We have always had them among us: fortune tellers, diviners, readers of palms, tarot cards, tea leaves, stars, horoscopes, discerners of animal entrails, calling on gods of wood and stone, and all sorts of other “seers” who have attempted to convince the gullible that they have the power to predict the future.
To some, climate change proponents are little more than modern-day soothsayers that media continues to legitimize, even when their dire predictions of global catastrophe turn out to be not so dire.
The latest, but assuredly not the last, is President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry. Kerry, whose scientific credentials are nonexistent, recently predicted we have only “100 days” to save the planet from climate disaster.
That “Chicken Little” prediction was made at the UN Climate Summit a few days ago, so we had better subtract the days that have followed.
Of course his boss, President Joe Biden, has led the way in speaking without worrying about factual data, for instance speaking last week in Somerset, Mass., where a coal-fired power plant once stood, Biden again recalled growing up in Claymont, Del., where he said pollution was so bad "you had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window."
The Wilmington News Journal has records dating back to 1923. They contain no stories I could find about oil slicks on car windshields in Delaware. I emailed The Journal and a reply came from Phil Freedman, regional editor for investigations and enterprise: "Dust and ash and other debris used to more regularly fall on cars and other horizontal surfaces there when those operations were running at full capacity. Biden has used this anecdote about the oil on the windshields before, I and a reporter who has covered him extensively recall. But we cannot find the actual clips nor did we ever confirm it. It was just one of a bunch of stories he told."
Biden's hyperbole when it comes to end-of-the-world prophecies follows many similar predictions that failed to materialize. According to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right Washington, D.C.-based think tank that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare, none of the climate change prophecies made by climate alarmists over the last 50-plus years have come true, not even close.
Here are a few, compiled by AEI's Mark J. Perry:
- 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
- 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989
- 1970: Ice Age By 2000
- 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
- 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
- 1972: New Ice Age By 2070
- 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
- 1974: Ozone Depletion a 'Great Peril to Life'
- 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
- 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend
- 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes
- 1988: Regional Droughts in 1990s
- 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018
- 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
- 1989: New York City's West Side Highway Underwater by 2019
These do not include more recent and contradictory statements by climate czar John Kerry, among others in politics and the media, who have variously said we have only weeks, months, or a few years to stymie Earth's extinction.
Let's just examine in greater detail the prediction in 1967 listed above, the LA Times reported, “It is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine,” this according to Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the controversial book “The Population Bomb.”
Ehrlich also said the U.S. population was “too big” and that involuntary birth control might have to be imposed through sterilizing agents put into staple foods and drinking water. Ehrlich added the Roman Catholic Church might have to be pressured into going along to control the population. In 2018, Ehrlich was still at it claiming that climate disruption was “killing people” and that the collapse of civilization is a “near certainty.”
America is not experiencing a famine, is it? and contrary to too large a U.S. population, the 2020 Census Bureau report showed that the U.S. population has slowed in the past 10 years to its lowest rate since the 1930s. To quote from a Stephen Sondheim musical, “I’m still here.”
Need more evidence? In 1970, a scientist named James P. Lodge, Jr predicted “a new ice age” by the 21st century. Here we are 21 years into the 21st century and now most experts are saying the opposite.
No wonder critics call it junk science.
Apologists often claim their predictions were based on information available at the time. Yet they demand our leaders make changes that would affect our lives and lifestyles, perhaps forever. It’s all about control, not individual freedom.
Today, because of fear surrounding COVID-19, we have similar apocalyptic statements emanating from politicians and scientists. Are these statements their attempt to obtain more power for themselves and rob us of our individual liberties and the right to make our own choices?
Has much changed since those ludicrous statements were made a half-century ago?
Are doomsday predictions being repeated in new ways today by John Kerry and his fellow climate scare travelers?
And the greater question, will we resist, or blindly follow?
Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist, lecturer and TV-radio commentator.
