" ... Mankind has always seemed to be fascinated by promises of apocalypse and global catastrophe.
... 1970s Ice Age scare
Numerous reports in the 1970s reflected concern that the Earth was
heading towards a new ice age.
These are nowadays often dismissed as mere newspaper gossip, but they were far more than that.
Some scientists forecast a full ice age, for instance NASA’s Dr. Rasool, who said that air pollution would cause a drop in temperatures of six degrees.
Such predictions were of the more extreme variety, but there was widespread acceptance amongst climate scientists that global temperatures had fallen sharply since the 1940s, and that this trend was likely to continue.
The US government was so concerned about events that it set up a Subcommittee on Climate Change in 1974, in turn leading to the US Climate Program in the same year and the subsequent formation of the Climate Analysis Center, designed to monitor and predict climate change.
This was the predecessor to today’s NCEI, the National Centers for Environmental Information run by the US Department of Commerce.
Needless to say, the cooling trend ended soon after the subcommittee was set up, and warming resumed.
... In the 1980s, the cooling trend reversed, and it did not take long for forecasts of apocalypse to re-emerge, but this time based on the idea of a hothouse planet.
In 1989, Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program did not hold back, warning us that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000; coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees’; sea levels would rise by up to three feet; coastal regions would be inundated – one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a quarter of its 90 million people, and a fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would
be flooded, cutting off its food supply;
it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone; shifting climate patterns would bring back the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s to Canadian and US wheat lands.
The most conservative scientific estimate was that the Earth’s temperature would rise from 1 to 7 degrees over the following 30 years.
Well, the year 2000 came and went, emissions of greenhouse gases carried on climbing, and global temperatures rose by a modest 0.4°C.
... Noel Brown gave us until 2000 to save the planet.
Australian Chief Scientist, Penny Sackett, was more optimistic.
... she warned us we had an extra five years to save the world from disastrous global warming.
Three years earlier, in 2006, Al Gore was much more specific, threatening that, unless drastic measures were taken to reduce greenhouse gases within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return.
When the world ignored Al Gore’s warning, the UN’s Christiana Figueres gave us another three years’ breathing space, but that deadline unfortunately ran
out too, just five months ago.
... The world has not ended as predicted, despite the fact that emissions of carbon dioxide have continued to grow rapidly year on year.
It is noteworthy that none of these predictions of doom came with any scientific basis attached.
On the contrary, the official reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) invariably shy away from making such predictions. ...