Have you ever wanted a nice, compact image you could share on social media whenever you need to put some eco-worrier in his/her/its place?
Well, one showed up in my social media timeline this morning, and it is worth sharing.
The “climate doom” timeline
“It’s worse than we thought!” should be “It’s not as bad as we hoped”
Ja. Ja.
and now this:
(click on my namre)
Interesting! Scary, though
Sweet … 🙂
It would be sweeter if it was more honest.
That is not true, he said some scientists had told it “could be” ice free by 2013.
So we proudly bring out our list of “facts” and someone goes to check it and finds we are not being truthful. Our protestations about alarmists not being truthful falls on its arse, we look silly, and you audience ignores anything more you tell them.
Great work WUWT.
…a distinction without a difference. Not citing WHERE OwlGoracle got the information does not change the fact that he SAID IT. Many predictions use “could” instead of WILL. It is a list of failed predictions, not a doctoral thesis with FOOTNOTES.
In 2008, James Hansen said the arctic WILL be ice free in 5 to 10 years.
Sure, but he never specified earth years, did he??
@BallBounces
2008+5=2013
2008+10=2018
😉
False attribution ( Gore did not claim that himself, he cited unnamed “scientist” hearsay ) and falsely claiming he said it would happen when he said it could happen is not “a distinction without a difference”, it’s called a straw man argument.
This is exactly what skeptics have been accusing others of for years.
You just made my point. He did not claim to be the SOURCE of that CAGW Alarmism, but he did SAY it. Those words came out of his mouth, so SAYING IT is SAYING IT, regardless of who came up with it or whether he gave those words proper attribution. What do you do with all of those nits you pick?
Greg
Thank you. It´s very good that you finally understand your own language.
Greg,
How old are you? I only ask because it may explain a few things.
Greg.
The man has a Nobel Peace Prize sitting on a shelf for his contributions toward climate change for goodness sake. He can certainly speak with authority on such matters.
Irrespective of the accuracy of such statements.
(And before you site the other 1000odd other scientists (IPCC) who also received it, I know he wasn’t alone.)
BTW, reexamine straw-man argument. Does not apply here. If anything it would be argumentum ad verecundium (appeal to authority).
Greg.
The man has a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to climate change sitting on the shelf for goodness sake . {along with the IPCC}.
Lookup straw-man argument again. Doesn’t apply here.
Argumentum ad verecunidum (appeal to authority) would apply though for VP Gore’s statements.
You’re right, Greg. To paraphrase another great “orator”, it depends on what the definition of it is.
I think it more likely most people will ignore your weak, trivial argument.
Greg
Oddly enough this subject came up elsewhere today. I sat through the al gore Nobel acceptance speech of 2007 so you didn’t have to.
https://judithcurry.com/2019/09/21/week-in-review-science-edition-109/#comment-900774
This leads to a transcript I found of the gore speech. Looking in context he was referencing all sorts of things he said would happen if we didn’t change our ways. He was obviously trying to impress his distinguished audience and spur them into action with an apocalyptic view of the near future and quoted disasters of the time to prove his pount.
In that context He certainly did endorse the notion that we would be ice free in 7 to 22 years according to two separate researchers.
Tonyb
Gore’s comment in his Nobel speech were:
“Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.
(Probably a long dramatic pause and then …)
Seven years from now.”
Oh … he was only quoting someone else! That’s OK?
“Sorry Officer, I didn’t cause the unnecessary panic and harm! …. I was only quoting someone else when I yelled FIRE in the movie theater.”
BBC article extract discussing Gore’s Nobel speech …. 12 December 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’ By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco
Headline …. “Arctic summer melting in 2007 set new records”
“Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.
Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.” (end)
What is BBC now predicting?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46976040
24 Jan 2019
“A rapid climate shift under way in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn.
So, it’s now only a matter of time, the researchers say, before this section of the Arctic effectively becomes part of the Atlantic. It could happen in as little as a decade, they warn.” (end)
“The purpose of Newspeak (aka “Climate Change”) …. was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Environmentalism, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” (apologies to George O.)
Al Gore in his own words:
https://youtu.be/Pxq4PmFV6yg
Al Gore has made entire movies that are entirely consisting of fact free assertions, things he got wrong, and predictions that never came true.
Even the courts have ruled that he lied in his movies, and they cannot be shown in schools in some countries unless the kids are first told of the numerous lies in the movie they are about to see.
September, 2019: Greg defends Al Gore’s failed record of climate predictions.
Jeezus, I’m not defending Gore or saying he never lied or that his film was not a crock of political pseudo-scientific crap. It was.
There is so much you can attack him for , why make shit up.
What I am saying is that if you want to attack him be accurate , don’t twist and make false claims when attacking him for making false claims. Can’t you see that that is counter productive and just a tad hypocritical ?!
Absolutely right, Greg. It’s very counterproductive. Skeptics have to get their facts straight, stick to the science, and avoid the temptation to oversimplify: The politics of AGW are completely irrelevant: even if “climate science” is a government-funded hoax, you cannot prove that to a True Believer (I’ve tried). What may work is the truth: what’s really up with sea level rise, Arctic ice minima, etc.
