
This appears to be not
entirely accurate.
The
alarmist propaganda piece actually states...
With the pace of global warming increasing, some climate change experts predict that the Scottish ski industry will cease to exist within 20 years.
Who those “some climate change ‘experts’” were was left to the readers imaginations.
Alleged prediction
White House Science “Czar” John Holdren. “A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern we can expect to see with increasing frequency, as global warming continues,” he claimed. Holdren warned decades ago that human CO2 emissions would lead to a billion deaths due to global warming-fueled global cooling — yes, cooling, which he said would lead to a new ice age by 2020.
Again there appears to be some debate for whether or not he claimed such a thing. Some
say he didn’t, some
say he did.
Certainly though there is no doubt that
Paul R. Ehrlich repeatedly made such claims* in books
that Holdren co-wrote.
*
Warning the above is a needlessly long if vaguely interesting article. I would summarize it as...
"Doomsayers repeatedly shown to be wrong & then they lose a bet with an economist. Doomsayers still affirm that they’re correct & that we’re all still doomed"
Alleged prediction
Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer, made some dramatic predictions in 1990 while working as “chief scientist” for the Environmental Defense Fund. By 1995, he said then, the “greenhouse effect” would be “desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots.”
There
appears to be no doubt he made these predictions in his 1990 magnum opus “Dead Heat” & was apparently interviewed by FOX news regarding them... Oppenheimer remained unrepentant.
[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Oppenheimer told FoxNews.com that he was trying to illustrate one possible outcome of failing to curb emissions, not making a specific prediction. He added that the gist of his story had in fact come true, even if the events had not occurred in the U.S.
"On the whole I would stand by these predictions -- not predictions, sorry, scenarios -- as having at least in a general way actually come true," he said. "There's been extensive drought, devastating drought, in significant parts of the world. The fraction of the world that's in drought has increased over that period."
This 'Dead Heat' horror novel must be an awesome read. It even managed to attract
some limp-wristed academic ‘criticism’ at the time of its release...
STEPHEN JAY GOULD wrote: Michael Oppenheimer and Robert Boyle's ''Dead Heat'' (on global warming) does not insulate itself sufficiently from the heat of the hype surrounding the subject
Geez... don't pull your punches Steve.
Myself I prefer the
modern day Amazon reviews...
This one time bible of the activist AGW movement quickly earned a place in the dust bin of useless information.
As a scientific source, this book's predictions for the future (now the past) are simply incorrect. However, for those who like earth science-fiction, this work has humorous entertainment value. The authors use an abundance of emotional, dire sounding adjectives which makes the reading even more enjoyable. Similar to the black & white science fiction movies made during the atomic scares of the 1950's, this book will provide some black and white evidence about the hysteria that substitutes for scientific method. In fact, the experience is very much like watching a B-grade horror movie with poorly constructed giant spiders or ray-gun equipped, maniac robots made from trash can lids. If you understand what real science is about and need a good laugh, the predictions (and the explanations used to back them up) are really worth reading. Just don't use this book as a source for your science class, research paper.
Alleged prediction
In 2007, 2008, and 2009, Al Gore, the high priest for a movement described by critics as the “climate cult,” publicly warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” in the summer by around 2013 because of alleged “man-made global warming.” Gore said during some of the summer months, Arctic ice could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.” Yes, we have found out. Contrary to the predictions by Gore and fellow alarmists, satellite data showed that Arctic ice volume as of summer of 2013 had actually expanded more than 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October 2013, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979.
There's
no doubt he said such things however he seems to use
so many qualifiers one wonders if it even counts as a ‘prediction’.
Here’s a
BBC story from 2007 about the possible ‘Ice free’ summers by 2013
It should be noted that ‘Ice free’ does not mean
what one would imagine so even those scientists are not claiming our
current ice age is about to end.
So all in all it appears true that the political & (allegedly) scientific establishments have made a number of absurd doomsday predictions over the years. These have, unsurprisingly, not panned out but the doom-sayers almost universally remain unrepentant & in most cases seem to claim their predictions were
mostly accurate.
It's an interesting conundrum the nutwork faces here... on the one hand climate, by it's very nature, is a long term process.
On the other hand few are going to agree to a massive increase in taxes & Government control over their lives to "Stop the sun dying!"
"We only have five billion years* to act!"
"Will nobody think of the children!"
So it appears to be a tactical agreement that dire, near-term, catastrophic predictions will be made even though most scientists surely know they're complete bullshit. These predictions help drive home the 'need for change' & therefore are probably seen as being 'for the greater good'.
When people point out that those predictions have failed to occur then the doom-sayers merely 'kick the can down the road' or just make entirely new predictions.
Rinse & repeat.
Looking at all this one wonders about the modern day predictions we see being pushed by our media.
Are
Saltwater crocodiles really in danger?
Will
Malaria really spread**?
Will
we have lakes in the future?
Will
humanity survive?
How many
hundreds of millions of children will really die?
* As per current models
** And if it does will that be due to Climate change...
Malaria used to be a big deal in the Netherlands