Anthropogenic Global Warming - Failed Predictions
Posted by Dr. David L.
Heald, October 13, 2017
One of the most entertaining aspects to the AGW
alarmists is their seemingly never-ending cascade of outlandish,
doomsday predictions that fall by the wayside, unfulfilled, as the “due
dates” repeatedly come and go with nothing happening.
One could reasonably ask why do they keep doing this, as any
vestige of credibility continually vanishes into the ether?
It would seem obvious that they must be aware their flawed
predictions have no chance of being proven accurate.
So, why??? It seems
inescapable that the goal is only the short-term shock value, trying to
induce people into responding emotionally to an imaginary impending
crisis, and hoping that they will forget in the future.
Consider first some of the earliest climate
predictions, beginning with a quote from Kesten Green and J. Scott
Armstrong in Chapter 12, p. 171 of “Climate Change – The Facts”:
“History is replete with experts making confident
forecasts. The record also
shows that the accuracy of such forecasts has been poor.
Consider, for example, Professor Kenneth Watt’s forecast of a new
Ice Age in his 1970 Earth Day speech at Swarthmore College:
‘The world has been chilling sharply for about
twenty years. IF present
trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the
global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year
2000. This is about twice
what it would take to put us into an ice age.’
Watt is not unusual among experts in making
confident forecasts that turn out to be wrong.”
Even his initial comment about the world having
cooled “sharply for about 20
years”, is wrong. From 1950
to 1970 the temperature actually increased by about 0.2oC.
(But to his credit, the temperature actually had cooled by 0.2oC
by 1970, if compared to 1945.)
However his prediction of the temperature cooling by “4 degrees”
(we assume he meant degrees Fahrenheit, which would be a little over 2oC)
from 1970 to 1990 was completely wrong, as the temperature actually
increased by about 0.15oC.
He predicted 11o cooler (again assumed to be
Fahrenheit, or about 6oC) by 2000, but there was again an
increase of about 0.25oC.
Data numbers are from HadCRUT3, Monthly Global Temperature:
Global monthly average surface air temperature since
1850 according to Hadley CRUT, a cooperative effort between the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and
the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), UK. The blue line represents the monthly values.
An introduction to the dataset has been published by Brohan et al. (2005).
Base period: 1961-1990. Last month shown: December 2010. Last diagram
update: 3 January 2011.
Kenneth Watt did say “IF” as his escape route, but he was
still very wrong.
Other similar predictions:
Also on the occasion of the first Earth Day in
1970, Harvard biologist George Wald assured us that civilization will
end "within 15 or 30 years“.
That would be between 1985 and 2000.
Ooops!
Former Obama science adviser John Holdren wrote in
a global ecology textbook in 1971 that 1 billion will die of famines by
2020 due to a "new ice age.“
This doesn’t seem likely to be true at this point – as of October, 2017.
Senator Gaylord Nelson predicted in 1970 that
within 25 years, between 75% and 80% of all animals will be extinct,
presumably as a consequence of the “coming Ice Age”.
https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/04/17/environmentalists-are-dead-wrong
As of 1995, 15 species were declared to have become extinct since 1970,
most due to loss of habitat.
A far cry from 75 – 80%.
(New species have evolved since 1970, but we don’t have a count at this
time.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions_in_the_Holocene
When the cooling trend of the 1950s and 1960’s
ended, predictions suddenly reversed to global warming, but these
reversed predictions have turned out to be equally outlandish, and
wrong. One such:
“In 2008 ABC
predicted that New York City would be underwater by 2015.”
Still waiting!!
We should revisit occasionally what the proper role of government is. As the constitution was a good sense of direction, we need a core set of principles to add in order to deal with the future.
So many want to engineer society, remove risk, assist certain groups, rather than let individuals thrive and raise communities. Why?
Is Democracy where we all "get it good and hard" or is it the best means to a free society?
Should we roll with the special interests, or make the government achieve its proper role, what is that role, and how to do this?
When do deficits and governments become too large?
Government is becoming more elitist while trying to sell corrections to problems it created, what makes this possible?
This could also be inserted into the field above, or erased
Currently as a society, we are having a most difficult time discussing political issues. What is driving this? And why a rebirth in political culture would be a good thing.
Are "markets" dead as some would conjecture? Or is free enterprise what got us here?
At the heart of economics there are several possible economic schools of thought, the essence of these schools of thought and how they relate to our lives.
