Summary: Climate science is done by experts, often using equipment of the high kind of tech. But we can crowd-source valuable information for the policy debate. Forecasts are the tool used to shape public. Here are some. Post in the comments those that you have found. We can list them and track their accuracy. The answers will reveal much. I’ll update this page as new information comes in.
“Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. …O! marvel of the human race! What madness has led you thus!”
— From The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.
The Project
The climate change debate has entered what we might call the “Campfire Phase”, in which the goal is to tell the scariest story.
— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) July 12, 2017
The advocates for massive public policy action to fight climate change have chosen fear as their primary tool to convince the public to follow them. Hence they are “alarmists.” They are almost always Leftists, seeing climate change as the path to gaining power to implement their ideology. Using their control of the news media, academia, and climate science institutions, they have bombarded America with terrifying forecasts of climate doom.
And they have terrified people. Scared, they believe all sorts of stories. They are immune to facts and logic. They believe with passionate intensity claims that are easily and immediately proven false, such as The North Pole is now a lake! – Are you afraid yet?,
It is vital that we learn about the accuracy of climate forecasts. We need a comprehensive list of documented forecasts. A forecast is an event and a date (or narrow range of dates) in the future. Documented means an easily checked authoritative source describing the prediction. Proposing a theory is not making a prediction, in the sense used here. Post in the comments forecasts that you have found.
I did not include in this post climate projections based on scenarios (RCPs) used in the IPCC’s AR5. I have compiled a very partial list of those predictions (there are too many for a comprehensive list). Most use RCP8.5, the worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s AR5. That is an unlikely future – as a worst-case scenario should be. Let’s not go there and learn if those forecasts are correct.
Alarmists R’us – a history of the Left
“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”
— From Narcotics Anonymous(1981).
But first let’s see the background story. During the past five decades, the Left has bombarded us with countless warnings of approaching doom. Inciting hysterical fear has become their favorite propaganda tool (for the Right, also – but that is a story for another day). Their predictions have an impressive record of almost total failure. Their fear-based political campaigns have had little success. Here are a few highlights.
Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?
by William and Paul Paddock (1967).
It was a best-seller! See Wikipedia for details. Bruce Trumbo’s review, “A Matter of Fertility“, gives a summary of this horrific forecast.
“The underdeveloped nations have exploding populations and static agricultures. The ‘Time of Famines’ will be seriously in evidence by 1975, when food crises will have been reached in several of these nations. The ‘stricken peoples will not be able to pay for all their needed food imports. Therefore the hunger in these regions can be alleviated only through the charity of other nations.’
“The only important food in famine relief will be wheat, and only the US, Canada, Australia, and Argentina grow significant amounts of wheat. The United States, the only one of these four countries that has historically given wheat to hungry nations, is the ‘sole hope of the hungry nations’ in the future. ‘Yet the US, even if it fully cultivates all its land, even if it opens every spigot of charity, will not have enough wheat and other foodstuffs to keep alive all the starving. Therefore, the US must decide to which countries it will send food, to which countries it will not.’”
Moving to bigger names, Paul Ehrlich set the model for bold doomsters. Others have followed his lead, but none have as yet equaled his record of wrong predictions. He hit the big time with his 1968 book The Population Bomb
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
He built his reputation with confident and precise predictions, such as this in his Autumn 1969 speech at London’s Institute of Biology. Bernard Dixon’s “In Praise of Prophets” (New Scientist, 16 September 1971) quoted Ehrlich.
“If current trends continue by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people, of little or no concern to the other 5-7 billion inhabitants of a sick world. …If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Dixon said that Ehrlich also predicted worldwide plague, thermonuclear war, death of all seafood, “rocketing” death rates, and ecological catastrophe. “The audience loved it and gasped for more”. Dixon applauded Ehrlich’s “vitally important activity.”
Never embarrassed by the failure of his predictions, he continued to ignore the consensus of scientists, applauded by the Left. In 2009 Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb Revisited“ in which he said “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future”.
My favorite bombardment of bout of doomster hysteria was about peak oil. Supposedly peaking had occurred, and would cause the end of civilization. Also entertaining were the lurid (but largely bogus) reports of the imminent bee-pocalypse – and the imminent collapse of agriculture.
This is the background for one of the Left’s largest campaigns ever in America: to get massive public policy action to fight climate change.
Predictions made during the Climate Change campaign
Climate science, like other physical sciences, has a long record of successful predictions (see this partial list from the AGU 2012 Tyndall Lecture by Ray Pierrehumber – video here – using a broader definition of “prediction” than used here, and even so citing only one in the period examined here).
