Ten years ago, Rush Limbaugh started a countdown clock after Al Gore reportedly claimed there were only 10 years left to save the world from the ravages of global warming.
Actor and activist Larry David was quoted as saying, “You know, Al is a funny guy, but he’s also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.”
For 10 years, the Al Gore “Armageddon” clock counted down at Rush Limbaugh’s website, heading toward its expiration at midnight Tuesday.
And it looks like civilization still is here.
“Well, here we are and nothing’s changed,” scoffed Limbaugh on Tuesday’s program. “It isn’t any hotter than it was.”
Limbaugh said he’s still working on what he and his team will do when the clock officially hits zero as they hadn’t thought about it until this week.
“What do we do when the thing hits zero?” he joked. “We started this 10 years ago, who thinks 10 years down the road, other than we knew that Gore was full of it and that whatever he was saying wasn’t gonna happen, wasn’t gonna be true.”
Marc Fitch, author of “Shmexperts: How Ideology and Power Politics Are Disguised As Science,” says even the collapse of these kinds of doomsday predictions won’t do anything to discredit radical environmentalism among the faithful believers of global warming any time soon.
“The unfortunate truth of the matter is that environmentalists will only lose credibility with those who are already skeptical of the global warming movement,” Fitch told WND. “I think time will ultimately make the difference. The global warming movement in general seems to be grasping at any and everything these days to make their case, but the more they try to tie everything (ISIS, immigration, disease, war) to global warming, the more it just falls on deaf ears.”
Average temperature has remained steady for 15 years and some climate scientists suggest the Earth is on the verge of another ice age. Yet Fitch observed environmentalists keep deploying hysterical rhetoric to win over Americans to their cause.
“One of the problems with the environmental movement is that no good news is ever good news,” said Fitch. “The fact that the polar ice caps haven’t melted is seen as a reason to fight harder for their cause rather than give pause for consideration. One would figure that their dire predictions not materializing would be seen as a ray of hope, but instead activists see it as just further reason to preach doom and gloom.”
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The bad-news-is-great-for-the-agenda strategy doesn’t seem to be working. A recent poll suggested Americans are relatively unconcerned about climate change, compared to the rest of the developed world.
Part of the problem for radical environmentalists, Fitch suggested, is their grim predictions don’t match up with the facts on the ground.
“There is always an explanation for why their models haven’t been correct or their dire predictions haven’t materialized,” he said. “In fact, there are usually many explanations. We’ve seen coal usage simultaneously cited as the cause of global warming and the reason that the Earth hasn’t warmed enough. With such a massively complex system like the climate, nearly any explanation can be made; it’s like playing connect the dots with the stars in the sky, there are probably millions of different lines of reasoning that can be drawn to make whatever picture you like.”
Limbaugh also mocked the inability of global warming activists to predict the future.
“They’re having to make excuses for the heat that never happened by claiming the ocean ate it,” he laughed. “Oh, yeah, the ocean ate the heat. It’s way down there at 700 feet below the surface. Well, 700 meters. So that would be almost a half a mile down there. That’s where all the heat is, and it’s gonna come bubbling up there. It’s gonna heat the saltwater, and the heat that the oceans ate is gonna heat up the saltwater, the saltwater is gonna flood and that’s how we’re gonna get the rising sea. This was in all of the pro-global warming, climate change analysis of last week.”
Unfortunately, Fitch said the global warming hysteria will continue for the foreseeable future, regardless of the facts, and skeptics may not live to see themselves vindicated.
“The public may grow even less concerned than they are now and politicians may eventually start to shy away from the global warming panic, but global warming activists do have time on their side,” he said.
“We know that the climate changes because it has done so in the past. We also know that it changes slowly but it does, sooner or later, shift. When that happens – whether we go into another ice age or become like the surface of Venus – some small cadre of activists will still be standing there with a sign saying that it is because of Big Oil.
“It’s like the sidewalk preacher who constantly warns, ‘The end is near.’ He doesn’t have to be right tomorrow, just right eventually. That’s the biggest asset that the activists have; they are warning about things 200 years in the future. Whether they are right or wrong doesn’t matter here and now and so they never have to admit to being wrong, just being a bit early in their predictions.”