Greg,
Gore’s claims concerning Arctic ice loss are so exaggerated that the UK High Court decreed they are political propaganda and, therefore, teachers who show Gore’s film to schoolchildren must inform the children of more ‘accepted’ information about the loss.
This sub-thread is about you having written,
“2008 Climate genius Al Gore predicts ice free Arctic by 2013.
That is not true, he said some scientists had told it “could be” ice free by 2013.
So we proudly bring out our list of “facts” and someone goes to check it and finds we are not being truthful. Our protestations about alarmists not being truthful falls on its arse, we look silly, and you audience ignores anything more you tell them.”
But, as Nicholas McGinley told you,
“Al Gore has made entire movies that are entirely consisting of fact free assertions, things he got wrong, and predictions that never came true.
Even the courts have ruled that he lied in his movies, and they cannot be shown in schools in some countries unless the kids are first told of the numerous lies in the movie they are about to see.”
McGinley is right. This is the link to the ‘Guidance Notes’ which the UK High Court ruled teachers must use if they show Gore’s film to UK school children
http://www.metlink.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/teachers/inconvenient_truth.pdf
In its Introduction that document says,
” However, in parts of the film, Gore presents evidence and arguments which do not accord with mainstream scientific opinion. This guidance points out, on a scene by scene basis, the areas where further input will be required from teaching staff. This guidance is designed to help teaching staff encourage their pupils to assess the validity and credibility of different information sources and explore different points of view so as to form their own opinions. ”
On Arctic Ice, the Guidance Notes say,
“Q: Is the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic growing?
A: No, there may be some seasonal changes but the overall trend is for melting.
Arctic ice is shrinking significantly (by 20% in area and 40% in thickness since
around the mid 1970s – http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html), but Antarctic ice is
actually increasing. Antarctic sea ice is showing no significant change, whereas
Antarctic land ice is actually growing owing to increased precipitation (the latter
caused by global warming –
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/Key_Topics/Climate_Change/ccps.html). ”
So, your dispute about Gore’s use of the word “could” is (at best) mistaken. According to UK law, Gore’s statement including the word ‘could’ was misleading exaggeration so severe that it is political propaganda.
Richard
Gore has made a career out of making alarmist claims that have failed to pan out.
During those years, he was a regular fixture on news shows and such, repeating the same sort of crap in the video I linked to over and over.
On many of those occasions, he was not quite to circumspect as in this one instance, and as other here have noted, left out the “could’s” and left out the part about how it was only Summer ice that might possibly get below a few Wadhams (recall that some of these so called scientists backpedaled by later stating that anything under 1 million square kilometers counts as “no ice”), and stated flatly that ice would be gone.
Besides for that, Gore was merely in the vanguard of people making such claims, and many others repeated them, exaggerated the claims, left out any qualifiers…yada yada yada.
In fact there were entire years in which it was regularly announced in banner headlines that a new study “has shown” that it is “worse than we thought”.
I for one have no amnesia for these pronouncements, which have in fact never really stopped.
How many times have we all heard the exaggerations, in which the bogus 97% of climate scientists said so and so was morphed into 97% of all scientists?
And many of the exaggerations and retellings and headlines versions were even more over the top than that.
Skeptics have the nearly impossible task of trying to counteract a decades long continuous blizzard of lies.
I do not see how it is very helpful to become overly strident in correcting a terse recap of the timeline of just a small sample of those lies.
That is all I am saying.
Just to restate it succinctly: Gore appeared hundreds of times in a span of a few years repeating this nonsense ad nauseum. Are you really sure he NEVER ONCE said what this recap says he said?
Oh, it’s Gregta, splitting hairs and saying “How dare you!!”
Zzzzzzz…
She said we came to her for leadership.
I didn’t, and won’t.
The prophecy “and a child will lead them” did not refer to saving the world from a fake catastrophe.
Crispin
You got it wrong the prophecy was ‘ a chide will lead them’ and she certainly is a chide!
Tonyb
A definition:
could
/kəd,kʊd/
verb
past of can.
used to indicate possibility.
“they could be right”
One needs to listen to how words are used as well as which ones.
Al was attempting to persuade his audience that an ice-free Arctic was a possibility, as ‘could’ has that meaning. Do you not purchase insurance for the same reasoning – Al has made a fortune in the same way.
I look forward to Al and all of his acolytes naming and shaming the same scientists he was quoting for their failed ‘coulds’. Would you care to start the ball rolling and let us know who they were as you seem familiar with Al’s work.
The equal negative of “could” is “could not”. Could is a weasel-word in science because it’s entirely fact free.
Climatology and especially media reporting of climatology is FULL of weasel words.
So attack Gore for making vague claims and demanding we change the world based on nothing but vague claims. Point out the many “could be”s which turned out be “was not”s.
Even your possible outcomes did not materialise, so why do we still need to change the world. Should we take any more notice of you current outlier extremist “could be” claims. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, not things which did not quite pan out.
