Turn on your television and whether you’ll be watching news reports, talk shows, late night “comedies”, or travel shows, chances are you’ll hear climate change / global warming mentioned. That is, because the planetary situation is serious, we are told that climate change is so bad, it is an existential threat.
What the public doesn’t know is that climate scientists and the media have been making doomsday climate predictions for over a century. This is a simple scare tactic, designed to keep the public in a state of fear. Of all the manufactured crises and hoaxes, perpetrated on humanity, climate apocalypse is the most enduring.
The usual arguments for global warming, used to reinforce the prevailing narrative – “97% of scientists agree..”, “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” and so on – will be discussed in other posts, this article presents a historical overview of failed climate predictions, conveniently omitted from public discourse.
From the late 19th Century to the 1920’s, the threat to man’s existence was purported to be global cooling, the next ice age.
- “Geologists think the world may be frozen up again.” – New York Times, February 24th, 1894
- “Fifth Ice Age Is On The Way. Human Race Will Have To Fight For Its Existence Against The Cold.” – Los Angeles Times, October 7th, 1912
- “Prof. Schmidt warns us of an encroaching ice age.” – New York Times, October 7th, 1912
- “Prof. Gregory of Yale University warns that Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, North America will disappear as far south, as the Great Lakes and huge parts of Europe and Asia will be wiped out.” – Chicago Tribune, August 9th, 1923
- “The discoveries of the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.” – Time Magazine, September 10th, 1923
Instead of the glaciers wiping out North America, temperatures started to rise at the beginning of 1930’s, the media began to sound the alarm of the coming devastation due to global warming.
- “America in longest warm spell since 1776, temperature line records a 25 year rise.” – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
- “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right…weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” – Time Magazine, January 2nd, 1939
- “Winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts are growing.” – US News and World Report, January 18th, 1954
- “Greenland’s polar climate has moderated so consistently, that communities hunters have evolved into fishing villages.” – New York Times, August 29th, 1954
- “Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists, proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade, or two.” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
The climate again did not cooperate with the doomsdayers, instead of melting, the Arctic icepack started thickening by the beginning of the 1970’s. The media changed their tune accordingly and took fearmongering to a whole new level.
- “The battle for humanity is over. In the 1970’s, the world will undergo famine. (due to climate change) Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” – Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
- “Colder winters herald the dawn of new ice age.” – Washington Post, January, 1970
- “By the year 2000, the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 Million starving people.” – Paul Ehrlich, (Professor at Stanford University. he was one of the most prolific climate alarmists of the time), 1971
- “Earth’s climate is changing faster, than even experts expect. Glaciers have begun to advance, growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter and the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast, as an ocean can cool.” – Christian Science Monitor, August 27th, 1974
- “Present climate change will result in mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence.” – New York Times, December 29th, 1974
- “The Cooling World. There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and these changes portend a drastic decline in food production.” – Time Magazine, April 28th, 1975
- “This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war and this could all come about before the year 2000.” – Lowell Ponte, (was hailed as the world’s most widely read investigative science reporter), 1976
By the late 1980’s it was groundhog day again, instead of cooling, temperatures began to rise once more. The media seamlessly transitioned to warning the public of the coming apocalypse, due to global warming.
- “By 2008, the West Side highway, (that runs along the Hudson River in N.Y.), will be under water.” – James Hansen (called the grandfather of the global warming theory), testimony before Congress, June, 1988
- “About 10 Million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance, because of the rising sea level, due to global warming during the next few decades.” – Al Gore, Earth in Balance, 1992
- “Within a few years, winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” – Dr. David Viner, research scientist, March 20th, 2000
- “Billions will die, says Lovelock, who tells us, he is not usually the gloomy type. Human civilization will be reduced to a broken rabble, run by brutal warlords and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couple will survive.” – The Daily Telegraph, February 6th. 2006
This last quote wins the “most illustrious doomsday prediction” award!
- “At this rate, the arctic ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer, by 2012.” – Jay Zwally, NASA climate scientist, December 12th, 2007
- “For the record, I don’t think any sea ice will survive this summer, an event, unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment transpiring in the Arctic ocean.” – Paul Beckwith, Sierra Club, 2013
Fast forward to 2020, the ice packs are holding strong, identical to 1980’s levels. Hence they have revised their prediction to 2035:
“Arctic summer sea ice could disappear by 2035.” – National Geographic, August 2020
Over the past 15 years, global mean surface temperatures barely increased, while record snowfalls were posted during the winter of 2021/22 at many locations in the United States. The winter of 2022/23 is known for the “Snowmaggedon” and the coldest since 1977. Could this be the beginning of another cooling period?
Climate change has not become a “likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” (Nigel Calder, 1975). Instead, it has been a source of lies and propaganda, perpetrated by “men of first rank in the scientific world”, with the complicity of the media.
Science has unfortunately become subservient to political agendas. Some climatologists may be incompetent, but many have been co-opted to deceive the public, in exchange for money and fame.
Related: Do 97% Of Scientists Agree On Global Warming? | The Demonization Of CO2
References:
124 years of failed predictions
Time for Truth 