I watched Joe Biden take an extreme position on climate change the other day, in preparation for the Democrat’s National Convention. He stated, “Science requires a timetable for measuring progress on climate that isn’t three decades or even two. Science tells us that we have nine years before the damage is irreversible.”
Biden may have forgotten that Al Gore told us it is already too late. He said in 2006 that we had 10 years before the damage would be irreversible. You may not have noticed anything special in 2016. Gore’s prediction was reported by the Associated Press on the occasion of the Sundance Film Festival, January 26, 2006, where his film was featured. Gore stated: “And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return” The 10 years have come and gone and we have survived very well.
Going back to the 1970s there have been many other foolish predictions on how the world as we know it was on the verge of being destroyed if we did not adopt their extreme proposals. Their obvious goal is to scare us into turning over the control of our economy to them. It does not seem to bother them at all that their predictions prove to be very wrong, over and over again.
I have written in the past about the predictions from the left about the imminent dangers of climate change years ago. The thing that is revealing to me is that enough time has passed that we can see how foolish their predictions were. Will this help us evaluate the current alarmists. I don’t know but you would think some people would be learning a lesson. I thought it would be good to review these claims again.
A number of quotes were compiled by Ronald Bailey, in an article published May 1, 2000. The article reported on predictions from the 1970s so we now know how accurate these predictions were. Here are some of the quotes that Mr. Bailey compiled:
- “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
- “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
- “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
- “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
- “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
- “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day, 1970
- “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
- “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt “
- [One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
- “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
