-- by Petr Svab, Epoch Times, March 29, 2023
So-called climate 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. A brief compilation of these are listed below in reverse chronological order.
| 2023-03 |
"Arctic ice has seen an 'irreversible' thinning since 2007,"
The Washington Post reported.
The ice hasn't thinned much over the past decade. Since 1979, the summer minima have seen a record low every 5-7 years. Since 2012, however, there has been no new record, the data shows. |
| 2022-08 |
"The End of Snow Threatens to Upend 76 Million American Lives,"
Bloomberg reported, referring to predictions of snow disappearance in
the western United States.
A few months later, Sierra Nevada mountains would see its second snowiest winter on record. |
| 2021-12 |
The Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined, "A 'no snow' California
could come sooner than you think."
A few weeks later, the UC Berkely Central Sierra Snow Lab announced that California just had the snowiest December on record. |
| 2020-07 |
"The end of snow," said an Australian Geographic headline. "Could a
warming climate be putting Australia's magnificent alpine landscapes
at risk?"
There was no particular lack of snow in Australia in either 2021 or 2022. |
| 2018-01 | "The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," said James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry, according to Forbes. |
| 2017-08 |
"Snowy retreat: Climate change puts Australia's ski industry on a
downhill slope," The Sydney Morning Herald reported. It's been snowing
quite as usual in Australia in recent years, weather data indicates.
Weather data indicate snowfall has been as normal in Australia in recent years. |
| 2017-07 | After then-U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement, physicist Stephen Hawking said, according to BBC: "We are close to the tipping point, where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees [Celsius] and raining sulfuric acid." |
| 2014-02 | "The end of snow?" asked a New York Times op-ed headline, talking about declining snowpack in Western United States. The past decade overall has marked no significant snowfall decline in the region. |
| 2013-07 | "Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe -- scientist," The Guardian reported. |
| 2012-09 | "Enjoy snow now ... by 2020, it'll be gone," The Australian reported. It still snows in Australia. Last year's snowfall was, in fact, significantly above average. |
| 2009-12 | "The entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years," Al Gore said at the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. |
| 2008-06 | "In five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of ice in the summer," The Associated Press reported, paraphrasing James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Sciences. |
| 2008-06 | "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]," said David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, according to National Geographic News. |
| 2008-04 |
"North Pole could be ice free in 2008," reported New Scientist.
"There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, according to the article. "That raises the specter -- the possibility -- that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year." |
| 2008-03 |
"If Norway's average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the
ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging
from current conditions," said Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian
International Polar Year Secretariat, according to Xinhua, China's
official propaganda mouthpiece.
Norway's average temperature did slightly increase from 2007 to 2008. The ice didn't melt. |
| 2007-12 |
"Artic summers ice-free 'by 2013'" the BBC reported.
"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," a researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, told the BBC. "So given that fact, you can argue that maybe our projection of 2013 is already too conservative." |
| 2007-12 |
"Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?" said an Associated
Press headline.
"At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012," said Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, according to the article. |
| 2007-11 | "The Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2010 or 2015 -- something that hasn't happened in more than a million years," Canada's Canwest News Service reported, paraphrasing polar researcher Louis Fortier. |
| 2007-11 | This year was the "defining moment" of the climate change fight, according to Rajendra Pachauri, then-head of the U.N. climate panel. "If there is no action before 2012, that's too late," the official said, according to The New York Times. |
| 2006-01 | "Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return," The Associated Press wrote, paraphrasing Al Gore, a prominent global warming advocate. |
| 2004-02 | The Guardian reported on a secret Pentagon report that predicted climate change will lead to nuclear war, major European cities will sink into the ocean, and Britain would descend into "Siberian" climate by the year 2020. |
| 2001-12 |
"The changes in climate could potentially extirpate the sugar maple
industry in New England" within 20 years, according to George Hurtt,
co-author of a 2001 global warming report commissioned by the U.S.
Congress, according to Albuquerque Journal.
Today, New England still produces plenty of maple syrup. Vermont's production totaled a record-high 2.55 million gallons, up 46 percent from the previous year, according to the USDA. |
| 2000-03 |
"Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past," The Independent wrote.
