Former Vice President Al Gore not only won an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize, but also became a gazillionaire by making outrageous (and outrageously inaccurate) climate predictions.
Despite the fact that Gore’s poor forecasts have turned his book and “documentary” film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” into works of science fiction, he’s still called on occasionally to speak on the subject. Most recently, he was a guest speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland this year.
But rather than tempering his views, his faulty crystal ball seemed to have made him even more unhinged, and described “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans.”
Al Gore was by no means the first.
Other so-called climate experts have foretold global doom and gloom for more than half a century.
Here are Newsmax’s list of the top six, listed in chronological order:
1967: Global Famine by 1975
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that “it is already too late.” We should expect global famine within eight years, according to a Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrich. He warned that the “time of famines” is upon us and will be at its worst and most disastrous by 1975.
Ehrich, who wrote “The Population Bomb,” blamed the coming famine on overpopulation, and said that governments will eventually have to step up birth control measures and even introduce sterilization agents into drinking water and staple food products.
The world population when he announced his prediction in 1967 was 3.47 billion. By 2020 it had more than doubled, to 7.79 billion, and one of the main problems facing Americans is obesity, not hunger.
1969: Humanity Will Disappear in Cloud of Blue Steam by 1989
Two years after Ehrich predicted famine, he announced that hunger would be the least of our problems. “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of a blue steam in 20 years,” he claimed.
“The situation is going to get continuously worse unless we change our behavior,” Ehrich added.
We must have been “extremely lucky.” We dodged the bullet.
1970: Ice Age Coming by 2000:
The Boston Globe reported in 1970 that we would be in an ice age within 30 years.
Those predictions were later “confirmed” by space satellites, according to a report in The Guardian.
“Telltale signs are everywhere -from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” reported Time.
This prediction remained the conventional wisdom until at least 1978, when The New York Times reported that an “International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere.”
1988: Oops! It’s Global Warming, and It Will Swallow Land Masses!
By the late 1980s climatologists traded in their ice age predictions for global warming.
Good news, right? Longer crop-growing seasons, lower energy usage, and we’ll all be walking around with dynamite suntans!
Nope! They claimed the warmer climate will result in the rise of oceans, which will gobble up land masses.
The AFP reported in 1988 that the Maldives, an island nation south of India, would completely disappear in 30 years — 2018.
A year later and closer to home, climatologist Jim Hansen said that New York City’s West Side Highway would be underwater by 2019.
It’s 2023 and the Maldives remain a treasured vacation destination, and the biggest dangers facing Manhattan motorists are traffic snarls and driver rage.
2000: Say Bye, Bye to a White Christmas:
Within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event,” according to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’” he said, according to The Independent.
Not only did heavy winter snowfall — measured in feet, not inches — disrupt holiday travel this year, but the Florida panhandle even saw snow for the first time in memory.
2008: The Arctic will be Totally Ice-Free by 2018:
“We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes,” NASA climate scientist James Hansen told the AP. “The Arctic is the first tipping point and it’s occurring exactly the way we said it would.”
This would be the same James Hansen who predicted in 1989 that Manhattan’s West Side Highway would be underwater in 20 years.
Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.
In his book and film, Al Gore latched onto the earliest year in the range, and said that the Arctic will be ice-free by 2013.
However, by 2015 NASA reported that winter gains in Arctic ice were exceeding summer losses. That net gain continues to today.
2008, you may recall, is the same year that then-candidate Barack Obama claimed he would make all the bad things go away.
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” said Obama upon winning the Democratic presidential nomination.
Maybe he just knew it was all poppycock.
And maybe that’s why he purchased waterfront property when he left the White House.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz’s Reports — More Here.
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