Thirty years have gone by since the “opening salvo” in the movement claiming mankind is causing catastrophic global warming, and the dire predictions of drastic temperature and sea-level rises “are well on their way to being falsified – and by a lot, not a little,” contends an energy expert.
Rob Bradley Jr., the CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research, pointed out claims made by NASA climate scientist James Hansen and Al Gore along with the “opening salvo,” the June 24, 1988, prediction by Philip Shabecoff in a New York Times article titled “Global Warming Has Begun.”
Shabecoff wrote that 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 [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050.” He also predicted a consequent rise in sea levels of “one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”
Bradley, who has testified before the U.S. Congress as one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and regulation of energy markets, argued that the mid-point of Shabecoff’s predicted warming would be six degrees.
“At the thirty-year mark, how is it looking?” Bradley asked. “The increase is about one degree – and largely holding (the much-discussed ‘pause’ or ‘warming hiatus’).”
He also pointed out that the world has naturally warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, which is “a good thing if climate economists are to be believed.”
Regarding sea-level rise, Bradley wrote, “the exaggeration appears greater.”
“Both before and after the 1980s, decadal sea-level rise has been a few inches. And it has not been appreciably accelerating,” he noted.
Shabecoff was reporting a model based on the predictions of Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer.
Bradley wrote that the predictions “constitute yet another exaggerated Malthusian scare, joining those of the population bomb (Paul Ehrlich), resource exhaustion (Club of Rome), Peak Oil (M. King Hubbert), and global cooling (John Holdren).”
He said the “sky-is-falling pitch went from bad to worse when scientist James Hansen was joined by politician Al Gore.”
Gore’s claim in his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” of a 20-foot rise in the sea level, Bradley noted, has brought rebuke even from those sympathetic to the climate cause.
Gore prophesied in his movie and companion book that unless the world dramatically reduced greenhouse gasses, mankind would hit a “point of no return.”
Hansen, in his review of Gore’s work, stated: “We have at most ten years – not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”
While time is clearly up on Gore’s “point of no return” and Hansen’s “critical tipping point,” neither has owned up to their predictions, Bradley noted.
He also recalled Rajendra Pachauri, then head of the United Nations climate panel, pleading that without drastic action before 2012, it would be too late to save the planet.
In the same year, Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, predicted “global disaster” from the demise of Arctic Sea ice in four years.
“He too, has gone quiet,” Bradley writes.
What’s more, in the late 1980s, the U.N. claimed that if global warming were not checked by 2000, rising sea levels would wash entire countries away.
Bradley also found “some levity in the charade.”
In 2009, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted mankind had only 50 days to save the planet from global warming.
Bradley noted that the Democratic Party platform heading into the 2016 election compared the fight against global warming to World War II, with Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warning that “a vote for Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe.”
Renewable energy researcher John Abraham contended Trump’s election means we’ve “missed our last off-ramp on the road to catastrophic climate change.”
