The climate doomsayers promised a hell that never arose

Democrats have run away from climate change as an issue, but some folks maintain that the doomsayers were proven right.“Climate models have been extremely accurate, even going back to the 1970s,” states left-of-center writer Noah Smith. Smith posts a chart showing what various climate predicted (red dots) as far as temperature increase, comparing that to actual recorded temperature increases (blue dots). But “one- or two-degree increase in temperature” wasn’t the climate prediction people cared about. What mattered to the public were all the promised effects of this warming.“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” promised Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently, in a typical instance of insane, demagoguing hyperbole. But the world is not going to end, and everyone knows it. Everyone especially knows it because of the long record of bad predictions about the results of warming.“Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Will ‘Disappear’ Within Two Decades With No Intervention,” Agence France-Presse promised in 2014.Coral now covers much more of the reef than it did in 2014, including three times as much on the northern portion.“Going to Glacier? You Should Hurry,” a New York Times reporter warned in 2004 about Glacier National Park. “The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting, and not at a glacial pace, but so quickly that scientists from the United States Geological Survey predict that there won’t be any left by 2030.” The culprit: “Global Warming.”Soon, the official prediction was more dire:“It’s an oft-repeated statistic that the glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park will disappear by the year 2030,” reported National Geographic News in 2009.“But Daniel Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who works at Glacier, says the park’s namesakes will be gone about ten years ahead of schedule….”Today, both glaciers are still massive, and the National Park Service reports that Jackson Glacier underwent “little change between 2009 and 2020,” and basically no change in the past few years.We could find 100 predictions like this. These were efforts by climate activists to make us understand the consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions caused a temperature rise, which caused bad things we could comprehend.When those bad things that we could comprehend never appeared, folks started doubting the rest of the story.