For the last three decades, activists and scientist alike have been sounding the alarm that our planet is on the brink of experiencing a global warming apocalypse. If we don’t stop using fossil fuels entirely, they insist that we are destined for a future of doom and gloom.
It would all be very frightening were it not for the fact that we keep hearing this over and over and it has yet to become reality. It has happened so often, in fact, that the Daily Caller recently put together a list of the many occasions on which experts have gotten their doomsday predictions completely wrong.
For example, there was the time 25 years ago when 1,700 scientists signed a letter to warn that society would collapse if pollution and overpopulation weren’t dealt with immediately. Their group, which now counts 15,000 members among its ranks, has recently issued another warning, and it’s hard to take them seriously considering how wrong they were the first time around.
In another highly publicized warning, Prince Charles said we had just 96 months to save the planet from an irreversible collapse in terms of climate and ecosystem. That was in July 2009, so some quick math tells us the deadline has come and gone. We’re pleased to report that this predicted collapse did not occur, and we feel even better about the warning when we consider the fact that he lobbied lawmakers in the U.K. to institute policies that would help his own investments in a Bermuda sustainable forestry company.
Speaking of expired deadlines, if the group of world leaders who met at the Vatican are as prescient as they seemed to think they are, our last chance to save the planet passed two years ago. Likewise, at a May 2014 meeting with John Kerry, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said we had just “500 days to avoid climate chaos.” Once again, the deadline came and passed – is the world now beyond the point of being saved?
Getting it wrong again and again
Some of these predictions merely failed to come to fruition, but others actually predicted the opposite of what happened. For example, environmentalist George Monbiot said in 2002 that within just ten years, the world would have to choose between using arable farming to feed our planet’s animals or using it to feed the people; doing both would no longer be possible at that point. Interestingly, at the time he wrote that, 930 million people were undernourished; that number has now dropped to 805 million.
In one of the most damning predictions, senior U.N. environmental official Noel Brown said that entire nations would be wiped off the planet by rising sea levels should we fail to reverse global warming before the year 2000 rolled around. That was 17 years ago, and we haven’t seen the sea swallow up a single nation yet. That hasn’t stopped them from continuing to sound the same warning even now.
If that all sounds completely over the top to you, consider this: a cover story that recently appeared in New York magazine actually said that the extreme global warming alarmism that we keep hearing about – and that never pans out – is actually too tepid.
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