Friday, 02 June 2017
Not surprisingly, champions of the Paris accord are warning that U.S. withdrawal will lead to global environmental devastation. Are they correct? In answering this question, it is worthwhile looking at past predictions climate doomsayers have made, and to compare their dire warnings with what has actually happened. This article was originally published in the Jan. 4, 2016 print issue of The New American magazine.
The 1975 Newsweek article entitled "The Cooling World," which claimed Earth's temperature had been plunging for decades due to humanity's activities, opens as follows:
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.
The article quotes dire statistics from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison to indicate how dire the global cooling was, and would be.
Experts suggested grandiose schemes to alleviate the problems, including "melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers," Newsweek reported. It added, "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." Sound familiar - except that the "climate change" alarmists were warning against global cooling?
For decades, climate alarmists have been warning that, without a United Nations-run global "climate" regime to control human activity, alleged man-made "climate change" will bring the wrath of "Mother Earth" down upon humanity.
They did it again from November 30 to December 11, 2015 at the Paris Summit on Climate Change, and warned, yet again, that it is the "last chance" to save humanity from itself. But climate alarmists have a long history of forecasting disaster - and of being wrong about everything.
In fact, stretching back decades, virtually every alarmist prediction that was testable has been proven embarrassingly wrong. What follows is just a tiny sampling of those discredited claims.
A new ice age and worldwide starvation: In the 1960s and '70s, top mainstream media outlets, such as Newsweek above, hyped the imminent global-cooling apocalypse. Even as late as the early 1980s, prominent voices still warned of potential doomsday scenarios owing to man-made cooling, ranging from mass starvation caused by cooling-induced crop failures to another "Ice Age" that would kill most of mankind.
Among the top global-cooling theorists were Obama's current "science czar" John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, the author of Population Bomb, which predicted mass starvation worldwide. In the 1971 textbook Global Ecology, the duo warned that overpopulation and pollution would produce a new ice age, claiming that human activities are "said to be responsible for the present world cooling trend." The pair fingered "jet exhausts" and "man-made changes in the reflectivity of the earth's surface through urbanization, deforestation, and the enlargement of deserts" as potential triggers for his new ice age. They worried that the man-made cooling might produce an "outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap" and "generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history."
Holdren predicted that a billion people would die in "carbon-dioxide induced famines" as part of a new "Ice Age" by the year 2020.
Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford University, similarly claimed in a 1971 speech at the British Institute for Biology, "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people." He added, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 and give ten to one that the life of the average Briton would be of distinctly lower quality than it is today."
To stave off the allegedly impending ecological disasters, the two alarmists demanded the implementation of "solutions." In the book Ecoscience, the duo pushed a "planetary regime" to control resources, as well as forced abortions and sterilization to stop overpopulation, including drugging water and food supplies with sterilizing agents.
Countless other scientists have offered similar cooling warnings. Fortunately, the alarmists were dead wrong, and none of their "solutions" was implemented. Not only did "billions" of people not die from cooling-linked crop failures, but the globe appears to have warmed slightly since then, probably naturally, and agricultural productivity is higher than it ever has been. Now, though, the boogeyman is anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.
Global warming - temperature predictions: Perhaps nowhere has the stunning failure of climate predictions been better illustrated than in the "climate models" used by the UN. The UN climate bureaucracy, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), produces periodic reports on "climate science" - often dubbed the "Bible" of climatology. In its latest iteration, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the UN featured 73 computer models and their predictions. All of them "predicted" varying degrees of increased warming as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased.
The problem is that every single model was wrong - by a lot. Not only did temperatures not rise by as much as the models predicted, they have failed to rise at all since around 1996, according to data collected by five official temperature datasets. Based just on the laws of probability, a monkey rolling the dice would have done far better at predicting future temperatures than the UN's models. That suggests deliberate fraud is likely at work.
Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH), analyzed all 73 UN computer models. "I compared the models with observations in the key area - the tropics - where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases," Christy told CNSNews. "I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear."
Using datasets of temperatures from NASA, the U.K. Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia, NOAA, satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, he found, "All show a lack of warming over the past 17 years." In other words, global warming has been on "pause" for almost two decades - a fact that has been acknowledged even by many of the most zealous UN climate alarmists. "All 73 models' predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world."
No explanation for what happened to the warming - such as "the oceans ate my global warming" - has withstood scrutiny.
Almost laughably, in its latest report, the UN IPCC increased its alleged "confidence" in its theory, an action experts such as Christy could not rationalize. "I am baffled that the confidence increases when the performance of your models is conclusively failing," he said. "I cannot understand that methodology.... It's a very embarrassing result for the climate models used in the IPCC report." "When 73 out of 73 [climate models] miss the point and predict temperatures that are significantly above the real world, they cannot be used as scientific tools, and definitely not for public policy decision-making," he added.
Other warming predictions have also fallen flat. For instance, for almost two decades now, climate alarmists have been claiming that snow would soon become a thing of the past.
The end of snow: The IPCC has also hyped snowless winters. In its 2001 report, it claimed "milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms." Again, though, the climate refused to cooperate. The latest data from Rutgers' Global Snow Lab showed an all-time new record high in autumn snow cover across the northern hemisphere in 2014, when more than 22 million square kilometers were covered.
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