Humanity only has a few years to act before the world may irreversibly plunge into an environmental catastrophe of global proportions, climate experts warned in a recent report. Their calls are muffled, however, by a ballast of dozens of past dramatic predictions that have failed to pan out.
Environmental experts have been predicting upcoming doom for many decades. Most, though not all, of the prognostications involve climatic cataclysm that appears to be just around the corner, only to fizzle out as the deadline approaches.
As the failed predictions pile up, climate experts appear to be more cautious in making their predictions too specific. The current general consensus among climate change proponents is that extreme weather events, such as droughts and storms, will become more prevalent or intense.
The recently released short-form report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that unless carbon emissions are cut drastically and promptly, the planet will warm roughly an additional 1.1-2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100 (pdf). That would lead to “high” or “very high” risk of wildfire damage, permafrost degradation, biodiversity loss, dryland water scarcity, and tree mortality on the land, and loss of warm-water corals in the sea. Most of the severe risks are asserted with moderate or low confidence, meaning that underlying evidence is lacking or inconclusive.
The full IPCC report hasn’t been released yet.
One of the most famous climate experts, Michael Mann, criticized the IPCC for being “overly conservative” in predicting catastrophic consequences of climate change, “including ice sheet collapse, sea level rise, and the rise in extreme weather events,” Inside Climate News reported.
But it’s been exactly these kinds of bold predictions that have undermined experts’ credibility in the past.
Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has collected some such failed predictions in his book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” Geologist and electrical engineer Tony Heller, who frequently criticizes what he considers fraud in current mainstream climate research, has made it a recurring theme of his climate science blog to point out failed and dubious predictions.
Examples are plentiful, stretching far into the past:
By Petr Svab
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