Climate Swindle: Meet the new scare, same as the old scare

The climate apocalypse bandwagon first got going nearly as long ago as the first moon landing, but shows no signs of falling apart despite a dismal record of no-show of its forecasts, as Climate Change Dispatch explains. The urge to blame humans for any and all vagaries, real or imagined, of the climate seems deep-rooted despite this ongoing lack of predictive success.

This month, The Wall Street Journal celebrated its 130th anniversary by republishing salient articles spanning that period, including this retrospectively illuminating report from February 2, 1978:

A climatic disaster, triggered by the continued burning of oil and coal, could result in the submergence of much of Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas in the next 50 years, an Ohio State University scientist predicted… “I contend that a major disaster – a rapid five-meter rise in sea level caused by deglaciation of West Antarctica – may be imminent or in progress, after atmospheric carbon dioxide has only doubled,” John H. Mercer, a glacier geologist, asserted.

By some miracle, fortunately, Florida and Holland were still with us over a decade later.

That’s when the United Nations issued a remarkably duplicative warning in June 1989.

For temporal context, that was so long ago that the Berlin Wall still trapped millions in a socialist paradise, Michael Jordan was still two seasons away from his first NBA title and Ronald Reagan wasn’t even six months out of office.

But this time, as reported by the San Jose Mercury-News, they really meant it when they sounded the alarm:

A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect.

Well, he was right that entire nations were wiped off the face of the earth during that 10-year window. But those casualties most notably included East Germany and the Soviet Union due to the collapse of communism, not rising sea levels.

Nevertheless, the apocalyptic warnings only seemed to accelerate with the passing of each expiring “window of opportunity” to halt climate change.

Continued here.