Missed It By That Much!

Snow in southern Italy on New Years

Botched environmental predictions for 2015

1) Two decades ago, the UN came up with several models that all predicted that by 2015, the Earth would have warmed by at least a degree Fahrenheit. Yet in the last two decades, there has instead been virtually no warming according to satellite temperature measurements.

So they changed the name from "global warming" to "global climate change" to "global climate instability" to be able to place blame for nearly any negative weather event on human influence.

Yanomani village from the air

2) Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, got famous for his 1968 book “the Population Bomb” which predicted that increasing human populations would spell doom.
. . .
“Half of the populations and species in tropical moist forests would be extinct early in the next century [the 2000s] and none would be left by 2025,” he warns on page 291. He added that that his model indicated that, on the upper bound, complete extinction would occur as soon as 2010.

Rain forests remain under environmental pressure for wood, to clear for crops (often to grow biomass for alcohol for fuel), and even for living space, but vast areas of tropical forest remain, approximately 2.4 million square miles, or 5% earth's land area including areas large enough to hide natives people with no contact with civilization.

Ain't fracking beautiful?

3) A Pennsylvania state government “Student and Teacher Guide” reads: “Some estimates of the oil reserves suggest that by the year 2015 we will have used all of our accessible oil supply.”

Frack, baby, frack.

4) “Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015,” Yale Environment 360 reported in 2012.

Photographer is almost a good as seal

Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then. At its lowest point during 2014, sea ice covered about 1.7 million square miles -- an area nearly half the size of the United States.

And proxy studies suggest that Arctic ice cover was even less during the Holocene climate optimum approximately 6,000-10,000 years ago, maybe even ice free in summer. And Polar Bears got through it just fine.

5) Dr. John Holdren, who currently serves as the White House Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, made dire predictions about global warming in the 1980s.

Paul Ehrlich cites Holdren in his 1987 book “The Machinery of Nature”, noting that: “As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

Holdren is still holding out hope for a catastrophe by 2020. But the places that do starve, starve as a result of a lack of development, not too much.

“It is a bit too soon, on the eve of 2015, to make any firm pronouncements about what will or will not happen by 2020,” Holdren wrote.

And Ehrlich continues to linger on the planet, despite his belief it would be better off without most of it.

I would say that it's bad business practice for an environmental scientist to make a prediction that can be tested in his lifetime, but Holdren belies that by becoming the President's chief science adviser.



Linked at Pirate's Cove in this week's "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup." Thanks, Teach!