Let's capture the climate panic together: looking at past false predictions

Do you remember any end-of-the-world climate predictions that did not come to be? Post a link in the comments so that we could pile them together in this article.

Has the sea level already risen 20 feet, as Al Gore promised in 2006? Are the Arctic waters already ice-free, as John Kerry promised for 2014? Has The Hague already been abandoned, as the Pentagon expected?

We are starting a thread of articles that present examples of how climate activists have scared people of an imminent catastrophe over the years, but their predictions have been embarrassingly wrong.

Why look back now? UN Secretary-General António Guterres has just declared that the era of global warming is over. Last week he announced that we are now living in an era of global boiling. According to him, wildfires that have ravaged southern Europe, particularly Greece, are a manifestation of this. It is a catastrophe, Guterres said, adding that for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame. Of course, he was not referring to humans who set the forests on fire in Greece, but his message was that people are still using the evil fossil fuels and time has come to take action – give fossil fuels up – because if we don't, we will fail to prevent a climate catastrophe. "Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," Guterres said. "All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings," he added.

The latter, however, is actually a rather surprising statement. Those who have followed the climate debate over the years have noticed many predictions that are far from being fulfilled. We are therefore launching a thread of articles in which we will highlight such predictions and promises from the past, so as to assess them in the light of current knowledge. Such a hindsight review is important since it is precisely those kind of predictions that form the basis of current arguments for restricting people's rights and freedom of choosing their own way of life.

We also want to involve our readers. If you can think of an example of a climate doom prediction, a relevant fact, or want to share anything else, please add a link to the article as a comment. That way we can keep the article updated and continue the topic in subsequent posts. Please share the initiative.

In the first post of the series, we will start with three highlights:

Al Gore's "boiling oceans" and the first ice-free Arctic summer in 2014.

UN Secretary General Guterres is by no means the only one who has used “boiling” as a comparison when talking about climate change. In January this year, former US Vice President and climate activist Al Gore did the same. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that humanity was emitting 162 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day and “that's what's boiling the oceans”. He also explained this causes droughts, melting of the continental ice, making the sea levels rise, creating atmospheric rivers and rain bombs. This, he says, in turn leads to waves of climate refugees.

Of course, there is no need to go and start measuring sea temperatures to verify Gore's words, as the scary image Gore employed was probably only to suggest that sea temperatures in general are on the rise. However, Gore's credibility can be called into question by his earlier claims and predictions.

In 2006, in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore announced that sea levels would rise as much as 20 feet in the near future. In reality, sea levels have risen by a total of 3.8 inches between 1993 and 2021, meaning that Gore's projected rise would take 1,136 years to reach that level at this rate.

In the same year Gore also said that unless drastic action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2016, climate change cannot be tackled. This has not been done: we have gone from 30.59 billion tonnes of carbon emissions in 2006 to 35.52 billion tonnes in 2016 and 37.12 billion tonnes in 2021. Commenting on his earlier prediction in 2019, Gore said that we must act despite passing his earlier deadline because we can still prevent much higher sea levels and steeper temperature rises.

In 2009, however, speaking at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Gore claimed that there is "a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years."

It was a popular talking point at the time, more so that in 2009, then US Senator John Kerry, who later became Secretary of State and is now appointed by President Joe Biden as a Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, made the same claim. Speaking to Congress, he referred to scientists and said that the melting ice would lead to the first ice-free Arctic summer in 2014.

Both men were wrong as nothing like this has ever happened. Moreover, the scientist Gore referred to in his speech – climatologist Dr. Wieslav Maslowski – remarked at the time that he did not know how Gore had arrived at such an accurate result by referring to him. He said that he personally has not tried and would not try to estimate the probability of such an event so accurately looking into the future.

Pentagon in 2004: Britain will become Siberia by 2020, Europe's major cities will drown

According to a 2004 report by the US Department of Defense, rising seas were expected to submerge major European cities by 2020 and Britain was now expected to have a Siberia-like climate.

According to the report, Europe was to be the most affected by climate change, and between 2010 and 2020 the average annual temperature was to fall by a few degrees, which would leave Britain with a much colder and drier Siberian-like climate. At the same time, by 2010, Europe and the United States should have a third more days with temperatures above 32 degrees Celsius than before.

The report also said that already in 2007, the Dutch coast would be hit by powerful storms, making large parts of the country uninhabitable. The Hague, on the North Sea coast, was cited as an example, which people would have to leave behind.

People have not been forced to leave The Hague. Photo: Skitterphoto.

In addition, the document warned of major droughts and famine, which in turn would lead to unrest, major migratory pressures, especially for Europe, and armed conflict, possibly even nuclear war. Migratory pressure has indeed hit Europe. It is not that clear, however, whether it is a matter of climate change or rather that of poverty in Africa and political instability in the Middle East where one of the major causes of change have been the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The threat of nuclear war hangs over us today, but climate change cannot obviously be blamed for that either.

The report was intended as a tool to pressure the administration of then US President George W. Bush, which at the time did not take the so-called climate science seriously.

Greta Thunberg and her Twitter post about the destruction of humanity

Climate activist Greta Thunberg posted on Twitter on 21 June 2018 that "a top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years". In making the post, he invoked the words of James Anderson, professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University, who said that reducing carbon emissions at the rate of 2018 would not be enough to save humanity from doom. Anderson recommended that the whole world should take extreme measures to phase out fossil fuels within the next five years, by 2023.

Later Thunberg deleted this post. Photo: screenshot.

Although Thunberg's post is often referred to as a prediction of the end of the world, which was due to arrive this June and never did, but as we can see, that is not quite what she said. The point was simply that the climate apocalypse and the destruction of mankind can no longer be averted, since we have not given up fossil fuels. It is not clear, however, when those would occur. Instead, there is perhaps some hope in the fact that both Thunberg's Twitter post and the article on which it was based have long since been deleted and are now only available via an online archive. This may mean that both the activist and researcher have now changed their minds.