Climate Change Is Old News

Published on Jan. 11, 2020

Ever since Al Gore “invented the internet” and started making bold climate predictions, those predictions are common now. Or so we claim. A new article out last September by U.S. News writes about climate predictions over the last eighty years, both cold and hot. Sorry Al, you didn’t start that trend.

            Now days, every time we have a climate catastrophe, someone make a prediction it will become common place. Now it is the trend and we all are guilty of making those predictions. But we are learning that making climate predictions is like predicting politics, and now we realize predicting both will place your foot squarely in your mouth.  

             The article tells of newspaper clippings documenting the predictions were recently published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. 

            We realize these predictions that have been going on for over 80 years will sooner or later become true as we now know that the climate has been changing ever since God rested on the seventh day. If one says it will snow a foot next week every day, some day next winter it will come true.

            Some of the more notable predictions in the article are pretty bold. 

            Professor Hans Ahlmann, a Swedish geologist, said in 1939, “All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting, it may be without exaggeration be said that the glaciers, like those in Norway, face the possibility of a catastrophic collapse.” 

            Eight years later he said “The possibility of a prodigious rise in the surface of the ocean with resultant widespread inundation, arising from the Artic climate phenomenon. The Artic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study the conditions on a global basic.” 

            Prof. Ahlmann was a noted world authority on climate and glaciers in his time and also collected data on Artic expeditions.

            Now, years later, with improved climate data gathering, the same predictions are being made and some were just the opposite. In 1970, pollution expert James Lodge predicted that “air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the new century.” 

            He must have lived around Los Angles and we’re sure he didn’t live in the Wyoming region with our “wind events.” 

            In the late 1980s, global warming and the polar ice meltdown predictions became popular.

             Noel Brown, a senior environmental official at the United Nations said “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos”. 

            The first to disappear were to be the island nations that are just a few feet above sea level. The small island nation of Maldives will be threatened to be completely covered by a gradual rise in average sea level in 30 years, the report said. 

            Well, some thirty some years later, the Maldives is growing, its population has doubled since the 1980s and there are reports of a flurry of new resort openings.            In the end, I think we can only predict that we just don’t know the future of our climate. We can only say with certainly of what has happened in the past according with good data collected. Our climate crystal ball is broken.