The campaign began with James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to the US Senate about global warming. Since then, the Left made frequent predictions about the imminent climate catastrophe – going beyond anything in the reports of the IPCC or major climate agencies. Many of the target dates of climate predictions will come due in the next few years. Let’s assemble a list. Here are a few to get started. Compare these with the solidly grounded, careful forecasts of Working Group I – The Physical Sciences – in the IPCC’s AR5 – and the almost always well-grounded predictions in the peer-reviewed literature.
The endless series of tipping points.
Climate tipping points are like buses. We miss one, and another comes along soon. Journalists’ fabulous amnesia means that these forecasters are never held to account for their failures. Such as this from the AP, 29 June 1989.
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco-refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”
There are some fun collections of these warnings of tipping points and “last chances” to save the world – always imminent – such as this one. And this one.
The Arctic death spiral.
The pattern is “if you don’t get it right, try again with a new date.” Every prediction gets exciting headlines, with little criticism for failed guesses.
The Arctic ice has been melting since the 1970s cooling ended. Looking further back, it has been melting since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century (during the LIA sea ice encircled Iceland and sometimes reached Scotland). Predictions abound about what comes next. Some are quite bold, such as this NASA press release about the coming “Arctic Meltdown“, 27 February 2001. NASA deleted the article; it is not in their press release archive. Down the memory hole!
“The Arctic ice cap is melting at a rate that could allow routine commercial shipping through the far north in a decade and open up new fisheries. …It was in 1906, after centuries of attempts, that Roald Amundsen finally navigated the North-West Passage through the sea ice north of Canada. Even today, only specially strengthened ships can make the trip.
“But in 10 years’ time, if melting patterns change as predicted, the North-West Passage could be open to ordinary shipping for a month each summer. And the Northern Sea Route across the top of Russia could allow shipping for at least two months a year in as little as five years.
“The new routes will slash the distances for voyages between Europe and East Asia by a third, and open up new fisheries. The resulting boom in shipping could lead to conflicts, as nations try to enforce fisheries rules, prevent smuggling and piracy, and protect the Arctic environment from oil spills. To complicate matters, Russia and Canada consider their northern sea routes as national territory, while the US regards them as international waters. …
“Peter Wadhams of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge agrees that the Arctic could soon open up. ‘Within a decade we can expect regular summer trade there,’ he predicts.”
Wadhams doubled down in 2012 with “Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within four years” in an email to The Guardian – “As sea ice shrinks to record lows, Prof Peter Wadhams warns a ‘global disaster’ is now unfolding in northern latitudes.” The summer sea ice minimum in the Arctic Ocean has been in a tight range since 2007. Seventeen years after Wadhams’ prediction, there is no regular commercial traffic of size in the NW passage. Six years after his four-year prediction, there has been no “final collapse” of arctic sea ice – an no unfolding “global disaster.” See his other false predictions about Arctic sea ice.
Scary news: “Arctic ice-free as soon as 2010” by Marianne White in the Montreal Gazette (Canwest News Service), 16 November 2007.
“Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network, said the sea ice is melting faster than predicted by models created by international teams of scientists, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They had forecast the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer ice as early as 2050. But Fortier told an international conference on defence and security in Quebec City Thursday that the worst-case scenarios are becoming reality.
“The frightening models we didn’t even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true,’ Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect – the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts. According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015. ‘And it’s probably going to happen even faster than that,’ said Fortier, who leads an international team of researchers in the Arctic looking for clues to climate change.”
In April 2011 the BBC reported predictions by a team led by Dr Maslowski at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
“Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade. The original prediction {was} made in 2007 ….Now they are working with a new computer model …that produces a “best guess” date of 2016. Their work was unveiled at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.”
On 13 March 2013 climate scientist Paul Beckwith wrote “For the record: I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer.” He later explained why he was wrong. See his website for more.
On 3 April 2013 Carlos Duarte wrote that “the Arctic could be free of ice in summer by 2015.” He is Director of the Oceans Institute at the U of Western Australia. Also that year “Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years” by Nafeez Ahmed in The Guardian, 2 May 2013. No ice-free Arctic in 2015, or so far.
End of Snow
Bold predictions by activist scientists get headlines, such as “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past“ in The Independent, 20 March 2000 (The Independent put the story down the memory hole, but the Internet never forgets).
