Happy Birthday, Global Warming! 30 Years of Failed Predictions

Happy Birthday, Global Warming! 30 Years of Failed Predictions

by Brock Simmons
June 24, 2018

It was 30 years ago today that NASA head Dr. James E Hansen testified to the US Senate that “global warming has begun”.

On June 24, 1988, Dr. Hansen told a panel of Senators that the world is plunging into an era of destruction, and told of hysterical doomsday predictions.

From the New York Times archive, dated June 24th, 1988:

Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ”greenhouse effect.” But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.

Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no ”magic number” that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, ”It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

If Dr. Hansen and other scientists are correct, then humans, by burning of fossil fuels and other activities, have altered the global climate in a manner that will affect life on earth for centuries to come.

He and other scientists testifying before the Senate panel today said that projections of the climate change that is now apparently occurring mean that the Southeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States will be subject to frequent episodes of very high temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond. But they cautioned that it was not possible to attribute a specific heat wave to the greenhouse effect, given the still limited state of knowledge on the subject.

Mathematical models have predicted for some years now that a buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil and other gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere would cause the earth’s surface to warm by trapping infrared radiation from the sun, turning the entire earth into a kind of greenhouse.

If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections. This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees, and lower at the Equator.

”Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,” Dr. Hansen said at the hearing today, adding, ”It is already happening now.”

Some experts also believe that concern over global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels warrants a renewed effort to develop safe nuclear power. Others stress the need for more efficient use of energy through conservation and other measures to curb fuel-burning.

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist with the Environmental Defense Fund, a national environmental group, said a number of steps can be taken immediately around the world, including the ratification and then strengthening of the treaty to reduce use of chlorofluorocarbons, which are widely used industrial chemicals that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect. These chemicals have also been found to destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere that protects the earth’s surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

So this was the beginning of all the doom and gloom. Since Hansen’s testimony, we’ve been treated a litany of crazed predictions that never came true. In fact, Hansen’s own charts and computer models from 1988 have been debunked, where he predicted a massive rise in temperature that ended up being quite meager.

Leading climate alarmist Al Gore once said that we would reach a “point of no return” in 10 years. 12 years ago.

Remember when a writer for The Independent said “snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”? Charles Onians opined in that article that England would soon never experience any more snow. That article was from 2000. As record blizzards hit England this past March, 2018, The Independent has since removed all traces all of the article, and even the Wayback Machine internet archive has removed the article. Fortunately, the folks at Watts Up With That preserved the article in PDF form.

This other article out of Australia’s The Age blames “growing global wealth” for the pending doom. From 2007. Miraculously, 11 years later, Australia still exists and isn’t under water.

Someone put together an entire website dedicated to climate hysteria predictions that never happened, called ClimateChangePredictions.org .

Tony Heller, of RealClimateScience.com , put together this video titled “Thirty Years Of Failed Climate Predictions”:

Dr. James Hansen has since turned into a wackjob activist, and has been arrested multiple times while protesting.