Science Fraud and Bogos Experts

Global cooling, global warming, climate change, have all been predicted with various levels of alarm for 50 years.  When global temperatures stopped dropping and began to rise the alarmists switched scenarios.  The one thing they didn’t change was the assumption that industrial civilization must somehow be destroying the whole planet.

If you are old enough you may recall that Newsweek, Time, Life, National Geographic all predicted that global cooling would kill billions.  University of California professor Kenneth Watt predicted a new Ice Age as the earth cooled by 11 degrees by the year 2000. What caused this prediction?  Simple, the temperature record showed global temperatures generally declining from about 1940 to 1970.  

In 1971 Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”  This did not come to pass, and today the predictions are exactly reversed.

Today he’s warning that Global Warming will lead to cannibalism.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicted that, by 2010, 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. In 1989, the AP reported that “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” The UNEP predicted “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”  It’s now 2018.

The Pentagon got in on the act, in 2003 predicting that in 10 years (2013) California would be flooded with inland seas, parts of the Netherlands “unlivable,” polar ice all but gone in the summers, and surging temperatures would result in resource wars and all sorts of other horrors. The Pentagon report claimed there was “general agreement in the scientific community” that the scenarios would come to pass.

James Hansen headed NASA’s Goddard and is one of the best known “climatologists” in the world.  In 1988 he predicted – among other things - that NY City’s West Side Highway would be under water, tape would cover the city’s windows because of high winds and crime would rise because of the heat.  In 1986, Hansen also predicted in congressional testimony that the Earth would be some two degrees warmer within 20 years.  It’s not.

Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer, in 1990 predicted that within 5 years the heartlands of North America would be desolated by drought, the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry and Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.  Perhaps Mexico should build a wall.

Al Gore, the BBC and the UN all predicted that the North and South poles would be ice free before now.   They’re not.  

Predictions of man-cause disaster are not exclusively related to climate.  

There’s the Population Bomb.  When environmentalists said that we were destroying the Earth, they meant it directly and literally. The biggest problem was the very existence of humans, the fact that there were just too darned many of us. We were going to keep growing unchecked, and we were going to swarm the surface of the Earth like locusts, destroying everything in our path until we eventually used it all up.

There were going to be an inconceivable seven billion people on Earth by the year 2000, and there was just no way we could support them all.  It took us a bit longer, until 2012, to reach a global population of seven billion—who are better off than the population of Earth has ever been.

Mass starvation.  Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness predcited that 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.  On reality, obesity has created a shortage of men and women fit enough to join the military.

Resource depletion.  Not only were we going to run out of food, we’re supposed to run out of pretty much everything else such as nickel and copper, and above all we were running out of oil.  Remember “Peak Oil?”  

Here’s our friend Kenneth Watt again, with his present trends continuing: “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.'”  Watt also got the demise of gas station attendants wrong.  

 Everyone knows the sad story of Cassandra, the woman given the gift of true prophecy by the gods and simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her. The Global Warmer/Changers/End of the Worlders problem, up to now, is like that but reversed. Always off, but generously credited. I think that string has run out. They can play Wagner and whistle the Ride of the Valkyries all they want from here on. People are tired of that music, and sick of the band.

References to Federalist and New American