Point out that Arctic sea ice minimum is just the same this year as when he made that claim over a decade ago.
Not to beat a dead horse Greg, and I do understand the point you are making, but Gore said a lot of things on a lot of occasions, and he was not always careful to make proper use of the qualifiers.
Jeff Alberts below has it right, or at least the way I can remember it.
I am sure if someone is diligent enough, we can find instances of Gore leaving out the “could”.
If someone finds an instance of him saying it without the could, then the bullet point in the above list is correct, no?
It is for sure that you tube (among other sites) has been scrubbed of a great many videos.
For instance, try finding the video of Obama telling illegal aliens that they can vote. You may be able to find one, but not easily.
I cannot even count how many times I have looked for videos I have previously watched and linked to in comments, only to find they are no longer turning up in searches.
Actually Gore did informally tell a group that, and it was caught on camera. He has since successfully had it mostly scrubbed from the web. I saw the video, but wasn’t able to save it.
There’s Gregta, splitting hairs and saying “How dare you, WUWT!!”
Zzzzzzz…
Greg,
No matter how you try to slice it, Al Gore clearly was fear mongering by pushing the idea of the Arctic’s melting away soon. Here have a look at this overview:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/
Aggressive predictions? Its not science that leads you to do that. Hence, it shouldn’t have been described as science.
Greg: I know “progressives” think a lie for a good cause is okay, but at WUWT it is not. Here is snopes.com finding:
Fact ChecksPoliticsEnvironment
Did Al Gore Predict Earth’s Ice Caps Would Melt by 2014?In the late 2000s, the former U.S. Vice President sometimes inaccurately represented studies that predicted the timeline for an ice-free Arctic.
ALEX KASPRAK
Claim
Al Gore predicted that Earth’s “ice caps” will melt away by 2014.
What’s True
In the late 2000s, Al Gore made a series of high-profile statements suggesting the possibility that Arctic sea ice could be completely gone during the summer by around 2013 or 2014.
What’s False
Gore did not himself make these predictions but said (in some cases erroneously) that others had; Gore never referred to a year-long lack of ice for both poles, but instead largely referenced Arctic sea ice in the summer.
So Greg, you have spun a lie out this statement. Shame on you. We now know to discount or ignore your contributions. Unfortunate, because we welcome honest critics and corrections. All of the consensus team has an open invitation to publish an article here.
A thing you don’t know about scientifically literate sceptics is they are just as brutally critical of sceptics that put a poor piece of work out because it reflects badly on the dedicated. Greg you perhaps are too young to know that before all this politically freighted climate “science” came out, scepticism was actually the default position for scientists reviewing new work. It has only become a pejorative in recent post normal times.
Amazing, you cite a fact check which backs up what I said and then claim I have “spun a lie out this statement. ”
Gore said “could be” and WUWT rewrites this as “will be” changing a possibility into a certainty, in order to claim he was wrong. That is a “lie” if you want to find one.
Yes, skeptics should be “just as brutally critical of sceptics”. That is exactly what I was doing and just look at the flames I got in response. Not as objective we pretend to be, eh?
BTW, I’m a scientifically trained skeptic and pushing 60. Not Greta’s class mate.
Greg (Griff) WTF are you babbling about? You clearly didn’t get the post. It’s not too long even for “no child left behind” types, try to read it again and let us know what you find this time.
(Greg, is NOT Griff) SUNMOD
Well Greg, after making the public statement several times, Gore gave up his source…Professor Wieslaw Maslowski. Maslowski and his group were known to be outliers with aggressive ice loss predictions. Gore cherry-picked the worst he could find and ignored the rest.
And the kicker? Maslowski said he has no idea where Gore got evidence to support such claims from his work. So Gore then said he was told during a private conversation (which Maslowski never substantiated).
And while Gore only said “possibly” ice free and not a 100% guarantee…he either had the conviction it would be ice free or nearly ice free, or chose to take an impossibility and imply it was possible just for the sake of rhetoric.
Thanks Micheal.
So saying Gore pulled this claim out of his ass and was not backed up even by the scientist who makes extremist projections may be better than building a strawman argument by rewriting what he actually said in order to claim he was wrong.
Thanks for that added info. I was not aware he had ever been forced to say where he got his anonymous claims from.
No. Gore’s claim about Maslowski’s projection was accurate. Maslowski even has a paper in 2012 supporting 2016±3 years for his Arctic sea-ice free projection.
Maslowski’s claims were given publicity by the BBC before Gore used them. They are not anonymous claims.
It is revisionism to come now and say that the things we were then told were going to happen weren’t told to us.
That’s not entirely correct. The BBC reported on Maslowski’s Arctic ice projections in December 2007 after the AGU meeting:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm
Maslowski went on record in that article saying that his 2013 Arctic sea-ice free projection was too conservative.
It would be nice if each line item had a reference. It would still be relatively compact. Having lived through it, I know most of it is true, but it would be nice to document it so younger folks can see history as it happened.
