The predictions
sometimes
contradict each other,
and sometimes the
same catastrophe
is predicted repeatedly
for many decades.
“All the glaciers
in Eastern Greenland
are rapidly melting,”
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Sunday Courier reported
on Dec. 17, 1939.
“The possibility
of a prodigious
rise in the surface
of the ocean
with resultant
widespread inundation,
arising from an Arctic
climate phenomenon
was discussed yesterday
by Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a noted
Swedish geophysicist at the
University of California
Geophysical Institute,”
a 1947 article in
The West Australian said.
“The glaciers of Norway
and Alaska are only half
the size they were
50 years ago,”
said Dr. William Carlson,
an Arctic expert,
according to the
Feb. 18, 1952,
edition of The Cairns
[Australia] Post.
“There are now six million
square miles of ice
in the Arctic.
There once were 1
2 million square miles,”
said Arctic explorer Adm.
Donald McMillan, according to
the March 10, 1955, issue
of Rochester, New York’s
Democrat and Chronicle.
“It is already too late
for the world to avoid
a long period of famine,”
The Salt Lake Tribune
reported in 1967,
citing Paul Ehrlich’s
prediction of famines
by 1975.
“Scientist predicts
a new ice age
by 21st century,”
The Boston Globe
reported on April 16, 1970,
saying that pollution expert
James Lodge predicted
that “air pollution
may obliterate the sun
and cause a new ice age
in the first third of the
new century.”
“An international team
of specialists has concluded,
from eight indexes of climate,
that there is no end in sight
to the cooling trend
of the last 30 years,
at least in the Northern
Hemisphere,”
The New York Times
reported this in 1978.
The small nation
of the Maldives
was threatened to be
completely covered by
“a gradual rise in
average sea level,”
Agence France-Presse
reported in 1988,
noting that:
“the end of the Maldives
and its people could come
sooner if drinking water
supplies dry up by 1992,
as predicted.”
Yet 31 years later,
the Maldives are thriving.
The population has doubled
since the 1980s, and its
picturesque islands
are “set for a flurry of
new resort openings,”
Hotelier Maldives
reported in 2018.
I looked up some recent