“However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event’. ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ he said.”
For better grounded perspective, see “Winter Olympics: Downhill forecast“ by Lauren Morello (journalist), Nature, 4 February 2014 — “Winter sports face an uncertain future as the planet warms.” This cites a wide range of expert sources.
Hurricanes
Predictions about hurricane doom make exciting headlines!
- “A Katrina hurricane will strike every two years“ in ScienceNordic, 2013 — One of many articles exaggerating the findings of “Projected Atlantic hurricane surge threat from rising temperatures” by Aslak Grinsted el al. in PNAS, 2013.
- “Hurricanes Likely to Get Stronger & More Frequent“ in Climate Central, 2013 – About a study in PNAS by Kerry Emanuel et al.using RCP8.5 (the worst-case scenario in the IPCC’s AR5).
- See ten even more extreme predictions from the big 3 TV networks.
For actual science about hurricanes, see What you need to know about hurricanes and their trends. For another perspective, see “Weather-related Natural Disasters: Should we be concerned about a reversion to the mean?” by Prof Roger Pielke Jr., 31 July 2017. Neither is alarming. This graph by Pielke shows how the game is played. The absence of extreme weather is weather, so the hurricane “pause” (the tall blue column at the right) means nothing. Any year with several major hurricanes – like 2005 (e.g., Katrina) – is reported as climate change by activists and journalists.
Fails about drought
Climate change works like quantum mechanics. It produces both droughts and floods. See the predictions that the California drought (now over) would be permanent (or very long). And The Texas drought ended; climate alarmists were wrong again!
Forecasts of global cooling made during the 1970s
Climate modeling began to mature during the 1970s. There was intense debate if anthropogenic cooling from aerosols would overwhelm anthropogenic warming from greenhouse gases. Plus, scientists had a wide range of views about natural climate cycles. There were many bold predictions, but no consensus. For more information, see these posts.
- About those headlines from the past century about global cooling…
- The facts about the 1970’s Global Cooling scare.
- A look at climate science written in a cooler and more skeptical day (1974).
Forecasts – collect them all! Mark them on your calendar!
“I think looking at grief is quite appropriate, as I believe we are facing human extinction”
— One of thousands of similar comments on the internet, by a reader on the FM website.
We need a list of predictions made about climate change. ASAP, because they are often deleted when proved wrong. Post in the comments any that you have found. Please, only post forecasts that are supported by links to authoritative sources. The sooner the target date, the better. The ones in this post are just a sample to start the project. Here are a few more, being updated as people send them in.
● From “Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect
“All debate about global warming ended in 1998 after a four-year drought desolated the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought. In 1995, food riots in Kiev, Cherkassy, and Odessa sparked a new …Mexican police began rounding up illegal American migrants working the fields …when Washington was hit with 82 days of 90+ temperatures in 2030 ….”
● “Climate change killing coral reefs” by the BBC, 17 August 1999. Biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg discusses the conclusions of his new paper in Marine Freshwater Research: “Climate change, coral bleaching and the future of the worldís coral reefs.” His 2020 prediction appears premature. He is one of the world’s top experts on coral bleaching, and famous for his false predictions (e.g., see these).
“Reefs around the West Indies in the Caribbean look as though they will be gone by 2020 while the Great Barrier Reef will probably last for just another three decades,” he warned.”
● “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us” by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris at The Guardian, 21 February 2004. Doomsday in 2020! Only 13 months left! Note the major scientists who said this was a serious forecast.
“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. ‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’ …
“Climate change ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network. An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions. …
“Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office – and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism – said: ‘If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.’ Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored. …
“Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. …So dramatic are the report’s scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections.”
● See the CIMP3 model’s forecast made in 2007 vs. 2017 global temperature: A climate science milestone: a successful 10-year forecast!
● “How will Earth’s surface temperature change in future decades?” by Judith Lean and David Rind in Geophysical Research Letters, 15 August 2009. Using NOAA’s numbers, the global temperature anomaly was .64°C in 2009 and .85 in 2017 – vs. their prediction of .82°C for 2019. Looking good so far, even conservative!
“From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ± 0.03°C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC. But as a result of declining solar activity in the subsequent five years, average temperature in 2019 is only 0.03 ± 0.01°C warmer than in 2014.”
● “Glacier loss on Kilimanjaro continues unabated” by L. G. Thompson et al. in PNAS, 24 November 2009.
“If current climatological conditions are sustained, the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro and on its flanks will likely disappear within several decades.”