Independent – Saturday 4 June 2016
https://tinyurl.com/y4mt8ucs
“The Arctic is on track to be free of sea ice this year or next for the first time in more than 100,000 years.” A prediction made in 2012 by Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University.
Except that “Ice free” by the good professors definition is “‘an area of less than one million square kilometres” – “about six United Kingdoms.”
Ah right, so not actually ice free then.
Meanwhile, back in the real world: “Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2019 minimum extent on Sept. 18. At 1.60 million square miles WUWT – https://tinyurl.com/y3e8bmml
I think we’re pretty safe citing any wild claims about melting Arctic sea ice. They are all wrong!
“The Arctic is on track to be free of sea ice this year or next for the first time in more than 100,000 years.” A prediction made in 2012 by Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University.”
“The date was 11 August 1958 and the Skate had just become the first submarine to surface at the North Pole.” https://www.navalhistory.org/2011/08/11/uss-skate-ssn-578-becomes-the-first-submarine-to-surface-at-the-north-pole
Good fracking grief!
It’s a funny list of one-liners. Almost every item on the list would require a couple of paragraphs to explain the context.
This is as ridiculous as Snopes’ “fact-checking” of Al Gore’s statement about creating the Internet.
Thats one of their core defense mechansims , indefinite language.
Bit like the weasel words defending Flannery re the “dams will never refill” statement which could another submission for the list
Yo Greg! Has it occured to you yet that the MSM deals largely in environmental lies yet literally millions of otherwise reasonably bright people believe them?
Oh wait! I’ll bet that you see those who disagree as too stupid to be persuaded of your truths.
So the tax scam goes back to the only time england won the world cup lol. Has anything the u.n. and ipcc club said ever got right?
Image saved and sent to all my devices….
Thank you!
That’s a very useful item! Bravo.
Where is the Club of Rome these days?
Pushing Greta, apparently.
I saw this video yesterday, its brilliant. And I am glad people are actually telling the truth about the co2 seeing puppet.
Red ice tv source link:
https://youtu.be/9Jpk8Ix1CCg
Excellent , thanks for that.
Soros Backed Climate Grifters
Lots of tearful acting without shedding a single one. Oh dear, Greta. Beware your handlers might tan your backside first next time to give a more convincing performance?
Miss Suzuki was 12 when she addressed the Rio summit in 1992. She claimed to be very worried about her future. Today she would be 39 or 40. Has anyone tracked her down to ask how she views things now?
Only 10?
The Club of Rome II is in the Vatican where the sponsor is Pope Francisco.
Club of Rome is currently headquartered at Winterthur, Canton Zurich, Switzerland.
Interesting:
Maurice Strong who established the UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Program, and the IPCC was also an executive member of Club of Rome.
Over the years, numerous big name people have been involved with both.
IPCC is made up of flapdoodle journalists sponsored by the UN. That’s made up of burned out politicians that are too useless to get elected anywhere else
The (revised) (revised) (revised) doomsday timeline (to be revised).
I would leave out the 1971 and 1972 items because the predicted due date has not arrived yet.
&exph=459&expw=550&q=vostok+temperature+graph&simid=608032377402492223&selectedindex=1&ajaxhist=0&vt=1&sim=11
Also, all of the previous warm periods were followed by rapid cooling. And the current warm period , the holocene, has lasted longer than the others.
David
That’s an interesting comment. The main phase of the MWP in England lasted from around 850 and ended abruptly around 1307 when the weather changed dramatically for the worse and there was a huge famine.
The years around 1540 were around the warmest in our record and came to an abrupt halt in the 1560’s, made famous by the Bruegel paintings of the severe snow and ice
Tonyb
Was 1540 the warmest year or just the hot dry summer in Europe(hottest european summer to date)? Don’t trying to downplay your comment, just curious.
We would likely have an very good idea about these sorts of questions, if the monumental volume of time and money being spent on pushing global warming alarmism and on wasteful renewables and such, had instead been spent doing actual research and actual science.
Little or no actual knowledge come of all of this effort and spending.
Instead, pretty much everything that had been learned over 100+ years has been erased, and a book of fairy tales penciled in to replace it all.
It’s all pump-and-dump scheme.
They let us invest into their fairy-tale fantasies, while they do exactly the opposite.
Probably the Simon–Ehrlich wager gave them some ideas. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager ]
1974: Space Satellites show new ice age coming fast
This one never made much sense.
A few images show ice and/or snow have increase from year to year.
Eureka! A new ice age, and it is coming fast.
There is a Mark Twain quote about such nonsense regarding a river.
I’ve posted this on this website before. But it seems very relevant to this thread:
M Courtney September 2, 2019 at 7:29 am
One of the key differences between alarmists and sceptics is that alarmists view AGW as a unique unprecedented event while sceptics see similarities between AGW and other things. Sceptics class AGW as a “Millennial Fear”.
This is not to say that sceptics don’t believe that the issue exists. It means sceptics believe that we have seen similar issues in the past and should moderate our response accordingly. The end of the world is predicted quite regularly.
