Dozens of Failed Climate Predictions Stretch 80 Years Back
https://www.theepochtimes.com/dozens...k_3096733.html
By 
Petr Svab
                 Comments                      September 25, 2019                     Updated: September 25, 2019
Apocalyptic 
climate  and environmental catastrophes of global proportions have decimated the  world many times over in recent decades—at least based on dozens of  predictions made by various scientists, experts, and officials over the  past 80 years.
 Newspaper clippings documenting the predictions were 
recently published  by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.  Many of those were first collected by geologist and electrical engineer  Tony Heller, who frequently criticizes—on his 
RealClimateScience.com website—what he considers fraud in the current mainstream climate research.
  The  predictions, some going as far back as 1930s, not only at times  contradict each other, but sometimes foretell the same imminent  catastrophe repeatedly for years, even decades, seemingly undeterred by  past failures.
 
Arctic Meltdown
“All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting,” the Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier 
reported on Dec. 17, 1939.
“It  may without exaggeration be said that the glaciers—like those in  Norway—face the possibility of a catastrophic collapse,” the paper  quoted Prof. Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geologist, from a report to the  Geographical Society after his Arctic expedition.
Ahlmann, a world authority on climate and glaciers in his time, was even more graphic eight years later.
“The  possibility of a prodigious rise in the surface of the ocean with  resultant widespread inundation, arising from an Arctic climate  phenomenon was discussed yesterday by Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a noted Swedish  geophysicist at the University of California Geophysical Institute,” 
a 1947 article in The West Australian said.
“The  Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can  speedily be formed to study the conditions on a global basis,” Ahlmann  said.
Stories about a melting Arctic were still in vogue with the media in the 1950s.
“The  glaciers of Norway and Alaska are only half the size they were 50 years  ago,” said Dr. William Carlson, an Arctic expert, according to the Feb.  18, 1952, 
edition of The Cairns [Australia] Post.
 “There  are now six million square miles of ice in the Arctic. There once were  12 million square miles,” said Arctic explorer Adm. Donald McMillan, 
according to the March 10, 1955, issue of Rochester, New York’s Democrat and Chronicle.
 
‘Population Bomb’
In the 1960s, a new environmental prediction was on the rise—overpopulation.
“It  is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine,”  The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 1967, citing Paul Ehrlich’s prediction  of famines by 1975.
Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and  author of “The Population Bomb,” proposed lacing staple foods and  drinking water with sterilizing agents to cut the growing population of  the United States, according to the report.
Ehrlich was on fire by  1970, getting two dozen speaking requests per day and predicting that  America would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980, California’s 
Redlands Daily Facts reported.
 But around the same time, a new prognosis was on the horizon.
 
Global Cooling
“Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century,” 
The Boston Globe reported on Apr. 16, 1970,  saying that pollution expert James Lodge predicted that “air pollution  may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the  new century.”
In 1972, two Brown University geologists 
wrote a letter  to President Richard Nixon, reporting that a conference attended by “42  top American and European investigators” concluded “a global  deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto  experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed  may be due very soon.”
“The present rate of cooling,” they said,  “seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century, if  continuing at the present pace.”
By 1975, the writing was on the wall, with major publications including 
The Washington Post, 
The Guardian, and 
Time magazine running their own stories on the predictions of a coming ice age.
“An  international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of  climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last  30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere,” 
The New York Times reported in 1978.
A  year later, the paper was reporting the opposite—a prediction of an  Arctic meltdown, blaming global warming caused by carbon dioxide  emissions.
“There is a real possibility that some people now in  their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will  have melted, a change that would cause swift and perhaps catastrophic  changes in climate,” 
the 1979 article said.
 Apparently, The Chicago Tribune didn’t get the memo, still reporting the “global cooling” narrative 
in 1981.
 
Arctic Meltdown 2
By  the late 1980s, the narrative had switched to global warming for good,  again predicting polar ice melting on a catastrophic scale.
“A  senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says  entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea  levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000,” California’s  San Jose Mercury News 
reported on June 30, 1989.  “Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of  ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the  New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.”
The first to disappear were to be the island nations teetering just a few feet above the ocean level.
The  small nation of Maldives was threatened to be completely covered by “a  gradual rise in average sea level,” Agence France-Presse 
reported in 1988,  noting that “the end of the Maldives and its people could come sooner  if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992, as predicted.”
Yet 31  years later, the Maldives are thriving. Its population has doubled since  the 1980s, and its picturesque islands are “set for a flurry of new  resort openings,” Hotelier Maldives 
reported in 2018.
After  a pause from the 1950s to the 1980s, the predictions of an Arctic  meltdown are back in full swing in recent decades. The region was meant  to be ice-free in summer by 
2013, 
2014, 
2015, and 
2018, based on various predictions.
Yet the 
Greenland Climate Research Centre reported plenty of ice in the Arctic in August 2019.
Some  scientists have argued the earth is currently undergoing warming  largely caused by carbon emissions due to fossil fuel burning; other  scientists disagree, assigning the dominant effect to other forces or  even disregarding the warming as insignificant.