Global Warming

Climate Change Caused By Racism?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Sky News host James Morrow says “everything now is a case of white supremacy” for the left, citing the Biden administration’s Senior Director for Environmental Justice Cecilia Martinez who attributed climate change to systemic racism.

In a 2019 press release Ms Martinez said “unless intentionally interrupted, systemic racism will continue to be a major obstacle to creating a healthy planet … The only path forward is to design national climate policies that are centered on justice.”

See more at PJ-MEDIA

 

Delusional Democrats Pipe-Dreams About Renewable Energy | Larry Elder

Published by Papa Giorgio

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Nuclear Energy: Abundant, Clean, and Safe

Published by Papa Giorgio

If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video. (I highly recommend watching PANDORA’S PROMISE)

California Wildfires… Policy vs. Rhetoric (Tom McClintock/John Kobylt)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(2018) California’s leaders are promoting the idea that the state’s in a “new normal” of more extreme wildfire, but fire scientists say it doesn’t have to stay that way, even in the face of a climate that’s getting warmer.

I posted previously on related topics for the interested:

(This is mainly a government issue – federal and state) John and Ken interview Congressman Tom McClintock (4th District of California) discussing the issue of forest mismanagement, and how since the 1980’s 80% less logging has been allowed.

Some good articles are these:

  • How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires (THE FEDERALIST, 2018)
  • California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary (FORBES, 2020)
  • Wildfires Caused By Bad Environmental Policy Are Causing California Forests To Be Net CO2 Emitters (FORBES, 2019)
  • The Same Old, Same Old California Suicide (NATIONAL REVIEW, 2020)
  • California’s Disastrous Forest Mismanagement (NATIONAL REVIEW, 2020)
  • Western Wildfires Are Due to Arson and Stupidity, Not Climate Change (AMERICAN THINKER, 2020)

PRAGER U

The following video is done by John Kobylt of the The John and Ken Show 640AM-KFI: “This is appalling. And not nearly enough people have been given this information.”

Corrupt politics overriding California wildfire prevention efforts, Republican John Cox says (SEE AT FOX NEWS)

120 Years of Climate Scares (American Thinker)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is all AMERICAN THINKER, with a hat-tip to ACE OF SPADES:

I sometimes ask myself, “Why is the New York Times allowed to exist?” And I don’t mean: “Why doesn’t the government ban the paper?” because that’s not how I roll. But why is it that this roiling cesspool of lies continues to be supported after decades of outright lies, propaganda and just plain bad reporting. This is the paper that gave us Walter Duranty, for crying out loud. This is the paper that constantly warns of the dire threat of weather, whether warming or cooling, as this great roundup from American Thinker shows. (Notice how many other “respectable” journalistic institutions get in on the act that also still exist.)

— ACE OF SPADES

That’s the gist of an amazing chronology of the last 120 years of scare-mongering on climate, assembled by butnowyouknow.net and reprinted by the estimable Anthony Watts in Wattsupwiththat, who updates it to the present.

— AMERICAN THINKER

This list is dated. It hails from 2014:

  • 1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
  • 1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
  • 1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
  • 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
  • 1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
  • 1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
  • 1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
  • 1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
  • 1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
  • 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
  • 1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
  • 1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
  • 1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
  • 1952 – “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
  • 1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
  • 1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
  • 1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
  • 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
  • 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
  • 1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
  • 1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” –Washington Post
  • 1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
  • 1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times

Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age

  • 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
  • 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
  • 1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
  • 1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote andHis superior’s objection for context
  • 1989 -“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,Discover magazine, October 1989
  • 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
  • 1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
  • 2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
  • 2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
  • 2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
  • 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” —Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
  • 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
  • 2006 – “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” –Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
  • 2007– “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
  • 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program atNASA, see above for Hansen quotes

Section updated by Anthony:

  • 2009 – Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters. Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis – “Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” – Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London, – The Guardian, Sep 2009.
  • 2010 – What Global Warming Looks Like. It was more than 5°C (about 10°F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow. There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia. James Hansen – NASA GISS, August 11, 2010.
  • 2011 – Where Did Global Warming Go? “In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.   – New York Times, Oct 15, 2011.
  • 2012 – Global warming close to becoming irreversible-scientists. “This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London. Reuters, Mar 26, 2012
  • 2013 – Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating.  The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way. New York Post, Dec 5, 2013
  • 2014  – Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought.  Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather evidence for the next report, due in 2014, Michael Le Page gives seven reasons why things are looking even grimmer. –New Scientist (undated in 2014)

Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and noted climate activist, used to think so. Now he’s not so sure. He explains why in this important video. (See my previous Prager audio with Michael)

 

Experts And Models Constantly Over-Predict Disaster!