Yet we haven’t run out of oil. We didn’t all starve in the 1980s. The ozone layer didn’t diminish until we were all blinded by the Sun. Trees survived the Acid Rain. We haven’t even run out of zinc.
And the Millennium Bug didn’t trigger WW3.
The reasons are at least two-fold.
Firstly the mere possibility of the catastrophe means actions are put in place to monitor and prevent. The problem then becomes “how much to spend on monitoring and prevention”. The Millennium Bug was a case in point. Making sure the nukes didn’t launch was probably worth the effort. Buying a new system which was Y2K compliant in the 1990s when you were going to upgrade anyway was certainly worth the effort. Hiring consultants for six months to save having to reboot the computers on January 1st (or 2nd) was often not worth it.
Secondly, the people who are most vocal about any issue are obviously the people who are most concerned. Therefore the self-declared experts are also self-selecting as being most alarmed. As evidence comes in the issue is always not as bad as first feared.
“This time is different” the Alarmists cry. They always do.
If by “…most concerned…” you mean “…most likely to receive the largesse of tax (other peoples’) money they’re recommending be thrown at the alleged problem…” then yeah, you nailed it. Those actually capable of addressing any problem are too busy addressing it to waste their time raising a ruckus. Activisting might describe it.
I still think about the tens of millions that were wasted because of “The Millennium Bug” that never was.
Banking, finance and accounting programs that “calculated” interest earnings, mortgage payments, bond maturities, etc., that the “due date” or pay off date was greater than 01-01-2000 didn’t “blowup”.
And a simple way to have “checked” if software did have a problem would have been to stage a ”test” run with a 2000 date.
Samuel, I can’t let this one go. I was working in IT at a bank prepping for Y2K. There were tens of thousands of places in that one bank’s programs that had to be changed to prevent a Y2K problem. Some problems could have been catastrophic. Every program, 10s of millions of lines of code, was examined, every program that was actually used was changed (and many, it turned out, were no longer used and removed from the system). Every program was tested multiple times, tests in which the date was “spoofed” to critical future dates depending on the program’s business function. Significant analysis was needed by business experts to determine what dates would be critical to the application. Every financial company, heck every company and every industry had to do this.
The reason Y2K was the crisis that never happened was because millions of people worked millions of hours to keep it from happening.
Some people have a desperate need to believe that everything is a conspiracy.
I was also in IT at the time and did all the testing and fixes at the company I was with. Yes there were problems that could have been catastrophic if not rectified, but the hype around the industry was completely over the top. In IT there are always risks that would be catastrophic to the business, how we identify and manage those risks is all that matters. Running around yelling “The sky is falling” doesn’t help.
Countries like Romania and Ethiopia did nothing, and were fine.
George V – September 29, 2019 at 2:50 pm
WOWEEEEE, …….. that really sounded impressive.
Anyway, George V, ….. it t’was way back in the mid to late 70’s that I was generating “loader rom fiemware”, via assembler code syntax and wanted to include a “real time clock” function.
And guess what, George V, ……. someone told me about a really simple algorithm for calculating correct “dates” for hundreds of years in the future.
I think the bank you speak of was really “flim-flammed” by their in-house software developers/recommenders/vendors. Their in-house programmers were probably …… “laughing all the way walking away from the bank“.
And ps, George, those programs you spoke of …… shudda went berserk and “out-into-the-weeds” the 1st time a 10, or 20, or 30 mortgage “payment” was being calculated past the 1999 date.
Samuel,
You aren’t wrong about firmware code, we stored dates as 16-bit values, not mmddyy, so that code was immune to Y2K issues. Many of those kind of systems don’t even store dates, so weren’t affected either (like pacemakers). The hype surrounding Y2K, especially about people with pacemakers dying and planes falling out of the air, was ridiculous. But – most business software at the time was written in Cobol and RPGII/III. The majority of those programmers cut their teeth using cards and/or reel-to-reel tape for primary storage and used tricks like storing the year as two characters (no binary level access to data in those languages). This created very real problems. I remember one grizzled veteran telling me how they tested their system one weekend by changing the clock to 1/1/2000 and rebooted the system. It crashed hard. The only way to get it back up was to change the date back. In those days a reboot took over an hour.
So while I don’t doubt there were people that milked that problem for all it was worth, there were also a lot of good honest people in the trenches that did yeoman’s work and saved many companies from bankruptcy. You do a disservice to all these people when you paint them all with the same brush.
…and you couldn’t change the date back until you could get it to boot up. 🙂 More than one computer has been turned into a boat anchor by faults just as ridiculous.
I spent a career with the telephone company and back in 1999 I suggested exactly that. But management and the engineers knew so much more-or so they said. My entire crew was on duty that night and we all made a lot of overtime-for nothing. They should have listened to us technicians. We knew better.
That’s called being ready just in case. Your managers didn’t want to be caught with their pants down if you were wrong. Cheap insurance really.
They didn’t “blow up” because all of them were fixed.
The fact that people pro-actively found the bugs and fixed them before they could cause problems is proof in the minds of some that the bugs never existed in the first place.
I for one spent about a month on a program fixing all of the Y2k issues in that program.
