Scientists’ Credibility Hurt by Crying Wolf

We have all heard so-called climate experts warn of looming catastrophes for decades. The problem is the Aesop's Fables’ tale concerning a shepherd boy who twice fooled villagers into thinking a wolf was attacking the town's flock of sheep. When an actual wolf appears, and the boy calls for help, the villagers believing that it is another false alarm, ignore the boy’s calls. The result is the sheep are killed by the wolf.

A recent climate report predicted, “Humanity has only a few years to act before the world will irreversibly plunge into an environmental catastrophe of global proportions.” The reality is environmental experts have been predicting doom and gloom for a half a century. Most of the prognostications involve a climatic cataclysm that is just around the corner, only to be forgotten after the deadline passes. First the planet was going to freeze, now it will boil. Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has collected some failed predictions in his book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. A few failed and dubious predictions stretching back almost a century include the following:

1958—“All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting,” the Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier reported. “It may without exaggeration be said that the glaciers—like those in Norway—face the possibility of a catastrophic collapse,” Professor Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geologist, said in a report to the Geographical Society after his Arctic expedition.

1967—“Global cooling: World famine is unavoidable.”

1970  (April)—“New Ice age is upon us.”

1970 (October)—“climate freeze coming. Expect water and food rationing.”

1971—“A Disastrous New Ice age is coming.”

1972 (January)— “We have less than a decade to stop the catastrophe.”

1972 (December)—“We are going to freeze.”

1974—“Ice age is coming fast.”

1978—“No end in sight to cooling trend.”

In 1978 the claim of global cooling changed into global warming.

1979—“The North Pole is Melting.”

1988—“The Maldives will be gone by 1992, covered with water.”

1989—“Entire Nations will be underwater.”

2000—“Children won’t know what snow is due to global warming.”

2001—“In 20 years no Maple syrup in New England due to global warming.”

2004—“By 2020 European Cities will be Underwater.”

2006—“Greenhouse gasses will kill all of us in 10 years.”

2007—“After 2012, it’s too late for the Earth.”

2007 (November)—“Ice free Arctic Ocean as soon as 2010.”

The list of failures that Lomborg lists continues for 24 more examples.

Global warming is a top concern of the Biden administration. To deal with it, his administration has spent billions on electric school buses and cars, stopped the Keystone XL Pipeline project dead in its tracks, and sold hundreds of millions of dollars of pipe for scrap. They rely on the latest National Climate Assessment report for evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and government leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response. The fact is, temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that forecast dangerous man made global warming repercussions have serious problems. Fortunately, scientific experts from around the world are now pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach their dire, but often false, conclusions.

Three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained that the flaws in global warming predictions are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse. Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”  The critics concluded that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears. Instead, they claim, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation. As astrophysicist Willie Soon claimed: “climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—and heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions.”