10 Failed Global Warming Predictions That You Need To Know About
Prediction #1: Global cooling is the real problem
When the environmentalist movement began in earnest back in the 1970s, climate change was still a core tenet of true believers. Unlike now, however, they were more concerned about an ice age than a planet that was too hot.
Prediction #2: If global warming isn’t reversed by the year 2000, it will be too late to avert catastrophe
That was the 1989 prediction by Noel Brown, an environmentalist apparatchik at the U.N. — that global body that has brought us so much rubbish when it comes to failed global warming predictions.
Prediction #3: We’ll be living in Antarctica pretty soon
Ten years ago, a group called Forum for the Future predicted that we would be living in a world so dire that we would actually have to move to Antarctica as “climate refugees.”
The 2008 study produced what the U.K. Telegraph very charitably called “a radical set of ‘possible futures,'” among them that the first climate refugees would begin flooding our planet’s icy, southernmost when temperatures made everywhere else too hot to live.
Prediction #4: Great Britain will be almost snow-less thanks to global warming
Back in 2000, climate scientist David Viner had a very dire prediction for those living in England: Snow was going to become almost extinct there.
In a viral interview with the U.K. Independent, Viner said that snow on the isles was going to be “a very rare and exciting event.”
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Viner said. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time.”
Prediction #5: Snow is going to be a thing of the past in other places, too
It wasn’t just the United Kingdom. A 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that “(m)ilder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” but increase the number of ice storms.
Prediction #6: We only have 50 days to save the world from global warming
During the negotiations for the Copenhagen agreement in 2009, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that if they didn’t solve the “impasse” they found themselves in within 50 days, the world was pretty much doomed.
“If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice,” Brown said. “So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.”
Prediction #7: Prince Charles says we only have 96 months to save the world
I’m not entirely sure when the moldering heir of the House of Windsor became a climate scientist, but nearly 10 years ago, Prince Charles warned us all “that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world,” the U.K. Independent reported at the time.
“We face the dual challenges of a worldview and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis — including that of climate change — which threatens to engulf us all,” Prince Charles said, without revealing how he had “calculated” we only had 96 months left to save the world.
Prediction #8: The Earth will warm by 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2025-2050
Back in 1988, as the global warming “consensus” began to grow, New York Times environmentalism reporter Philip Shabecoff wrote a piece of alarmism based on the work of the aforementioned James Hansen, fresh from his congressional testimony.
“If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections,” Shabecoff wrote. “The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”
Prediction #9: Most species on the Earth will perish by 1995
Back in 1970, around the time of the first Earth Day, Democrat Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote an article for Look Magazine. In it, he repeated one of the most preposterous claims in the whole climate change/pollution movement: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Prediction #10: Pretty much everything in “An Inconvenient Truth”
Yes, the movie that popularized the “hockey stick” graph regarding carbon emissions turns 12 this year, and it’s not exactly looking too prescient, as Michael Bastasch noted two years ago in The Daily Caller.
“One of the first glaring claims Gore makes is about Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He claims Africa’s tallest peak will be snow-free ‘within the decade,'” Bastasch wrote. “Gore shows slides of Kilimanjaro’s peak in the 1970s versus today to conclude the snow is disappearing.