Those bugs weren’t imaginary, and the program would have “blown up” had I not done that work in time to get it to our customers before “2000-01-01”.
Those “date” bugs should have never been in the programs that were released to customers.
Those date bugs were a result of computing limitations. When developing early programs ram was limited and the extra bits required to store four digit years could not be spared. Once dll’s were introduced and ram availability increased those early programs should have been updated, in most cases recompiling with an upgraded compiler was all that was required. Unfortunately a lack of foresight and proactive maintenance created a totally unnecessary emergency allowing shysters to milk businesses for millions in unnecessary spending. Now we have climate as the emergency to achieve the same ends.
When the snake oil salesman tells you the results will not be seen until after he has left town, even selling snake oil is fake.
You have perfect hindsight I see. As Murph mentions, those compromises (not bugs) in how data was stored was reasonable at the time those programs were written (1970’s and 60’s in some cases). There was no reason for the original developers to assume their programs would still be running 30 or more years later, after all. Management didn’t want to spend the money or take the risk (of introducing new bugs) of upgrading or replacing software that worked and was (after many years and dollars) relatively bug-free. At least until they were forced to by the calendar. The fact that the media piled on with outrageous story of doom after another is not their fault or those that did the work to upgrade those systems.
What I really need is somewhere I can send folks I talk to who are ready to accept that they may have been lied to and misinformed and are prepared to be informed and want more than just my word for it.
Sadly, with the low level noise of articles here these day, I’m not going to say : oh just go have a look of WUWT.
This site needs a concise summary of Climategate issues : explanation of hide the decline, gatekeeping of peer review, rigging AR4, , fake “exoneration” etc. If I search for this stuff I’m more likely to get WonkyPedia or SkS. Any links to WUWT are just run of the mill stuff which no one not familiar with the issues is going to spend more than 10s looking at.
Here is an article that explains the history and modern obfuscations and skullduggery of the climate artifice. Hope this helps. https://fcpp.org/2019/09/17/there-is-no-climate-emergency/
I second your motion. One of the problems with searching using search engines is that most of them and all of the social media and YouTube are biased LEFT as has been pointed out here and on numerous other blogs. YouTube even adds a snippet beneath every skeptic video about “Climate Change” that uses the Wikipedia nonsense, so they are essentially placing a disclaimer on the content of the video….outrageous.
If you think the world needs a site that concentrates on the science of climate and nothing but the science. Feel free to start your own.
Here is the thing about these sorts of complaints: We live in a world with a lot of things happening, and a lot of people saying stuff.
But some days are slow news days, and some of the stuff people say is ridiculous nonsense.
If this site limited itself to big new developments, or stories and articles that were informative and interesting to any and all possible visitors, there would be days and perhaps whole weeks when nothing got posted.
There are a lot of blogs like that.
They are boring and dry, one reason is people stop going to those sites after a while.
If you want to direct people to info that may help them change their mind, there are easy ways to do exactly that: One is to create a list of pages in your browser’s favorites tab, which you save and categorize and name as you come across them.
Have a list of links and a file of graphs and another of photos. It takes half a second to click save or on the favorites icon.
Or, failing that or while you are compiling one, quickly come to this site, or Heller’s, and do a quick search on the site for a relevant article, and then copy that link to the person, which you can easy make sure is relevant and addresses the things you were discussing.
Both sites have an easily used search function, and umpteen articles to reference.
There is no topic or subtopic that will not give you a long list of articles on that very thing.
Besides for all of that, when I open WUWT, I get a page with a list of articles in date order.
Some look interesting to me, some not.
Some I open right away, some days later when I have more time or an bored.
Others I ignore, rather than opening the article and complaining that it sucks!
But that is just me.
If the people you refer here are not able to do what every internet user, including every child, does many times every hour…filter lists and streams of info and select something interesting to expand on… they are unlikely to be persuadable anyway.
You have great patience Nicholas. That is a great explanatory rejoinder. However, I believe Greg knows all that, but he’s here to be a sh!t disturber. There’s one at every party, and they often provide some fun fireworks.
There is more than one Greg
“when I open WUWT, I get a page with a list of articles in date order.
Some look interesting to me, some not.
Some I open right away, some days later when I have more time or an bored.
Others I ignore, rather than opening the article and complaining that it sucks!
But that is just me.”
It’s not just you. Many us do the same.
What 30 years of global cooling? we adjusted the world so that never happened!
Today mocking
97% of journal articles support dangerous global warming,
Obviously its hard to find good censorship when facebook and google pay so much!
I predict that the current interglacial period will eventually end and a new ice age will develop. But all this will take thousands to tens of thousands of years to unfold. Check back with me in 50,000 years to see if my predictions were correct.
Please all send this to your congressman and senators — THEY are the people that NEED to see articles like this.
”1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend”
Fixed. Data has been ”corrected”. Easy. What was the problem now?
what got me with that one is, that 1979 was chosen for the start point of the now dangerous warming trend
Due to obsolescence the Doom Line was no longer effective and was phased out. Environment Canada and NASA/GISS have replaced it with the North Warming System.