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," said David Viner, a
senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of England's
University of East Anglia, noting that within a few years, winter
snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event.â"
Snowfall, though scarce, still comes to southern England during most winters. |
| 1989-06 |
"A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown,
says 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,"
California's San Jose Mercury News reported.
"Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos," said Brown, then-director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Programme. |
| 1988-09 |
The small island nation of Maldives was threatened to be completely
covered by "a gradual rise in average sea level" in 30 years, Agence
France-Presse reported, noting that "the end of the Maldives and its people
could come sooner if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992, as predicted."
As of 2023, the Maldives are still nowhere near under water. In fact, despite the COVID-19 pandemic's decimation of tourism, the nation still attracts new developments. Just last week, Emirati development company awarded a $148 million contract to build 120 luxurious over-water and beachfront villas on Maledives' South Male Atoll, Hotelier Maledives reported. |
| 1982-05 | Mostafa Tolba, then-executive director of the U.N. environmental program, said that if the world didn't change course, it would face "an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust" by the year 2000, according to The New York Times. |
| 1979-02 | "There is a real possibility that some people now in their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will have melted, a change that would cause swift and perhaps catastrophic changes in climate," The New York Times said. |
| 1978-01 |
"An international team of specialists has concluded from eight
indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of
the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere," The New York Times
reported.
A year later, the paper was reporting the opposite. |
| 1974-06 |
"Another Ice Age?" a Time Magazine headline asked.
"Telltale signs are everywhere -- from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest." |
| 1974-01 | "Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast," The Guardian reported. |
| 1972-12 |
Two Brown University geologists wrote a letter to President Richard
Nixon, reporting that a conference attended by "42 top American and
European investigators" concluded "a global deterioration of climate,
by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized
mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon."
"The present rate of cooling," they said, "seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century, if continuing at the present pace." |
| 1972-01 | "We have 10 years to stop the catastrophe," said Maurice Strong, then-U.N. environmental secretary, regarding world's environmental problems, according to a Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. |
| 1971-07 | "The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age," said atmospheric scientist S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Columbia University, The Washington Post reported. |
| 1970-10 | Ehrlich went on to predict that America would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980, California's Redlands Daily Facts reported. |
| 1970-04 | "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century," The Boston Globe reported, saying that pollution expert James Lodge predicted that "air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the new century." |
| 1967-11 | "It is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine," The Salt Lake Tribune reported, citing Paul Ehrlich's prediction of famines by 1975. |
| 1958-10 |
"Some scientists estimate that the polar ice pack is 40 percent
thinner and 12 percent less in area than it was a half-century ago,
and that even within the lifetime of our children, the Arctic Ocean
may open, enabling ships to sail over the North Pole," The New York
Times reported, noting that the Arctic ice sheet was about 7 feet
thick at the time. Currently, the ice is about 7 feet thick, too.
By the 1960s, it appears that worries about a melting Arctic became not as immediate, only to be supplanted by other environmental concerns. |
| 1955-03 | "There are now six million square miles of ice in the Arctic. There once were 12 million square miles," said Arctic explorer Adm. Donald McMillan, according to Rochester, New York's Democrat and Chronicle. |
| 1952-02 | "The glaciers of Norway and Alaska are only half the size they were 50 years ago," said Dr. William Carlson, an Arctic expert, according to a newswire run by The Cairns Post in Australia. |
| 1947-05 |
"The possibility of a prodigious rise in the surface of the ocean
with resultant widespread inundation, arising from an Arctic climate
phenomenon[,] was discussed yesterday by Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a noted
Swedish geophysicist at the University of California Geophysical
Institute," an article in The West Australian read.
"The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study the conditions on a global basis," Ahlmann said. |
| 1939-12 |
"All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting," the
Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier reported.
"It may without exaggeration be said that the glaciers -- like those in Norway -- face the possibility of a catastrophic collapse," the paper quoted Prof. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geologist, saying from a report to the Geographical Society after his Arctic expedition. In fact, arctic ice was seen receding since 1918, according to a 1923 New York Time article. "Last Winter, oceans did not freeze over even on the north coast of Spitzbergen," the article read. By comparison, this winter, sea ice did reach the shore of Spitzbergen (now Svalbard), though in low concentrations. Back then, however, the meltdown seemed nowhere near finished. |