It was only days ago that the socialist U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., claimed that in a few years Miami would disappear because of global warming.
Not likely, says a report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In fact, the think tank has compiled a list of all of foreboding predictions over the past half century of coming global catastrophes.
“Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today,” the report said, but, none have come true.
The CEI pointed out that while the predictions grab media headlines, “the failures are typically not revisited.”
Among the failures:
The Los Angeles Times reported in 1967 that Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich warned it already was too late for the world “to avoid a long period of famine.”
“Most disastrous by 1975,” said the report.
Oops.
Ehrlich, a “population biologist,” had several others. In 1969 he warned that by 1989, “everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam.”
Oops, again.
In 1970, the New York Times reported on a threat from James P. Lodge Jr., a “pollution expert,” who said there would be an ice age by 2000.
Also in 1970, NASA’s S.I. Rasool said that over the next five to 10 years, there would be “such a temperature decrease [that it] could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
Brown University scientists in 1972 wrote to the president that “very soon” there would be “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind.”
They looked at the bottom of the ocean to determine that.
In 1974, the London Guardian warned a new ice age was “coming fast.”
In 1976 was a New York Times book review of a work by Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Schneider warned of insufficient food reserves for the coming famines, claiming to have developed his warning “as responsibly and accurately as he can.”
In 1978, the AP reported there was “no end in sight” for global cooling.
But the Lansing State Journal warned to prepare “for long, hot summers” in 1988.
That year, the Environmental Affairs director for the Maldives, Hussein Shihab, said the island nation would be underwater by 2018.
AP reported in 1989 that Jim Hansen said New York City’s West Side Highway would be underwater this year.
He told an interviewer: “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.”
Al Gore, famed for his wildly inaccurate predictions, said in 2008 that the Arctic would be ice-free during the summer by 2013.
And in 2009, Prince Charles said there were only 96 months to save the world.
Fox News reports those kinds of forecasts continue.
“Earlier this month, leading Democratic presidential candidates held a town hall on the issue and warned about the ‘existential’ threat posed by a changing climate. Before the end of the month, 2020 candidates are expected to have another climate forum at Georgetown University.”
WND long has reported on such failures and admissions about the political and financial agenda behind the activists pushing the idea of global cooling, global warming and climate change.
Gore, for example, once admitted the campaign is “torqued up.”
He was discussing a warning from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that horrible things are ahead for humanity if it continues to use carbon fuels.
PBS host Judy Woodruff noted the panel members were “painting a much more alarming picture of what we face than we had previously known.”
Gore, the vice president under Bill Clinton and a failed Democratic nominee in 2000, said, “The language that the IPCC used in presenting it was torqued up a little bit, appropriately – how [else] do they get the attention of policy-makers around the world?”
Gore has established a long history of unsubstantiated rhetoric about global warming.
When he updated his famed global-warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and illustrated sea water reaching the site of the 9/11 Memorial, as he had predicted, he used footage of Superstorm Sandy.
In that movie, he says: “Ten years ago, when the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ came out, the single most criticized scene was an animated scene showing that the combination of sea-level rise and storm surge would put the ocean water into the 9/11 memorial site, which was then under construction. And people said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What a terrible exaggeration.'”
The movie then shows news footage of Superstorm Sandy water reaching the memorial site.
But Newsbusters pointed out the original prediction “was not about extenuating circumstances of a storm like Sandy slamming into New York or any ‘storm surge’ at all.”
“It was about the sea level rise that would be generated as (he predicted) ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica escalated dramatically.”
Scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which has gathered the signatures of at least 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California-San Diego, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. His son, Noah Robinson, was a key figure in the petition work and has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech.