What about Those 50 Failed Climate Predictions?

Did you know that there have been 50 failed doomsday predictions since the 1960s? Yea, neither did I, but that's what an opinion piece at AEI from 2019 claims. The article compiles its list from several sources, including 27 from Tony Heller. A Breitbart article upped that to 41. Then Perry added 9 more from Heller to get it up to 50. When his list had 41 predictions, Perry wrote, "For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent... and it never happened. And not once — not even once!"

The logic of this is bafflingly stupid, even if we accept his opinions on these predictions at face value. If there are 41 (updated to 50) failed predictions on this list, that doesn't indicate a 0-41 (or 0-50) record on climate predictions, since Perry has only listed predictions he believes failed. Nevertheless, screenshots of these predictions have been floating around the blogosphere and social media, and I don't think any of the promoters of these "predictions" have tracked these down. So I decided to do it. Now the media and politicians often do get the scientific evidence wrong, and I'm not going to defend every politician or every news article. What I'm interested in is how many on this list actually qualify as failed climate predictions in the scientific literature. So here's my criteria for whether a scientific prediction qualifies as a climate-related scientific prediction that failed:

1. There has to be a scientific prediction with a date in the future by which time it should take place.
2. The prediction should have something to do with climate (temperature, sea level rise, changes in the cryosphere, changes in extreme weather, etc.).
3. The prediction should be published in the scientific literature. If the prediction is cited in a news article that accurately describes and references a scientific study, that counts.
4. The due date for the prediction must have passed or it should be clear that there's no way the prediction could come about by the due date.

I tracked down all the (findable) predictions that were climate-related to see whether they represented the scientific literature, whether they predictions were honestly presented, and whether they failed. Here's what I found.

• 19 of the predictions contained contrarian lies about about what was claimed to be predictions.
• 8 were sensationalistic or sloppy reporting by the media and/or scientists.
• 22 were not climate-related.
• 1 was a legitimate failed prediction found in the scientific literature. It was an outlier prediction that was not representative of the literature at the time. 

So 1 of the 50 qualifies as a failed climate prediction in the scientific literature. In addition to the above, at least 6 of the 50 were duplicates of other predictions among the 50, and some didn't even qualify as predictions. One article simply asked if cherry blossoms in Washington DC would begin to bloom in the winter, and about 3% of them actually do. So here's my accounting of the 50. I grouped them by type (contrarian lie, sloppy reporting, not climate-related) and ordered them by date (not sequentially by number) so that you can more easily see the duplicates. 

Contrarian Lies

Many of the supposed failed predictions listed below are a combination of lies on the part of contrarians and sloppy reporting on the part of the media and/or politicians. For clarity, I put clearcut lies in this category and clear cut sloppy reporting in that category, but I put contrarian lies about sloppy reporting here and then indicate sloppy reporting when it exists. 

From Peterson et al 2008[1]

To clarify, several of the articles below from the the 1960s and 1970s have to do with the possibility of that aerosol pollution would cause global dimming at rates that would outpace the rate at which carbon emissions would cause warming. This lead a minority of papers to speculate that we might be able to expect global cooling trends to continue. However, warming papers outnumbered cooling papers by 44:7. The literature was not certain, and scientific papers were written to evaluate various hypotheses, but to my knowledge, none of them made global cooling predictions. Some media articles were were guilty of sensationalistic coverage of these positions in the literature, but this cannot be attributed to the literature itself.

3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000

The article is here. It says, "Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century if population continues to grow and the earth's resources are consumed at the present rate, a pollution expert predicted yesterday." I found a NASA internal report from 1968 that give context.

One group tells us that the infrared absorption properties of carbon dioxide cause radiant heat going out from the earth to be captured near the surface. The result, an increase in the temperature of the atmosphere, is called the "greenhouse effect." If current rates of carbon dioxide are allowed to continue, there may be melting of the polar ice caps and a rise in the ocean level. Another hypothesis sees change in the opposite direction. Dr . James P. Lodge, Jr., a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado, finds that the earth's average temperature has dropped one-half of one degree since 1950. This is equivalent to moving the frostline 100 miles south. Air pollution, according to his theory, blocks some of the sunlight from reaching the earth. If the present rate continues, North America will experience another Ice Age by the year 2030.

Clearly there was disagreement among scientists, but Lodge is cited as offering an extrapolation of a linear trend with no prediction that this trend would continue. This is not a failed prediction in the scientific literature. In the 1970s, scientists were exploring the possibility that global dimming would outpace global warming from fossil fuels, and the global dimming side was a minority position.[1] The literature did not contain firm predictions, but there was sensationalistic coverage of this minority position.

6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070

The link points to a presentation that cites correspondence from Dr. Kukla about global cooling, with no prediction of an ice age by 2070. In fact, they say "existing data do not allow forecast of the precise timing of the predicted, nor the assessment of the man's interference with the natural trends. It could not be excluded however that the cooling now under way in the Northern Hemisphere is the start of the expected shift. The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century, if continuing at the present pace." So here again, the authors explicitly state that they cannot forecast timing but can only extrapolate a linear trend. 

