Back to the Cave: Failed Prophecies of the Environmentalist Extremists

I was going to post this as a comment in yesterday’s classic rant, but I think it deserves an entry of its own:
The thing is, there is climate change happening, and it is almost certainly man-made, and it almost certainly will have repercussions, and these repercussions will need to be dealt with.  But the fucking stupid thing is when people take certain ecological activists (who are increasingly being proven wrong, by the way) as being Irrefutable Prophets, and then try to push extreme and radical agendas based on their warnings of doom. 

This only leads to most people either becoming actively opposed to the whole notion of doing things about climate change, conservationism etc because they see it as a threat(which indeed, if people like the ones in my article were allowed to set policy, it certainly WOULD be a threat to most people’s lives), or become hopeless and apathetic, not bothering to do anything because “those ‘scientists’ said that in 2 years 89% of all the world’s species will die, so what does it matter if I waste electricity.. its too late anyways”

They’re doing more harm than good on every level.  And they’ve been wrong over and over again; its not that the science is wrong, about there being climate change, but the predictions made by these eco-radicals have been consistently wrong.  Let’s look at a few:

In 1995, Ross Gelbspan predicted that by 2010 there would be 200 million “Climate refugees”, forces to abandon their homes due to global warming.

About 10 years later, the UN made a slightly less extreme claim of 50 million climate refugees by 2010, and then when that prediction didn’t come true they tried to erase the evidence that they’d ever made it.
 
 Back in 1997, Al Gore predicted (with his usual smugness) that there would be a massive increase of storm activity and more severe winds from “El Nino” which was going out of control because of climate change. He was wrong. The El Nino of 97/98 turned out to be the strongest to date.

In 1999, you might recall that Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of Queensland University claimed that due to global warming the Great Barrier Reef would die within as short a time as a few months! He repeated the claim in 2006, and then again in 2007, each time stating that it could be as little as a few months before the reef died. In fact, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network has stated that global warming has done no damage to the reef, and its still very much alive in 2012.

In 2000, british environmentalist Dr. David Viners claimed that by 2010 English schoolchildren “aren’t going to know what snow is” firsthand as subzero winter snows would cease in the UK. The last few years have in fact produce bitterly cold winters in the UK and most of europe, with plenty of snow.
In his Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed that within the next decade from the film there would be a huge increase in hurricane activity.  While its true that there have been changes to hurricane activity in the last few years, including some strong hurricanes, there has been no actual increase in the overall volume of hurricane activity. Overall global hurricane energy is actually at its lowest level since the 1970s.

In 2004 the WWF (world wildlife fund) claimed that by 2012 polar bears would have ceased to reproduce in the Hudson Bay area. That hasn’t happened, they’re still going at it up there.

In 2007 professional climate alarmist David Jones claimed that Australia was doomed to permanent drought and that every single Australian city was about to run out of water, and that the Murray-Darling basin (Australia’s largest irrigation system) would go dry in a matter of years; Tim Flannery repeated the claim stating that Adelaide would be completely out of water by 2009, and that Perth would have to be completely abandoned very shortly.  As of last year, not a single major Australian city is in any danger of running out of water, there were ample floods in 2011, and the basin is operating at about 87% capacity.

In april 2008, Canadian climate-activists (including Dr. David Barber, and quoted by famous Professional Climate Activist David Suzuki) claimed that that same summer the North Pole would  completely melt. In fact, in 2008 the arctic ice cover increased somewhat since 2007.  When it proved not to happen, Barber amended his prediction to state that the north pole would be ice-free by no later than 2014.  While it is incontrovertibly true that climate change has affected the ice of the north pole, there hasn’t been a single ice-free year in the north pole between then and now and it seems extremely unlikely that there will be this year or next.

An innumerable legion of climate change lobbyists have claimed that “this year will be the hottest year on record” in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.  They have been wrong every time, as the current record for global temperature continues to be held by 1998.

So again, I don’t think Climate Change is a “myth”; I do think its absolutely being hijacked (and ironically leading to a public rejection of the very notion) by a group of radicals with a Back to the Cave agenda of fake “sustainability” who have no qualms whatsoever about masking their ridiculous and very unscientific predictions in the respectable facade of science in order to try to get their agendas through, in the effort to sabotage the notion that we can look at things rationally and apply solutions that involve innovation and scientific/technological development to dealing with the difficulties of climate change, rather than carbon-footprint ponzi-schemes and repressive social engineering.

RPGPundit

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(originally posted January 18, 2013; on the old blog)