Each organization contributes its own expertise to the North Warming System.
Environment Canada maintains the NWS by removing temperature data prior to 1950, while its US counterpart retains pre-1950 data but adjusts records as required to keep warming within a range acceptable to stakeholders that include Greenpeace, WWF, the Sierra Club, and IPCC.
I think the list is missing dozens of recent predictions. I know they are talking mid century, but still it would have nice to have them there.
Here’s an expanded list with links to sources!
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-eco-pocalyptic-predictions-the-so-called-experts-are-0-50/
Glenn D
Below are the 41 failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions (with links):
1. 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000
4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070
7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
8. 1974: Another Ice Age?
9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph)
10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)
12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link)
13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
17. 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
18. 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’
25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link)
27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000
34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020
35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
36. 2006: Super Hurricanes!
37. 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015
38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
41. 1970s: Killer Bees!
Update: I’ve added 9 additional failed predictions (via Real Climate Science) below to make it an even 50 for the number of failed eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions over the last 50 years.
42. 1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production
43. 1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century
44. 1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum
45. 1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980
46. 1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018
47. 2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020
48. 2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past
49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming
50. 2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster? Not.
Didn’t see the links, but cei has Heller’s best collected here
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions
(think what you think about Heller’s graphs, but his old newspaper takes are world’s most eye-opening)
Aesop first documented this in his story – “The boy who cried wolf.”
Overlooked; the “12 years to the end of the world”, started during 2019.
While I think that WUWT is the most enlightening and interesting of the skeptical sites I have found, there are numerous others that have much to recommend themselves: Tony Heller’s realclimatescience.com, geocraft.com and iceagenow.info are a few that come to mind. Look at the list to the right.
What I would love to see is a site that shows all the geological data regarding previous Ice Ages and graphs of past temperature and CO2 concentrations to show how little there is to concerned about. A pamphlet or booklet, filled with large graphs of temp and CO2 records with a short explanation of what they show in layman’s term, would be very useful for dealing with children and adults unaware of most of the dissenting science. Considering how low both temps and CO2 levels are presently, I can’t imagine how someone with a deep understanding of geologic history can NOT be a skeptic. Religious beliefs hard to change I guess.
Have you seen this one, linked below, called C3 Headlines?
It has extensive archives of graphs and articles and everything else you are looking for.
I do not know about pamphlets, but there are plenty of books.
One of these days Tony Heller is going to be publishing a book he has said he has been working on.
And someday I may get around to the one I have been working on.
In the meantime, you can always print some stuff out.
Some of Tony’s many videos are excellent summaries.
But to be complete and tell the whole story…it seems one would need to publish an encyclopedia.
Here:
https://www.c3headlines.com/
But,but, but the BBC says you’ve got unusually early heavy snowfalls in Montana which surely hasn’t been sanctioned by the Saintly Appreciation of Greta Society (SAGS), surely this isn’t allowed to happen?
Snow in late Sept Montana/Alberta is proof of climate change. See? It means absolutely anything you want, and since the weather changes every week, it can mean anything you want it too. Can’t lose. If it would have been record heat, and on fire, it would still be because of climate change. Doesn’t matter what the weather does, CO2 is responsible for everything. Repent!
I have a friend who lives in Montana. Since the city where she lives depends on mountain snows for water, they are very concerned when the snow influx doesn’t happen on time, or is at insufficient levels for the following summer season.
Snow in late September in Montana, Wyoming and the Rockies in general is nothing unusual. It is, in fact, normal weather. I used to read what are now old novels about the western USA, cowboys and stuff like that, and snow in July in the West was NOT considered to be anything unusual, because the authors knew those areas quite well. It would be unusual to have snow in downtown Chicago in September or October, but it HAS happened in October more than once.
Making photo recordings of first snowfalls and last snowfalls with the dates stamped on the image files and maybe on the images will do a good job of supporting early and late weather conditions that are normally “out of season” events.
In regard to the BBC, they operate out of ignorance, which appears to be intentional. It’s a shame they can’t leave the comfort of their habitats to visit the real world occasionally.
Good list!
(But I never heard of 1969 “blue steam” thing. Guess we all dodged a bullet! 😎
In looking it up, I came across this. (Some or the predictions may overlap.)
From https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/opinion/freepress/story/2019/sep/22/cloud-blue-steam/503985/
“Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s,” the article by Myron Ebell begins. “They continue to do so today.”
Instead of recalling the predictions in a narrative, though, the article reprints copies of what was printed. So there will be no doubt what was said.
* A 1967 Salt Lake Tribune article, citing a Stanford University biologist, said “it is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine,” which will be at its worst in 1975. The U.S., the biologist suggested, will need to make birth control involuntary and put sterilizing agents into food staples and drinking water.
* A 1969 New York Times article quoted the same biologist in saying “unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”
* A 1971 Washington Post article, quoting an expert at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said “fossil- fuel burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees” in the next 50 years.
* A 1974 Time magazine article said “telltale signs are everywhere” of another ice age.
