Source:Reason.com

Earth Day is past now, but this article is so popular we’re pinning it at the top of the home page today so everyone looking for it can find it. Luckily, we haven’t run out of oil, but we have exhausted our supply of 70s fashion. For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza. Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half”
Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill’er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever. H/t Marc Morano Climatedepot.com

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live. Read post here.

By Marc Morano, Climate Depot

Energy Secretary Offers Dire Global Warming Prediction. Speaking at the Summit of the Americas in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, Steven Chu says some islands could disappear if water levels rise as a result of greenhouse-gas induced climate change. - FoxNews.com - April 19, 2009

Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday. Conservative climate change skeptics immediately denounced Chu’s assessment of the threat and potential consequences of global warming. “Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of ‘evidence’ of a looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

“Secretary Chu’s assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is ‘no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.’” Morano said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at 30 year lows and hurricane experts like MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and [NOAA’s] Tom Knutson “are now backing off their previous dire predictions.” He said Chu is out of date on the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary. Full Fox News article here.

Sampling of scientific background of the latest sea level and hurricane data:

Sea Level: ‘No evidence for accelerated sea-level rise’ says Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute - December 12, 2008. Excerpt: In an op-ed piece in the December 11 issue of NRC/Handelsblad, Wilco Hazeleger, a senior scientist in the global climate research group at KNMI, writes:  “In the past century the sea level has risen twenty centimeters. There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise. It is my opinion that there is no need for drastic measures. It is wise to adopt a flexible, step-by-step adaptation strategy. By all means, let us not respond precipitously.”

U.S. Senate Report on Scientists Counter Computer Model Sea Level Rise Fears - September 26, 2007. Excerpt:  Nearly two dozen prominent scientists from around the world have denounced a recent Associated Press article promoting sea level fears in the year 2100 and beyond based on unproven computer models predictions.

Hurricane/Warming Link: Florida State University: “Global [both Southern and Northern Hemisphere] Tropical Cyclone Activity [still] lowest in 30-years” - Updated April 17, 2009 Ryan N. Maue - Department of Meteorology - COAPS - Florida State University

Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming’s impact - Houston Chronicle - April 12, 2008. Excerpt: One of the most influential scientists behind the theory that global warming has intensified recent hurricane activity says he will reconsider his stand. The hurricane expert, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled a novel technique for predicting future hurricane activity this week. The new work suggests that, even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries.

Another Hurricane Expert Reconsiders Warming/Hurricane Link - Associated Press - May 19, 2008. Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject. Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson [Note: Research Meteorologist Tom Knutson is with NOAA] reported in a study released Sunday. In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic. See full post here.

By Bob Ferguson, SPPI

On March 25th, Christopher Monckton gave testimony before the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce.  That testimony gave rise to a letter to both Democrat Ed Markey and Republican Joe Barton, members of the committee.  The letter has been formatted and posted at SPPI here. 

As context, the Committee held a hearing on the desirability of, and opportunities for, adapting to anthropogenic “global warming”. Congressman Joe Barton introduced Monckton to the Committee as “the world’s most knowledgeable climate skeptic.” His opening statement concentrated on three scientific graphs and an economic graph. The scientific graphs (each featured in SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Report, showed that global temperature had been falling for seven years; that CO2 concentration had been rising at about half the UN’s central estimate, requiring its warming projections to be halved and rendering them harmless; and that 20 years of satellite observations of changes in outgoing long-wave radiation had demonstrated conclusively that the UN had exaggerated the effect of CO2 on temperature by a factor of 7-10. The economic graph showed the cost of adapting to “global warming” (if and when it resumed) as being many times cheaper than the cost of attempting to mitigate it.

These graphs aroused considerable interest. Provoked by Congressman Markey’s alarm at hearing real science, Mr. Tom Karl, the Director of the US National Climatic Data Center, a Democrat witness, disputed the temperature graph on the insubstantial ground that Monckton had compiled it by inappropriately combining two satellite and two surface temperature datasets; disputed the CO2 graph on the ground that carbon emissions were rising far faster than the UN had predicted; and disputed the satellite data on outgoing long-wave radiation on the ground that all satellites are prone to orbital degradation.

Monckton replied that each of the four temperature datasets individually demonstrated that global temperatures had been falling for fully seven years; that it is not CO2 emissions but CO2 concentrations remaining in the atmosphere that matter, and the concentrations, while rising, were doing so far more slowly than even the lowest of the UN’s projections; and that the analysis of the satellite data that he had displayed had been confirmed - precisely because the results were so surprising to those who believed the UN’s exaggerated estimates of climate sensitivity - by at least four further scientific papers.

Congressman Barton said it was essential that the Committee should know who was telling the truth, and he invited Mr. Karl and Lord Monckton to write to the committee, giving further and better particulars in support of what they each had said.

Icecap Note: This letter is Monckton’s reply. It is a remarkable work and you should take the time to read it. Hopefully it will influence some of the fence sitters in congress on this issue and help derail congressional action on cap-and-trade (tax-and-trade) and other similar efforts to drive up the cost of energy to benefit the government, NGOs, traders and corporations who care less about the environment but see profit in green efforts.