Wild, Failed Climate Change Predictions That Would Make Chicken Little Cringe
Failed Predictions
“A secret [U.S. Pentagon] report warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world….” — Reported by The Guardian, February 21, 2004
“It could be that the 2016 Games are the last Olympics in the history of mankind. Global warming is getting worse. We have to come up with measures without which Olympic Games could not last long.” — Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, September 30, 2009
“We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.” — French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, May, 2014
“Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources. Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelerates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.” — Reported by The Canadian in 2007
“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots… [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 in his 1990 book “Dead Heat”
“Governments are running out of time to address climate change and to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures, an influential UN panel [IPCC] warned yesterday. Greater energy efficiency, renewable electricity sources and new technology to dump carbon dioxide underground can all help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the experts said. But there could be as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” — Reported by The Guardian, May 4, 2007
“Within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event. … Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” — David Viner, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, 20 March 2000 [Editor’s Note: The reality is just the opposite. There are children seeing snow that wouldn’t have seen it if they were children 20 years ago.]
“With the pace of global warming increasing, some climate change experts predict that the Scottish ski industry will cease to exist within 20 years. The perilous state of finances in the remaining resorts may reduce even that estimate.” — Reported by The Guardian, February 2004 … But in February, 2014, The Guardian reported “As snow conditions have improved in Scotland in recent years, so have the facilities in its ski centres.”
“Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.” — George Monbiot, December 23, 2002
”Winters with strong frost and lots of snow like we had 20 years ago will cease to exist at our latitudes.” — Mojib Latif, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, 1 April 2000 [Editor’s Note: It doesn’t take a meteorologist to know that Latif’s prediction has been way off.]
”Last September 21 [2006], as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is ‘falling off a cliff.’ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years. Seven years from now.” — Al Gore in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech [Editor’s Comment: It has been eight years. The North Polar ice cap isn’t close to gone. In fact, it has rebounded nicely — and as true scientists expected it to — from a typical cyclical low.]
“The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” — Environmentalist Nigel Calder at the first Earth Day Celebration in 1969
“The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” — C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization (late 1960s)
“in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death…. If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” — Professor Paul Ehrlich, 1968
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” — Professor Paul Ehrlich, 1968
“The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.” — 1975 Ads by The Environmental Fund
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald, 1970
“[by 1995] somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” — Senator Gaylord Nelson, quoted in Look Magazine, 1970
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years… If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore College on April 19, 1970
“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life Magazine, January 1970
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — Peter Gunter, 1970, professor at North Texas State University
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born … By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich in the 1969 essay “Eco-Catastrophe!”
Wild Predictions Destined to Fail
“The world can decide in a fit of madness to kill itself. Sometimes progress may not be possible. We’re in a very fraught time. There will be a mass extinction event. That could happen on your watch. The signs are that it will happen and soon…. We may not get to 2030. We need to address the problem of climate change urgently.” — Bob Deldof at the 2013 One Young World Summit
“What’s at risk [in 100 years] if we do not take action, truly is the survival of civilization as we know it… Literally that is the case. We have seen global warming so far of just a little bit less than one degree Celsius and look at what’s happened. Superstorm Sandy. Boulder Colorado. All these fires. Hurricane Irene one year before.” — Al Gore in an interview at the Social Global Summit [Editor’s Comment: Sheer alarmism. None of the events Gore mentions are unique anomalies caused by global warming. Big storms, floods and fire seasons have occurred with regularity since long before mankind appeared on the scene. Interestingly, 2013 is turning out to be one of the least active hurricane seasons on record.]