Updated with the Help of Readers. 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.
Updated on August 22.
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?
What should have happened by the year 2000 according to the prediction made in 1989 by a UN official to avoid climate catastrophe? What about this 1970 prediction of a coming ice age?
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. Recently 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.
Latest updates to this article (August 22):
UN official in 1989: if nothing is done by the year 2000, rising seas will submerge a number of countries under the sea
In June 1989, the Associated Press carried a doomsday prediction by Noel Brown, then director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), that national governments had 10 years to tackle the greenhouse effect before it was out of human control.
Mr Brown said melting ice at the poles would raise sea levels by up to 90 centimetres, enough to sink the Maldives and other low-lying islands, while coastal areas would also suffer from flooding. A sixth of Bangladesh, for example, will be submerged, he said, meaning 90 million people will have to be relocated. According to a joint study by UNEP and the US Environmental Protection Agency, a fifth of Egypt's arable land in the Nile Delta could also be flooded, causing food shortages.
"Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?" Brown asked.
All of this is happening because of humanity's use of fossil fuels and the burning of rainforests, which is frying excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the article said. Brown also pointed out that the most conservative scientific estimate is that the Earth's temperature will rise by 1 to 7 degrees Celsius over the next 30 years.
As a solution, Brown proposed protecting rainforests, reducing fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, and highlighted measures to tax energy use as positive.
It is now 34 years since the article was published and thankfully things have not gone that badly. Nor has the Earth's average temperature risen so rapidly – 1.1° Celsius rise has been officially recorded since 1880 and it is estimated that since 1975 the Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.15-0.20°C per decade.
However, the current target is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If we fail to do this, catastrophe is looming and the Earth will become uninhabitable, warns the UN.
Scientist in 1970: there will be an ice age in the 21st century
In April 1970, The Boston Globe newspaper published an article entitled "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century". James P. Lodge Jr., also called a pollution expert in the article, said that air pollution could obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the century. He also linked this frightening prospect to continued population growth and the Earth's continued consumption of resources at the then current rate.
Lodge Jr. also estimated at the time that the growth in electricity generation would require so much cooling water that the rivers of the United States would run dry. Lodge Jr. also noted that by the next century (i.e. the 21st century), humans would be burning more oxygen than nature could reproduce. To avert disaster, he proposed three remedies: controlling the human population, a less wasteful standard of living, and a major technological breakthrough in the way man consumes the Earth's resources.
In the first post of the series, we started 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.
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.
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.