Apocalypse Postponed

Climate Scientist Moves Global Meltdown from 2018 to 2168

In 1988, climate change “scientist” James Hansen predicted that within 20 to 30 years New York City’s West Side Highway would “be under water.”

“And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds,” Hansen said at the time, as recalled by reporter Bob Reiss during an interview 16 years ago with Salon. “And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change. There will be more police cars … (because) you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”

Uh huh …

That was about 30 years ago, yet not surprisingly, New York City remains OK for the most part, save for its radical leftist mayor, Bill de Blasio.

So now that Hansen’s predictions about New York City being flooded have clearly not come true, what has he done? Surprise, surprise — the fake “scientist” has upgraded his prediction by claiming in a paper published last year that if the United States continues to use fossil fuels, sea levels would increase by “several meters over a timescale of 50 to 150 years.”

And just last week he addressed the prospect of further temperature increases during an interview with New York magazine. Keep in mind that Hansen predicted in a greenhouse model that there would be “an increase of from two to five degrees Fahrenheit” in global temperatures by 2018, as quoted from December 1998 edition of Spin magazine.

“I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice,” he said last week. “But the biggest effect will be that melting ice. In my opinion that’s the big thing – sea-level rise – because we have such a large fraction of people on coastlines, more than half of the large cities in the world are on coastlines.”

And yet, still no sign of the promised acceleration of sea level rise over the last century.

It's become such a problem that global warming merchants have begun the practice of adjusting the past satellite data, lowering old rates of sea level rise, so that more recent rates will be elevated by comparison. Unfortunately, the individual tidal charts, like that of Baltimore above, are no subject to those "tweaks." At least not yet.