This week, while world leaders attempt to dictate regulations to save the world from climate change, seems to be a great time to describe why I proudly label myself as a denier. It's really pretty simple. Mankind, in it's pride, believes that we have the answers. We don't. The best proof is to look back on the predictions made by the prideful and see how they turned out. Remember that in this case, past results are very indicative of future results. Paraphrasing the article referenced above:
I am old enough to remember the chicken little predictions of the 60's and 70's. Back then, global warming wasn't the bogey man. Instead, it was global cooling. Dire global-cooling predictions were hyped and given great credibility by the mainstream media. According to the man-made global-cooling theories of the time, billions of people should be dead by now due to cooling-linked crop failures and starvation.
“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000,” claimed an ecology professor at the University of California in 1970. “This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” Of course, 2000 came and went, and the world did not get 11 degrees colder. No ice age arrived, either.
In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program warned that imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by “man-made global warming” would lead to massive population disruptions. The organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable in terms of producing “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas.
The 2005 their predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” 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. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.
By now, according to their scaremongering report for a 10-year time period, the world should be a post-apocalyptic disaster zone. Among other outlandish scenarios envisioned in the report over the preceding decade: California flooded with inland seas, parts of the Netherlands “unlivable,” polar ice all but gone in the summers, and surging temperatures. Mass increases in hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters were supposed to be wreaking havoc across the globe, too. All of that would supposedly spark resource wars and all sorts of other horrors. But none of it actually happened.
For well over a decade now, climate alarmists have been claiming that snow would soon become a thing of the past. In March 2000, for example, a senior research scientist, working at the time for the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, predicted 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. In 2008, perfectly timed for a “global warming” legislation debate in Parliament, London saw its first October snow since 1934 — or possibly even 1922, according to the U.K. Register. By December of 2009, London saw its heaviest levels of snowfall in two decades. In 2010, the coldest U.K. winter since records began blanketed the islands with snow.
In early 2004, the several self-styled “experts” warned that skiing in Scotland would soon become just a memory, thanks to alleged global warming. “Unfortunately, it’s just getting too hot for the Scottish ski industry,”. Another “expert,” Adam Watson with the Center for Ecology and Hydrology, predicted the skiing industry in Scotland had less than two decades left to go. Yet in 2013, too much snow kept many Scottish resorts closed. “Nevis Range, Ironically, by 2014, the BBC, citing experts, reported that the Scottish hills had more snow than at any point in seven decades. It also reported that the Nevis Range ski resort could not operate some of its lifts because they were “still buried under unprecedented amounts of snow.”
In 1988, a predominate global warming expert was asked by how the “greenhouse effect” would affect the neighborhood outside his window within 20 years (by 2008). “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water,” he claimed. “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 … [since] you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.” In 1986, he then predicted in congressional testimony that the Earth would be some two degrees warmer within 20 years. In recent years, after the anticipated warming failed to materialize, alarmists have cooled on predicting such a dramatic jump in temperature over such a short period of time.
Separately, another prominent alarmist, Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author, 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.” By 1996, he added, 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.” The situation would get so bad that “Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
Perhaps nowhere have the alarmists’ predictions been proven as wrong as at the Earth’s poles. 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.”
Speaking to an audience in Germany five years ago, Gore alleged that “the entire North Polar cap will disappear in five years.” “Five years,” Gore said again, in case anybody missed it the first time, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”
Gore, though, was hardly alone in making the ridiculous and now thoroughly discredited predictions about Arctic ice. Citing climate experts, the British government-funded BBC, for example, also hyped the mass hysteria, running a now-embarrassing article on December 12, 2007, under the headline: “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’.”
The following year, Gore made similar claims at a UN “climate” summit in Copenhagen. “Some of the models … suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.” We did. It wasn't ice free.
Even more embarrassing for the warmists have been trends in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, all of the “climate models” and “climate experts” and “scientists” predicted that rising CO2 emissions would increase global temperatures, which would melt the ice in Antarctica — by far the largest mass of frozen H2O on the planet. Indeed, the forecasts were crucial to many of the other predictions about surging sea levels and related gloom and doom.
The problem for global-warming theorists is that the opposite happened. Indeed, sea ice in Antarctica is off the charts, consistently smashing previous record highs on a near-daily basis. Sea-ice area in the south is now at the highest point since records began — by a lot — and the warmists are searching frantically for an explanation.
In his second-term inaugural address, Obama also made some climate claims, saying: “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.” Ironically, all three of the examples he provided of what he called the “threat of climate change” actually discredit his argument.
As Forbes magazine pointed out last year, the number of wildfires has plummeted 15 percent since 1950, and according the National Academy of Sciences, that trend is likely to continue for decades. On “droughts,” a 2012 study published in the alarmist journal Nature noted that there has been “little change in global drought over the past 60 years.” The UN’s own climate alarmists were even forced to conclude last year that in many regions of the world, “droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter.”
Regarding hurricanes and tornadoes, it probably would have been hard for Obama to choose a worse example to illustrate the alleged threat of man-made warming. Contrary to predictions by global warmists, hurricanes and tornadoes have been hitting in record-setting low numbers. “When the 2014 hurricane season starts it will have been 3,142 days since the last Category 3+ storm made landfall in the U.S., shattering the record for the longest stretch between U.S. intense hurricanes since 1900,” noted professor of environmental studies Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado, who last year left alarmists who had predicted more extreme weather linked to alleged global warming silent after pointing out the facts in a Senate hearing. “The five-year period ending 2013 has seen two hurricane landfalls. That is a record low since 1900.” After adjusting the data for trends such as population growth and better reporting, it appears that 2013 also featured the lowest number of tornadoes in the long-term record.
Why does the gross incompetence of climate change "experts" matter? Because their myth will cost the entire world much of our accumulated wealth and future earnings. If the climate dictators get their way, all goods and services will cost more, much more. The cost of energy will multiply.
No one is opposed to clean, renewable energy. Many are opposed to foisting technology that is neither mature or cost effective on Americans before it becomes economical. Doing so fosters crony capitalism, where government decides which industries and businesses are protected, and which are punished. That is the current Obama energy policy.
Should we change society dramatically to avoid the predictions they climate alarmists make? Well, based on their track record, would you buy a stock based on their tip? Would you bet the American or world economies? I wouldn't.
