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“How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood … People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction … How dare you!” Those words, dripping with adolescent moral superiority and contempt, rang out from the lips of Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg at the United Nations “Climate Action Summit” in 2019. That sanctimonious harangue made her the apple of socialist eyes, an instant heroine, the self-appointed Joan of Arc in a worldwide left-wing movement to combat climate change.
Once again punching way above her weight, Thunberg claimed there is “a continued violation of international law and war crimes that Israel is systematically committing against Palestinians by not letting aid come to starving people.” In fact, more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza over the previous two weeks, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli and US-backed organization, has delivered almost 11 million meals to the civilians in Gaza. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar dismissed Thunberg’s theatrics: “Greta and her friends brought in a tiny amount of aid on their celebrity yacht. It did not help the people of Gaza. This was nothing but a ridiculous gimmick.”
Indeed, it was a spectacle likely designed to draw attention to herself. Evidently, the now 22-year-old believes the world has forgotten her patently absurd predictions, which were swallowed whole by climate change extremists, laughably behaving as if she spoke with authority.
But in fact, we have not failed to remember Ms. Thunberg’s 15 minutes of fame. In addition to her infamous tirade, she shared the 2018 prediction of a Harvard scientist that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels” by 2023. That scientist, James Anderson, also predicted that “there will be no floating ice remaining” in the Arctic Ocean by 2022. Well, it’s now 2025, we are still using fossil fuels; there is still floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, and – incredibly – humanity is still standing. All kidding aside, Thunberg’s return to the public eye presents a ripe opportunity to review the accuracy of not just her catastrophic prediction, but those of her fellow climate extremists.
Decades before global warming became the fashionable threat to the planet, climate extremists said we were headed for the opposite – another ice age. For example, “The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun?” was the title of one notable book in 1976. But 1970 was a year of particularly dire warnings about global cooling. That year, S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institute said that 75% to 80% of species would be extinct by 1995. Kenneth Watt of the University of California, Davis, insisted that “there won’t be any more crude oil,” that “none of our land will be usable” for agriculture, and the world would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000.
But wait, that’s not all. That same year, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, predicted that the “world population will outrun food supplies” and “the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine” by the year 2000. Biologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University claimed that by the end of the 1970s, up to 200 million people would die each year from starvation due to overpopulation; life expectancy would plummet to 42 years, and all ocean life would perish.
Today’s extreme climatologists pretend that there was never really a scientific consensus about an impending ice age, but that belies the evidence. As detailed by The Washington Free Beacon, here are some of the full-length articles from that decade: “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969; “Science: Another Ice Age?” Time Magazine, June 24, 1974; “The Ice Age Cometh!” Science News, March 1, 1975.; “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975; “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and the end of the world as we know it is now going to be the result not of global cooling but of global warming. In 2004, an analysis by the Pentagon, of all places, warned of global anarchy due to man-caused (anthropogenic) warming of the climate. As The Guardian breathlessly reported at the time, “[The Pentagon study] warned 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.”
ABC News hosted a two-hour climate change special warning that New York City could be underwater by 2015, among other apocalyptic predictions. And let’s not forget the granddaddy of the cult of global warming, climate activist and former Vice President Al Gore. His alarmist documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, predicted the Arctic Ocean would have no ice by 2014, which is the same thing Thunberg said would happen by 2022.
We are still waiting.
It is always critical to consider the people making dire predictions more than the predictions themselves. How can Thunberg and the extreme climate crowd expect to be taken seriously when their dire warnings over multiple decades have been so spectacularly off-base? Perhaps they believe that any kind of catastrophic forecast about the end of the world will serve as shock therapy for the unwashed masses living in blissful ignorance. But when the wizened experts in the field of climatology lurch uncontrollably from warning about the coming ice age to scaring the world about apocalyptic global warming, their credibility is shot. Likewise, when a self-important youngster jumps aboard the train of the latest radical left-wing cause, she becomes nothing more than a punchline.
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