● “The shape of British summers to come?” by Fiona Harvey in The Guardian, 8 August 2012 – “It’s been a dull, damp few months and some scientists think we need to get used to it. Melting ice in Greenland could be bringing permanent changes to our climate.”
“Nor has the UK been alone in suffering extreme weather. In the US, the eastern seaboard has been hit by heatwaves and storms but even worse has been the ‘dustbowl effect’ in Texas and across much of the nation’s agricultural heartland. India’s monsoon failed to appear on schedule, leaving millions of farmers in the subcontinent facing destitution. Floods in Beijing, after the heaviest rainfall in 60 years, caused devastation to millions. The consequences across the world have been and will be dire. A food crisis is now all but inevitable …”
● On 24 April 2014, Christiana Figuere – Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – presented “Climate Conflict to Climate Action: Capturing the Greatest Opportunities of Our Generation.”
“In fact, unless environmental disasters are averted by global action, the number of people in extreme poverty could increase by up to three billion by 2050 with all the ensuing social and economic conflict.”
● “Faster than Expected” by Guy McPherson at his website, February 2017. He is Prof Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology (U AZ) and the author of Extinction Dialogs: How to Live with Death in Mind
“Not long after civilization fails – and certainly by mid-2026 – the planet will harbor no humans.”
Understanding the plan: why Doomsterism?
Privately more than one journalist told me they were afraid to push back against the NY Mag climate horrors piece.
— Ryan Maue | weathermodels.com (@RyanMaue) July 13, 2017
“Alarmism Is the Argument We Need to Fight Climate Change” by Susan Matthews in Slate — “New York magazine’s global-warming horror story isn’t too scary. It’s not scary enough.”
“It’s okay to talk about how scary climate change is. Really.” by David Roberts at Vox — “In defense of worst-case scenarios in climate journalism.”
“The Uninhabitable Earth” By David Wallace-Wells in New York magazine — “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.” Even Michael Mann gently condemns its exaggerations. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it. The article paints an overly bleak picture by overstating some of the science.” But in an interview Mann supports the argument and the doomster outlook: “Scientist Michael Mann on ‘Low-Probability But Catastrophic’ Climate Scenarios” by David Wallace-Wells in New York magazine.
A Leftist likes Wallace-Wells’ doomsterism, but condemns his article for insufficient leftism: “New York Mag’s Climate Disaster Porn Gets It Painfully Wrong” by Daniel Aldana Cohen at Jacobin — “The real climate danger is that a vicious right-wing minority will impose an order that privileges the affluent few over everyone else.”
Stand by for many many more over the top predictions of climate doom! NYMag published a follow-up article. It opens with what is most important to them — and their fellow journalists.
“We published ‘The Uninhabitable Earth‘ on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind.”
As the news media suffers from loss of credibility and overcapacity, they use science. Readers’ attention is all that matters, and the advertising dollars that flow from them. Doomster stories gain our attention. Keyboards are humming across America right now to tell us about the very certain death to everybody coming very soon.
Summary
“The world may still be doomed, but it is not quite as doomed as the climatologists have repeatedly told us.”
— From “Global warming predictions may have been too gloomy” by Ben Webster (environment editor) in The Times.
There is no point bickering about these forecasts. Let’s build a complete list of them and track results. The next few years will provide the necessary evidence showing who is right.
For More Information
Congratulations and thanks to Les Johnson, whose database of predictions contributed many of these.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information about forecasts, about doomsters, about this vital issue see the keys to understanding climate change and especially these posts …
- 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.
- Hopeful news for us about climate change from the Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.
- Read about the world of 2030 and see hidden truths.
- Panicking about climate change? See the rest of the story.
Alarmists worked hard to keep you from reading this book.
Alarmists have worked long and hard to discredit Roger Pielke Jr., because he tells us about the IPCC and peer-reviewed research. Things that violate the “narrative” about our imminent doom. They really do not want you to read this book, the revised second edition of …
The Rightful Place of Science:
Disasters & Climate Change
By Roger Pielke Jr.
See my review of the first edition. Here is the publisher’s summary …
“After nearly every hurricane, heatwave, drought, or other extreme weather event, commentators rush to link the disaster with climate change. But what does the science say?
“In this fully revised and updated edition of Disasters & Climate Change, renowned political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. takes a close look at the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the underlying scientific research, and the climate data to give you the latest science on how climate change is related to extreme weather. What he finds may surprise you and raise questions about the role of science in political debates.”