Summary: Read the shocking news in this warning from global experts about our future climate! We can learn much from this report, but not what they intended.
A review of “Climate Futures: responses to climate change in 2030“
A report by Forum for the Future, October 2008.
Looking back at the lurid warnings from the Left and Right provides a test of their vision. It helps us gauge the validity of the forecasts that dominate our headlines. Such as this terrifying vision of 2030 made a decade ago by a team of experts hired by Forum for the Future. The Forum is one of the many vaguely leftist advocacy organizations lavishly funded by corporations. We are almost halfway there. Let’s look at their predictions.
The expert authors of this report do not directly connect their climate change scenario to those used by the IPCC in AR4 (its 2007 report). But they explain, as usual in leftist forecasts, that the IPCC is “timid” and our future will be much worse than the IPCC predicts. This narrative continues today, as the Left believes that the implausible RCP8.5 is our certain future unless we restructure the world according to their wishes.
“But it seems more and more likely they {predictions of the IPCC} will be looked back on in years to come and seen as timid. …So the five possible future worlds that we describe are different responses to a similar level of climate change. In all of them, climate change is a serious problem and follows a path towards the upper end of IPCC estimates….”
They interview only alarmists, giving not a hint that other experts have radically different views. For example. as in this failed prediction (emphasis added). It is part of climate alarmists’ series of failed predictions about the end of snow.
“A report from Friends of the Earth in Australia, Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action
As usual in this genre of fiction, current problems are considered harbingers of the future – not the commonplace troughs of global cycles in a growing and improving world. Food riots and $150 oil were trendy issues in 2008.
“Our scenarios are based in part on the latest IPCC reports from 2007, which drew on science from the previous years. They are already out of date. The most recent science says climate change will go further and faster. We are closer to the thresholds than we thought. What’s more, indirectly related impacts that our interviewees said were long-term – food riots, import tariffs, oil at $150 – are happening now.”
Journalists focused, by design, on the scariest of the report’s five scenarios: the environmental war economy. Such as “Climate change study predicts refugees fleeing into Antarctica” by Urmee Khan in The Telegraph. This scenario is the usual dream of extremists, left and right: doom forces the world to put them in charge. But too late to avoid disasters. This scenario assumes with greenhouse gas emissions declining after 2019 due to severe actions by governments around the world.
- “Licences are required to have children in some countries and awarded on a points system; climate-friendly behaviour earns extra points.
- Governments have banned personal car ownership and forced citizens to replace convector ovens with microwaves. Kettles and washing machines are automatically switched off when households exceed their energy quotas.
- Refugees from Bangladesh and the Pacific make up 18% of New Zealand’s population. Others are being relocated to permanent settlements on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is projected to have a population of 3.5 million by 2040.
- In some countries it is a crime to publicly question the existence of man-made climate change.
- The oil price broke $400/barrel in 2022, making shipping and aviation prohibitively expensive, and leading to a collapse in international trade.”
They describe events happening this year, in 2018. Such as the “reunification of Korea under the brokerage of Russia and China, with the capital in Pyongyang.” (nope) and that the “Antarctic Peninsula opened for mineral exploitation” (nope).
We have interesting things to look forward to. Such as 2020 being “the year of no winter in the northern hemisphere.” That looks unlikely. As does in 2022 that the “oil price hits $400/barrel.” Then things turn ugly. In nine years, 2027, an “extreme heatwave in Europe kills 200,000.”
But there are exciting events coming for leftists. In 2028 the “leader of the No Climate Change Party in Canada, is convicted of denying the existence of climate change. He is deported to the international convict settlement on Kerguelen in the Southern Ocean.” Leftists thugs are doing this today, their volunteer violence suppressing the voices of those on the Right.
In 2029 we will get another Leftist dream: the “first planned permanent settlement in Antarctica, a ‘global community’.” A blank slate society in the wilderness in which they can create a Leftist heaven (after their failures to create new men and women in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China)!
Conclusions
That the Left and Right so often attempt to influence us using fear reveals what they think of us (i.e., we are easily frightened fools, incapable of rational thought).
