If “our planet has a fever” as Al Gore and his band of merry leftist “scientists” continue to claim, it’s probably because the collective pants of climate alarmists are on fire.
Not only are their official findings (read: mostly conflated estimations) insignificant, their sobering predictions of global armageddon are flatly wrong.
Don’t believe me? If you’re still alive (not scorched by the sun’s heat or drowned by rising seas) and have gasoline in your car, you’ve just disproven decades of climate “science.”
Some tall tales perpetuated by the vast left-wing science cabal include:
Al Gore’s 2009 forecast of a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap would melt away by 2014. This followed an incorrect prediction by the “scientific community” in 2007 that Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2012.
James Hansen’s claim that Manhattan would be submerged by 2018 (he’s since, um, “revised” his estimation to have NYC underwater in 50 to 150 years).
Scientists in 1966 “stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States’ oil supplies” and “estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years.”
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1972 confidently stated that “at any rate, U.S. oil supplies will last only 20 years.” It also inaccurately concluded that “natural gas is as short as oil…is harder to import” and therefore “have to be limited.”
By the late 1970s, the government had bought into the grossly unnecessary panic over fossil fuel shortages, saying “we must recognize that world oil production will likely peak in the early 1990s,” warning that “we must face the prospect of running out of oil and natural gas.”
The New York Times cited “specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way” in 1975, “as a result of man-made pollution of the atmosphere.”
In 2005, the United Nations Environmental Program predicted 50 million people would become “environmental refugees” by 2010 due to rising sea levels–instead of the nations highlighted by the UN report experienced an influx of people, and a net increase in population by 2010.
A report released by the Pentagon, widely cited by climate change scientists, followed the “history of climate change” as a “useful guide.” The resulting research predicted “disagreements with Canada and Mexico over water” by 2010, worldwide “nuclear proliferation,” and an “inland sea” forming in Central California.
Like the delusional cult leader who continually claims to know the date of the Lord’s second coming, only to change it after each previous rapture date passes without event, climate scientists have yet to get one of their doomsday scenarios right.
What is clearly a guessing game used by leftists in feeble attempts to create a need for industries and causes such as the debacle also known as Solyndra, doesn’t even jive with actual science–you know, the measurable, empirical kind.
Polar ice caps? Still there. Al Gore and his nervous friends can stop wringing their hands: there was a 3000 cubic km increase in Arctic sea ice from 2012 to 2013, right about the time scientists were saying there’d be open water over the North Pole.
As for fossil fuels, the United States boasts roughly 9,860,000,000,000 cubic meters of natural gas alone, making the U.S. No. 5 in the world for proven reserves. The U.S. also has more crude oil than it knows what to do with, thanks to advances in fracking and horizontal drilling.
There was so much crude in reserves this spring that the U.S. began selling oil to China, decreased its OPEC imports from 6 million barrels in 2007 to just 2.9 million in 2015. American energy independence is now a reasonable proposal should self-sustenance be necessary.
