Andrew L. Urban
Dunno ‘bout you but after more than 30 years of false alarms I’m utterly sick and tired of climate alarmism. There is such a thing as too much of a bad thing. The UN’s climate chief Simon Stiell the other day tried to out-scare his boss, UN SecGen Antonio Guterres that we are no longer seeing warming but it is now ‘boiling’. Stiell is claiming that Australia will let the world “overheat” and fruit will be a “once-a-year treat” if Labor does not lift its clean-energy ambitions. Australia as the control knob for global warming/boiling/overheating is the new genre of over-alarmism: a single country is now held responsible for global temperature rises.
This seems to me to be more like a temper tantrum, driven by frustrated enthusiasm unrestricted by facts or logic. It’s clear Stiell wants to see the very large global thermometer in his nursery to show a drop in temperature. Mind you, that has always been the case with impatient alarmist claims. Even as Climate Change and Energy Minister is raping the countryside with wind turbines and shading fields from the sun with panels, activists march in the streets demanding action now.
There have been dozens of unfulfilled doomsday predictions over many years – all of which now look absurd, often laughably stupid. Other than some minimal entertainment value, they have long become irritating.
In 1970, Peter Gunter from North Texas University proclaimed a timetable in which “by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India. These will spread by 1990…. by the year 2000 or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. By the year 2030, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia will be in famine.”
It was a bad year for predictions, starting in January 1970 when Life magazine warned that “by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by half.”
Scientists like Peter Wadhams (2012) claimed Arctic summer sea ice would disappear by 2013–2016 due to rapid warming.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and others warned of 1–2 meter sea level rise by the 2010s–2020s, flooding cities like Miami and New York.
Reports like the Stern Review (2006) and UN estimates projected 200–250 million climate refugees by 2010–2020 due to droughts, floods, and rising seas.
Advocacy groups and media (e.g., WWF, 2000s) warned the Great Barrier Reef would be functionally extinct by 2020 due to warming and bleaching.
NASA climate activist/scientist James Hansen (1988, 2008) and others warned of irreversible tipping points (e.g., methane release from permafrost) by the 2010s, leading to runaway warming.
Claims (e.g., Gore, 2006; media post-Katrina) suggested global warming would drastically increase hurricane frequency and intensity, devastating coastal regions by the 2010s.
The ABC’s heavily promoted 2009 special, Earth 2100, warned that “2015 is only six years away. But many experts say that if the world has not reached an agreement to massively reduce greenhouse gases by then, we could pass the point of no return.”
A year or so earlier, the ABC broadcast unchallenged Tim Flannery’s prediction that “water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.”
Ian Plimer flays the “cherished illusions” of a ruling orthodoxy, in his book Green Murder. He writes: “Some 500 years ago, the mainstream establishment said the sun rotated around the earth. 150 years ago, the mainstream scientific bodies said that manned flight was impossible, 100 years ago, the mainstream scientific opinion was that flight across the great oceans was impossible, 90 years ago, the mainstream opinion was that space flight was impossible and 80 years ago the mainstream opinion was that the continents did not move. In all cases, the mainstream was wrong.”
Plimer argues that consensus is not science and not reliable. And climate alarmist predictions are the products of junk science and feverish activism.
The need for drastic action hinges entirely on computer models. People eventually get tired of failed apocalyptic computer models. I certainly have.