Decades of saturation bombing by scary scenarios has damaged our ability to see and plan for the future. It is a mad version of “chicken little” and “the boy who cried wolf!” But there are no consequences for lies and exaggerations in propaganda campaigns. Tribal truths rule. Leftists believe what their leaders tell them, as do those on the Right. Generations of failed predictions have not shaken either side’s confidence. But the middle has become skeptical and alienated, leaving our public policy wheels spinning wildly and futilely.
We must become better grounded in order to find areas of broad agreement well-supported by research. See the posts here for suggestions.
For More Information
Hat tip on this to Steve Goddard, who does a remarkably great job discovering past follies of climate forecasts that would otherwise go down the memory hole.
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see The keys to understanding climate change, all posts about forecasts, and especially these…
- About RCP8.5: Is our certain fate a coal-burning climate apocalypse? No!
- The climate change crisis as seen from 2100 AD (a business as usual scenario).
- Stratfor gives us good news, showing when renewables will replace fossil fuels.
- Focusing on worst case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work.
- Updating the RCPs: The IPCC gives us good news about climate change, but we don’t listen.
- Celebrate Los Angeles’ survival, despite the prediction of its destruction in 2017.
- Fix the mistakes that killed the climate change campaign!
- Hopeful news for us about climate change from the Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.
Those that think like that should go now to Antarctica to taste the perfect climate there, but of course, without the polluting technology to keep them safe: https://youtu.be/qz2SeEzxMuE
Part of the problem (all of it?) is that the people who write these reports have absolutely nothing to lose from them turning out to be complete nonsense. If anyone asks, they’ll say that they were working with the best science available and that things are better defined now and that we really really need to believe *this* report.
Shylock has a bad rep in my view, the pound of flesh made perfect sense as a guarantee. Legislators and anyone proposing a policy response to an issue should be forced to offer the equivalent of a pound of flesh as a measure of their confidence that what they’re proposing or predicting will turn out as they state.
$100 and we can walk away assured that it’s nonsense, 5 years salary, a kidney or perhaps a finger, and we can sit up and take notice.
Steve,
That’s quite an odd proposal.
More realistic would be to hold individuals and organizations to the same standards we do others: tracking their proposals vs. reality. The problem is that we’re almost totally indifferent to repeated failure of predictions. Most Americans care only about Tribal truths.
The Right has been saying since the 1930s that debt will kill us real soon. Since the 1960s the Left has been making bogus predictions of environmental doom. The individuals making these are still heros on the Left and Right. My fav is Paul Ehrlich, who should be introduced as Dr. Wrong.
My view is that there’s an unbalanced policy/prediction market caused by this lack of meaningful consequences. Clearly the market currently favours prognosticators and politicians. I’m searching for a way to light touch regulate it to restore balance.
Papers and policy reports can include data on accuracy and probabilities for predicted outcomes, but they’re often difficult to understand or contextualise. What I’m asking for are clear end points that are easily measured and an unambiguous statement of the confidence the author has in their projections or legislation.
I’d imagine it a bit like posting bail, if you’re confident that you’re not going to skip, you’re more likely to be prepared to post a large bond or find others prepared to do it for you. The size of the bond usually reflects ability to pay, seriousness of the offence and the likelihood of the person doing a runner.
Why not for policy and predictive business?
For instance, you predict that by 2030 there will be a million climate change refugees. Define how that status is to be measured and post a bond of some type that reflects your confidence and means.
Obviously bonds involving limbs and internal organs are entirely optional :-)
If the guzzoline is so expensive that international trade collapses, how are you moving the population of the Houston metro area to McMurdo Sound? This is like a left-wing version of the comic “Liberality for All.” I suppose some of the secondary predictions like the Sahara being greened and a virtual Olympics are more plausible.
SF,
Fuel might be too expensive to move fruit and toys around the world, but not so much to make emergency shipments of people too expensive. Different categories.
> Let’s look at their predictions.
Ah, but you see, they weren’t predictions. They were “scenarios”!
Paul,
That is a commonly used dodge. But here their scenarios used a common prediction for climate (albeit never described). It’s was extreme and unlikely, an analytically weak foundation for their scenarios. But this was an exercise in propaganda, not science or predictions.
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