Friday, June 9, 2017

Global Warming Predictions... How accurate are they?

Source: Politics Alabama

Part 3: Failed Predictions of the Coming Apocalypse
This is part 3 of a 5 part series. You can read the Introduction and Part 2 here.

One thing we get from Global Warming scientists and activists is predictions. They LOVE to tell us what is going to happen… and more than that, they love to paint pictures of all the catastrophes that will occur if we don’t enact [name of favorite law or regulation here].

The problem is, their accuracy stinks. And the more doomsday-ish the scenario, the less likely it is to come true.

Now, I could spend DAYS posting lists of failed predictions… I mean that literally. Failed predictions of wrack and ruin ABOUND, and I hardly have to work to find list after list of them. And I will post some, just to make the point.

In fact, here are a few of the failed predictions made in the cause of “Global Warming” or “Climate Change”.

Most recently, of course, is PresTrump's withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Accord. In response to that, we saw wild, panicky claims that the world will end. Literally. CNN ran with the headline, "Trump to planet: Drop Dead", and the New York Daily News followed suit. Various journalists and magazine editors said we should "blow a kiss goodbye to nature", that we will "all die", that “Trump just committed a crime against humanity”, as well as having “expanded his predatory acts to the entire planet.” None of that is overreaction to a voluntary withdrawal from a non-binding agreement in which we set our own goals and aren't even legally obligated to meet them... right?

In a 1972 speech, author of “The Population Bomb” argued that overpopulation and pollution would have a severe impact on the world:
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” He added, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 and give ten to one that the life of the average Briton would be of distinctly lower quality than it is today.”

The IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is considered by activists one of the most prestigious and accurate of the organizations making these pronouncements, has predicted that “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” (2001), and that the Antarctic ice caps were shrinking and “contributing 0.2 ± 0.35 mm yr - 1 to sea level rise over the period 1993 to 2003” (2007).

And what really happened? Winter snowfall rates are actually up a little, on average. And in a report released October 2016, NASA admitted that that ice across Antarctica has been growing rapidly for decades.
“Rather than melting ice in the southern hemisphere contributing to sea-level rise, as claimed by the UN, ice in Antarctica is expanding, and the growing ice is responsible for reducing sea levels by about 0.23 millimeters annually. According to the NASA study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, satellite data shows the Antarctic ice sheet featured a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 — more than a trillion tons of ice in less than a decade. Between 2003 and 2008, Antarctica gained some 82 billion tons of ice annually.”

Al Gore went even further, claiming in 2007 that, “The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff. It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.” That would be 2013, but satellite pictures from that year show arctic ice volume had actually increased by 50%.

Ooops.

But the failures don’t seem to stop these doomsday predictions from not only being issued, but also being taken seriously by global warming activists and the media. The formula seems to be, parrot any dire claim on the environment, beat us over the head with this “obvious truth”, and then ignore the failure when it doesn’t come true.

On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press ran an article headlined: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” In the piece, the director of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) New York office was quoted as claiming that “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.” He also predicted “coastal flooding and crop failures” that “would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” Of course, 2000 came and went, and none of those things actually happened. But that didn’t stop the warnings.

In 2005, the UNEP warned that imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by AGW would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be producing the most “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas. The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be fleeing those areas. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee,” by 2010, population levels for those regions were still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.

The more dire, the more extreme the prediction, the less likely it is to be true. Much as the climate activists WANT the climate to behave as they wish, the truth is that the climate is much less fragile and sensitive to airborn pollution than most of them think. That’s why the dire, doomsday predictions don’t come true… because the science isn’t settled, and they know less than they want us to believe they do.

I bring to your attention now the old story of the boy who cried wolf. It is a story that “Climate Change” activists and scientists are living right now. Every time they insist the science is settled, that man is driving climate change, and that this will result in [insert favorite disaster scenario here] by [date comfortably in future], we are treated to them crying wolf. This happens over and over and over again, with most or all of the dire predictions failing to materialize.

Remember that, 11 years ago, Al Gore predicted that without “drastic measures” the world would reach a “point of no return” in ten years, saying that it would be a true, planetary emergency. Last time I popped my head out the window, that hadn’t happened… and the “drastic measures” proposed in the US have all been opposed and stopped, to the best of my knowledge. So what went wrong? Al Gore went wrong.

How many times are we content to believe them because they claim the mantle of “science”, especially when we see their track record on accuracy? We are left to wonder why we should pay attention to more self-serving pronouncements of doom that will also fail to come true.

Why, indeed.

Read Part 4 and Part 5 when they are published.

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