Published by Papa Giorgio

To update the “Sweden Story,” REUTERS has an interesting update:

Sweden’s decision to keep schools open during the pandemic resulted in no higher rate of infection among its schoolchildren than in neighbouring Finland, where schools did temporarily close, their public health agencies said in a joint report.

Sweden decided to forego a hard lockdown and keep most schools and businesses open throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, a divisive strategy that set it apart from most of Europe.

Its Public Health Agency has maintained that the negative consequences of a shutdown on the economy and society outweigh the benefits, and says this also applies to schools.

The report, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that during the period of February 24 to June 14, there were 1,124 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among children in Sweden, around 0.05% of the total number of children aged 1-19.

Finland recorded 584 cases in the same period, also equivalent to around 0.05%.

“In conclusion, (the) closure or not of schools had no measurable direct impact on the number of laboratory confirmed cases in school-aged children in Finland or Sweden,” the agencies said in the report, published last week.

The report showed that severe cases of COVID-19 were very rare among both Swedish and Finnish children aged 1 to 19, with no deaths reported. A comparison of the incidence of COVID-19 in different professions suggested no increased risk for teachers.

Children made up around 8.2 percent of the total number of COVID-19 cases in Finland, compared to 2.1 percent in Sweden.

[….]

Separate studies by Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet (KI), an independent medical research institute, and the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children and Unicef, showed that Swedish children fared better than children in other countries during the pandemic, both in terms of education and mental health….

“Apocalypse Never” – Michael Shellenberger Talks With Dennis Prager

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager had Michael Shellenberger on his show to discuss his new book entitled “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (Amazon: ). In an article by Michael, you see him transitioning into a “Bjorn Lomborg” type of category. Here is the opening paragraph of that article:

  • On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. (ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS)

Facts through reason and common sense have made it through to this gentleman, and this is nice to hear. In another review of the book, it is noted that Mr. Shellenberger is a long time environmentalist and contributed “rationalism [that] is in woefully short supply in present day environmental discourse. Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never succeeds in providing a welcome boost” Here is the opening of that review:

The way to a cleaner, sustainable planet is not to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power, but rather to expand their use, especially in developing countries to bring economic growth and prosperity, the way such sources did for the developed world.

This is one of the primary themes in the new book, Apocalypse Never, written not by a “climate denier” or “corporate shill.” Instead, author Michael Shellenberger is a 30-year environmental activist with street cred in various causes including saving California’s redwood forests and co-founding a “progressive Democratic, labor-environment push” in 2002 for the New Apollo Project, a renewable energy initiative that long predated the Green New Deal. He also is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment.”…..

(PA PUNDITS – Peter Murphy)

Glacier National Park Removes “Gone By 2020” Signs

Published by Papa Giorgio

This video was found on WUWT’S WEBSITE…. “But by 2019 NOT EVEN ONE of the glaciers had disappeared.” (See also a previous post on this)

One can see pictures with dates on them, that the glaciers are not shrinking as predicted, in which Roger Roots documents some of the most famous spots the adorn most walls from Glacier National Park (WUWT):

…The average date of first freeze in East Glacier, Montana is September 13th.  It is only then that one can assess whether the glaciers are getting bigger or smaller than in previous years.

In September 2015, Lysander Spooner University launched an annual research project aimed at visiting GNP’s glaciers every year at their lowest points.  This year a small group of us opted to hike to the popular Grinnell Glacier and take a few snapshots on September 16.  We hiked the 5.5 miles from the Many Glacier Hotel and arrived at glacier’s edge late in the afternoon.

