Climate Change and the "Experts"
A lesson in the nature and purpose of "authority."
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
We have received assurances for decades that the world will end any decade now. Just you wait…here it comes…three…two…one…
No one can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger. They’re not going to get less; they’re going to get stronger.
Joe Biden, 2 October 2024
This is from the man who “beat Medicare.” Here’s a couple from another futurist who wasn’t very good at being accurate, either.
The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says , the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. . . . We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.
Paul R. Ehrlich, The New York Times, 1969
And…
No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.
Redlands Daily Facts, 1970
Check your calenders now and see if the oceans are dead; Erlich is and they ain’t. Erlich wrote a great deal about demographics and a “population bomb” that should have exploded some years ago. Last I saw, the population was cratering in most of the industrialized world.
As a teenager, I remember these prognostications of the coming ice age:
Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century . . . (I)f the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of the continental United States. . . . (B)y the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’
The Boston Globe, 1970
The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. ... In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ — ‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’
Washington Post, 1971
And here come the academics:
Dear Mr. President: . . . We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. . . . The main conclusion of the meeting was that 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 cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. . . . The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972
Some at the time questioned this orthodoxy, which wasn’t required for journalists yet.
Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.
Time Magazine, 1974
But the “experts” reversed themselves just in time.
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Associated Press, 1989
Check those calendars again and see how many nations have vanished because of rising sea levels. And here comes a Nobel Laureate/political hack/“expert” to assure us all is not well yet.
Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.
Al Gore, 2006
And one more “expert:”
The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2019
And her credentials are impeccable, no doubt, having gone to the same science schools as Gore.
A Common Thread: Time
“Experts” are especially careful to put their ends of the world comfortably in the future or in vague terms. Gore’s “point of no return,” for example, means…what? And if the predictions are closer in time, the predictor is a vague “senior official” who can’t be called on it when it didn’t happen, which brings up another common thread…
Recall, or A Lack Thereof
Few remember the global cooling/coming ice age claims from the ‘70s, and few will recall the earliest, most hysterical claims that said we’d all be dead by now. That’s in part because the predictions are wrong, and because people’s memory for such things is very, very short. While the climate catastrophes pronounced earlier in this century have yet to come to pass (depending on interpretation, of course), many of the draconian mandates are still in place. Germany’s industrial production has practically come to a standstill, and many homes are chilled because their “green energy” programs can’t keep the lights on and the furnaces running. Similar “earth-friendly” diktats mean rolling blackouts in California in the heat of summer.
Cynics win either way: everyone’s relieved when they’re wrong, and they’re regarded as seers when they’re right.
John D Beatty
Sensationalism Sells
The third common thread is how catastrophe becomes popular, often swiftly. Predict the end of the world tomorrow and most people will yawn. Predict it in a century, and some will listen, even start building an ark (figuratively). But predict that it will become inevitable if something doesn’t change in fifty years, and suddenly (nearly) everyone (important) scrambles to change whatever needs changing. We can see this in climate hysteria, and we’ll keep seeing it as long as someone with power gets something out of it. For example, now one of the biggest names in the climate change hysteria has changed his tune.
Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.
Bill Gates, October 2025
But which prognostication do we think will people remember? His earlier pronouncements about the end of the world in line with Broadway Al Gore of St Albans and his bunch, providing we don’t end industrial society, or the later “yeah, it’ll be tough for some, but the sky ain’t falling?”
No one is interested in houses that aren’t on fire. No one is interested in fires that don’t require massive government intervention to extinguish.
Journalistic truisms
The ice age predictions didn’t come with “we can fix this” programs requiring massive state intervention into every aspect of human life, like the global warming/climate change alarums have. Gate’s prediction, too, has nothing politicians and bureaucracies can use in their campaigns to gain more money and power. It’s worth noting that Erlich passed away last month at age 93. Ya gotta wonder if he had anything to say about how wrong he was about, well, pretty much everything he predicted. Most journalistic outlets just announced his demise; few mentioned his erroneous predictions, which is not surprising.
Predicting the end of the world has become nothing more than a power grab.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study of Miscalculation and Folly
My co-author and I have endured a great deal of criticism about our failure analysis by those who insist that the Japanese leaders who attacked the West in 1941 felt they could dictate terms on the Potomac. Well, no; most only ever felt they might just break even.
Some predictions are more dangerous than others.
And Finally...
On 18 April:
1942: James Doolittle and his eighteen B-25 raiders launch from USS Hornet 250 miles east of their intended launch point. They would reach Japan around noon, catching the Japanese flat-footed. The physical damage they did was negligible; the psychological damage great and lasting.
1943: Betty Tramer and Hudson Beatty were joined in matrimony in a small ceremony in Detroit, Michigan. The groom, on leave from the Army, remained in town for another five days before he was off again to Ft. Bragg, thence to France. Dad would return in 1944.
And today is NATIONAL COLUMNISTS’ DAY, commemorating the death of Ernie Pyle on Ie Jima Island on this day in 1945. A well-known human interest columnist before the war, Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his reporting on “GI Joe,” the common soldier.