A recent article on Fox News discussed the repeated failure of the climate doomsday predictions made by alarmists over the past few decades to come to pass. The news organization deserves praise for exposing the repeated, “Chicken-Little,” like environmental claims made by climate alarmists.
The Fox News article, “Eight years? Nine years? Six years ago? A climate change activist guide to doomsday,” discusses various alarmist predictions, such as those made by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, and others in politics promoting the idea that the world faces a climate emergency.
Fox explains that these activists in politics and media “are increasingly invoking doomsday scenarios to pressure President Biden to take unilateral action to lower greenhouse gas emissions, despite a history of such claims falling flat.”
Climate Realism has previously covered some of these doomsday predictions: Al Gore’s false predictions that Kilimanjaro would be ice-free by 2016, here; Gore’s mistaken assertion that there would be no more glaciers in Glacier National Park by 2012, here; climate scientists’ claims that ocean currents would accelerate, leading to total ecological collapse, here; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Prince Charles, and Faith Birol all claim that we have less and less time to change our lifestyles before world-ending catastrophes commence, here.
The Fox News article quotes Steve Milloy, advisor to President Trump on Environmental Protection Agency staff picks and founder of JunkScience.com, who agrees that these alarmist predictions are as common as they are incorrect.
“They make these End Times predictions for a variety of reasons ranging from ignorance to politics to personal aggrandizement.” Milloy told Fox News.
The underlying cause for many of these false predictions is those making the predictions relying on flawed computer models, Myron Ebell, director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News.
“Most of the time the data doesn’t line up or scientists assume a larger temperature increase will happen than actually does and that skews the entire prediction,” Ebell said.
The computer models that these predictions are based on are deeply flawed, as Climate Realism has reported here, here, and here, for example.
Ebell points out that scientists have been assuming larger temperature increases than what exist in nature, this is true. The figure below shows model runs predicting global warming trends, alongside actual observed temperatures.
There is a warming bias in the models that averaging does nothing to correct. Their projections fail to track real-world measured temperatures. Because predictions about the future climate are based on faulty assumptions and flawed models that fail to correspond to actual global average temperatures, ancillary predictions. like those of worsening extreme weather, that are supposed to flow from dramatically higher temperatures cannot be taken seriously either.
It seems that every time one of these public figures makes an alarming claim in a speech, the countdown to climate doomsday gets pushed back another year or so; almost as if there really isn’t a looming catastrophe.
Sadly, the corporate media seems to ignore the fact that past predictions of catastrophe failed to materialize as soon as they are falsified. Instead, they glom onto the next prediction of doom–forever predicting the near term future will be worse than the present. It is something akin to Zeno’s Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, or a math problem involving infinite halving of distances. It seems climate alarmists, outside of and within the mainstream media, will never reach the point at which they admit that doomsday isn’t coming. Thankfully, Fox News, and the experts they interviewed have seemingly reached that point. Now let’s hope the wider corporate media becomes interested in discussing real climate data, which is not alarming at all.
Thank you!