* A 1974 United Press International article said holes in the ozone layer would cause a dramatic increase in skin cancer within the next 12 months and that the earth was “on the verge of a period of great peril to life” because of them.
No mention of the millions of climate refugees either; I.e. There are many many more bad predictions out there. Basically all of them since every single climate prediction to date has been incorrect if not an outright lie.
I was in The Maldives last week at Club Med Kani. I can assure you, they are not underwater. On the main island with the Airport in Male, they are building structures of 20-30 stories high. I consider this having good faith of not being underwater anytime soon.
What we really need is a database showing the predictions, dates published, original publication sources, other publications that picked it up, identification of the persons making the predictions and some information about them, etc etc.. Put the database online to be searchable, and publicize it so people can find the information, analyze it, etc.
Thanks, Anthony!
I was in a little back-and-forth with Mosher, and tweeted this to him.
Haven’t heard back from him yet .. he’s in Seoul, so he’s probably asleep.
Anybody wanna bet he denies the 70s coming Ice Age Cometh?
excellent way to promote skeptical group think.
This is what makes arguing with skeptics so much fun.
They never quote any actual science, just the MSM
My favorite is using Viner from 2000. “no more snow”
dude didnt even publish and left CRU. I guess he could not get his radical views accepted by other scientists
https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researcher-careers/researcher-career-stories/what-do-research-staff-do-next-career-stories/david-viner
He lept into government and then private consulting roles focused on climate change.
Doesn’t speak well of CRU at all.
Oh, and mr-didn’t-even-publish apparently published back then and has been publishing relatively recently – “…I’m even managing to publish still – in autumn 2014 I had an article in Nature Climate Change…”
”They never quote any actual science,”
Please SM. Quote us some science to prove permanent CC. Let us know what caused the MWP. We don’t need to quote science, we just point to the past. We see there is no correlation between modern co2 rise and temperatures. We laugh at your silly cult and your feeble defence of it.
“They never quote any actual science, just the MSM”
Greg…we seem to have someone saying something which is very clearly not true here.
Can we spend equal time getting on Mosher’s case for telling a blatant lie, as we did insisting that Al Gore did not say it exactly the way the list asserts?
Michael I believe you’ve misread the autobiography of Dave Viner. He doesn’t really think ill of UEA-CRU (after all he spent 17 years there). He set up and ran a successful Masters Programme, for which he thought he ought to have been rewarded with a tenured position. He wasn’t and was given no reassurance of this happening in
the future. CRU was run on “soft money”.
Thank you for the link. I had often wondered what had happened to him. Interesting that a man such as he who is an inveterate self promoter should miss out an incident which got him onto all the UK National Press when he rescued a man swept into rough seas.
I remember all of them pretty much from 1970 on wards. And I am sure some Sci-Fi “B” movies were made around some of them like killer bees!!
And yet, not one mention in the current alarmist media of the tens of thousands ripped from the grip of abject poverty, daily, BECAUSE of fossil fuels!
Bookmarked – cheers.
You left out the “Jupiter effect” planetary alignment in 1982 – the World was definitely going to end.
Didn’t.
If the World is going to end, how big a boat do I need to build?????
I think the CliSci documentary “2012” addressed that.
There is a reason the end is always ‘going to be ‘ nigh
Handy. This is a keeper.
Basically it is a testament to the no-cost prediction world. There would be a cost if the media ever called out bad predictions and those responsible.
The 2020 Peak oil prediction could still be right. It is still in the future.
Time to publicize my 2017 article on failed climate predictions. Many of the things discussed in this list are properly identified and linked there:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/30/some-failed-climate-predictions/
One of my favorites was the prediction of tens of millions of climate refugees:
They even made a map showing where the refugees should come from. And in 2011 they recycled the prediction to 2020.
Who knows, they might all come next year.
I don’t believe any of this thread, you missed off Plastic from the list of things going to cause our extinction. I always thought the Sun had an effect on the Earth’s Climate?
Maybe plastic will end our civilisation or maybe not, after all plastic is an organic compound, and if what the doomsayers say is correct we should be up to our armpits in the stuff, we continue barely up to our ankles.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304389419305060
The boy that cried “wolf.” How brainless do people have to be to believe all this rubbish? Remember, the idiots that believe this have a vote worth the same as yours.
There are other hyperventilating temper tantrum scares to add- beemaggeddon, microplastics, radioactive contamination from Fukushima. How ironic that the cure for confusion brought on by hyperventilating is to breathe in some exhaled CO2.
Thanks for a great summary!
Saw it, left it for other stuff, then tried to find it again. Found these details:
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions
They’re all TRUE – each failed prediction was an actual, news prediction.
I’m going to call it the long version (with details). Yours is the great summary version.
Are there footnotes linking to each of the original quotations?
Along the same lines, I’ve been reading about the imminent advent of “artificial intelligence”. For the last 40 years, we’ve always been “just 10 years away” from it.
Can you please make this a sticky on your page?
I am going to need it for years. Maybe decades.
Thanks again.