The Grinnell is perhaps the most iconic of two dozen named glaciers in the Park.  Untold thousands of people have hiked to it.  Millions more have been exposed to government imagery of the Glacier melting away.  The nearby Many Glacier Hotel features pictures on its walls showing the Grinnell’s decline from the 1880s to 2008.  Numerous blog posts and magazine feature stories have also addressed this theme.

Upon our return to the Hotel after visiting the Glacier, we noticed that our brand-new photos appear to show that the Grinnell Glacier has grown slightly from the 2008 images that are displayed on the Hotel walls.  There has been no reporting of this in any newspaper or broadcast that we know of.  (In fact, all news coverage reports the precise opposite.)  The smaller Gem Glacier—which is visible from the valley miles below—also appears to be slightly larger than it is shown in 2008 pictures on display….


….

ZEROHEDGE note from WUWT’s article, the following, with an addition:

….The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources. But no mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in GNP over the past decade. Even local Montana news sources such as The Missoulian, Billings Gazette and Bozeman Daily Chronicle have remained utterly silent regarding this story.

(Note that since September 2015 the author has offered to bet anyone $5,000 that GNP’s glaciers will still exist in 2030, in contradiction to the reported scientific consensus. To this day no one has taken me up on my offer. –R.R.)

  • I live very close to Glacier National Park, and while the media has been saying for years that the glaciers are “disappearing”, there has been no significant change in the park’s glaciers in the time I have resided here.  The news above only reinforces the reality that if the climate is “changing”, it is only getting colder, NOT warmer…. – Brandon Smith, Founder of Alt-Market.com

But again, this is nothing new… glaciers have been shrinking (thank gawd) for 20,000 years. And the Scare tactics are nothing new (click pic for link):

 

What I Wasn’t Told About Climate Change (Luca Rossi)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Via WATTS UP WITH THAT)

More from GENERATION LIBERTY:

  • “Since the 1950s, polar bear numbers have increased by around 400%” – Click here.
  • “water vapour is in fact the most abundant greenhouse gas” – Click here.
  • “CO2 only makes up 0.04%of the earth’s atmosphere” – Click here.
  • “multiple times in the earth’s history where CO2 levels have been higher and temperatures have been lower.” Click here, for Berner, et al. ‘Geocarb III’, a well known geochemical model of ancient CO2 levels showing them to be at vastly higher levels than currently. And here for Finnegan et al. ‘The Magnitude and Duration of Late Ordovician–Early Silurian Glaciation’ which examines the extent of glaciation during the Late Ordovician period, indicating much lower temperatures than currently.
  • “I was told 97% of scientists agree that human induced climate change is happening and that the ‘science is settled’.” Click here.
  • “500 scientists submitted a letter to the United Nations stressing there is no climate emergency, global warming has not increased natural disasters and the measures to fight climate change deny humans the life-giving benefits of electricity.” Read it here.
  • “Ivar Giaver thinks climate change is a pseudoscience.” Click here.
  • “Al Gore said that humanity had only 10 years left before the world would reach the point of no return.” Click here.
  • “In the 1970s there was scientific consensus that the earth was heading into a period of significant cooling or a possible ice age.” Click here.
  • “In 2009 Prince Charles said we had 8 years to save the world from ‘irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse’.” Click here.
  • “Since 1990, 1.2 billion people have overcome extreme poverty.” Click here.
  • “137,000 people have been listen out of poverty everyday, for 25 years.” Click here.
  • “So rather than worrying about the world ending in … 11 years” Click here.
  • “or was it 18 months?” Click here.

We Are Days Away From Climate Doomsday (Failed Predictions)

Published by Papa Giorgio

First of all… While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

Second of all… here is more about this 2004 Pentagon Report About 2020:

….That’s because they made the prediction back in 2004 and said all that would happen by 2020, which is just 5 days away.

“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters,” reported left-wing newspaper the Guardian on February 22, 2004.

“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world,” the report added.

The alarmist document went on to claim that nations would resort to using nuclear weapons to protect dwindling food supplies, a situation that would “bring the planet to the edge of anarchy.”…


Flashback: Al Gore vs Reality (11-years ago today)

Published by Papa Giorgio

CLIMATE DEPOT:

…Deadlines Come and Go

Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)

Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.

Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year…..