Cal Thomas: End of the world prophecies

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, July 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Commentator Cal Thomas now on extreme climate predictions that didn’t pan out.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: While watching President Biden speak last week in Somerset, Massachusetts about what he called the “climate emergency” an old song came to mind. It was a hit for Skeeter Davis in 1962: “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?”

The President called climate change “an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”

He again recalled growing up in Claymont, Delaware where he said pollution was so bad “You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window.” President Biden has repeated a story he has told before, but repetition does not necessarily make it true.

The Wilmington Delaware News Journal has records going back to 1923. They contain no stories I could find about oil slicks on car windshields in Delaware. 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), none of the climate change prophecies made over the last fifty-plus years have come true, not even close.

Here are a few, compiled by AEI’s Mark J. Perry:

In 1970 there was a prediction that there would be an ice age by the year 2000.

In 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030.

1972: New Ice Age By 2070.

1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast.

1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent.

1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.

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 and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among others who have said we have only weeks, months, or a few years to stymie Earth’s extinction—take your pick.

Bjorn Lomborg takes a pragmatic approach to changing weather patterns. In his book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Lomborg says while he believes the planet is slowly warming, “The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded.” Politics, not science, is behind this worldview. He writes: “Many climate campaigners go further than the science supports.”

If they get their way, the costs will be huge, the benefits few and they will crush the middle class and especially the poor.

The book is worth reading if for no other reason than it is a moderate voice that lowers the temperature created by the climate alarmists. Lowering the rhetorical temperature in our politics and among scientists would be helpful, since history has shown predictions are often more wrong than right on this and other subjects.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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