One would be much safer following the latter of the two possibilities noted above:
Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts
1. Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.
Hmmm. Just finished shoveling some of the “very rare and exciting event”. According to the local forecast I’ll get a chance to do so on Thursday, and again the following Sunday. OK. I know that Viner is a Brit…but wait…they’ve been getting hammered with snow the last few years over there too.
2. “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Was down at Fremont, NE on the Platte river last summer. Seemed to be a fair amount of boating going on. Haven’t seen a new dust bowl either.
3. “Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.” Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.
Somebody must have forgot to tell the “Ice Road Truckers”
4. “Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010.” Associated Press, May 15, 1989.
Not by a long shot…try 0.7 deg F
5. “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” Life magazine, January 1970.
Would you believe 3-5% then, less now since air quality has been greatly improved.
6. “If present trends continue, the world will be … eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” Kenneth E.F. Watt, in “Earth Day,” 1970.
More believable for January in South Dakota, but doesn’t this sort of clash with some of the other predictions about polar ice, etc?
7. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
Good thing for Erlich he isn’t a gambler!
8. “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970
Someone forgot to tell the fish.
Meanwhile, these same folks are STILL predicting disasters that, like the object of the cryptozoological search programs, never quite live up to their objectives…and they are STILL believed? Who’d have thunk it!