Dr. Kukla did publish a paper in 1979[2] which contained a novel idea that increased CO2 would have a cooling influence on snow and ice, delaying warming from the radiative properties of CO2. But the paper said that it was unable to come anywhere near to achieving a "comprehensive determination of the effect of CO2 on snow and ice fields." It said instead that predictions of global warming should be considered tentative. In other words, despite Kukla's observation that extrapolating a linear trend would lead to a new ice age, he did not consider it a prediction. In fact, his stance was that we lacked the certainty for such a prediction.

7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast

The headline isn't all to the story: "Worldwide and rapid trends towards a mini Ice Age are emerging from the first long term analyses of satellite weather pictures. Of potentially great importance to energy strategies and to agriculture, but barely observable yet in Britain because our weather is strongly buffered by the Atlantic, a preliminary analysis carried out at Columbia University, New York, by the European climatologists Doctors George and Helena Kukla indicates that snow and ice cover of the earth increased by 12 per cent during 1967-1972." This is reporting a 5 year increase in ice extent that was just a preliminary analysis. There is a sensationalistic title, but no failed prediction in the scientific literature. Worse, this is just another rehash of #6 above.

8. 1974: Another Ice Age?

This is yet another reference to Dr. George Kukla, making this yet another duplicate of #6 and #7 above. This article also acknowledges that Kukla's views are not shared by all scientists. "Some scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the National Weather Service's long-range-prediction group, think that the cooling trend may be only temporary." Those scientists were actually in the majority.[1]

12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.

There is no prediction here, and the article explicitly states that "no scientific attempt to predict whether the trend would continue was possible."

And this is the fourth time (in addition to #6, #7, and #8) that this article attempted to construe Dr. Kukla's position as if he was predicting global cooling when in fact his position was we lacked the certainty to make predictions of warming (or cooling).

14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs

This article cites things that Hansen believes will be likely to happen within the next 60 years if we do nothing to cut carbon emissions. Astute observers will notice that 60 years from 1988 is 2048, or 22 years from now, and it's simply false to suggest that we've done nothing to cut our carbon emissions in 2026.

46. 1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018

The link doesn't point to anyone saying lower Manhattan would be under water by 2018. Instead, it points to a Salon article that misrepresents what Hansen said (Bob Reiss remembered the interview incorrectly). I clarify the issues here. Hansen clarified, "Reiss asked me to speculate on changes that might happen in New York City in 40 years assuming CO2 doubled in amount. Michaels has it as 20 years, not 40 years, with no mention of doubled CO2" and Reiss admitted that he had misremembered the details of the interview. Needless to say, we haven't doubled CO2 and we haven't yet reached 40 years since 1988.

17. 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019

This links to the same Salon article in which Reiss misremembers his interview with Hansen regarding the West Side Highway. The author appears to change the wording of the prediction, the date of the prediction, and the date by which it was supposedly to occur to make it seem like a different failed prediction. But it's the same one as #46 above. I clarify the issues here. 

48. 2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past

There is a sensationalistic headline to this news article, but the text does not support the headline. I explain more details about this here.

18. 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is

This is the same as #48 above. The authors just duplicated it with a different line from the article. More details about this here.

47. 2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020

The Guardian reports that "Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10 million people a year, and the situation would get worse." The 50 million number is the cumulative number, and at 10 million per year for 15 years, that's 150 million refuges by 2020, so it would seem Bogardi was not off the mark.

37. 2005: Manhattan Underwater by 2015

The link points to a 2008 video that does not predict Manhattan would be under water by 2015. It does imagine other things, like milk costing $13 and a gallon of gas causing $9, but there's no prediction that Manhattan (or any other part of New York) would be under water by 2015.

36. 2006: Super Hurricanes!

This links to a Breitbart article that's nothing more than a pack of lies, especially about Kerry Emanuel. The literature has been pretty consistent that we should not expect an increase in frequency of hurricanes, but we should se an increase in the proportion of Cat 3+ storms, which is observed across the satellite era.

22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013

He simply didn't. What he said in 2009 was, "Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years." He said some of Malsowski's models said there was a 75% chance of the first Arctic summer without sea ice would happen by 2016. He got Maslowski's paper wrong, but this is a lie about Gore's claims, which I go into more details here. 

21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018

The link points to a news article in which Hansen says "we're toast if we don't get on a different" path, but he doesn't predict the Arctic would be ice free by 2018. It does say that Hansen's claims about Arctic sea ice echo the claims of other scientists which expect a summer free of sea ice by 2018. This is probably a reference to Wadhams, which would make this a duplicate of  #25 and #26 below.

24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’

The link here points to the USA Today with yet another quote from Al Gore about disappearing summer Arctic Sea ice in 5 to 7 years. This is essentially just a duplicate of #22 above.

25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014

The link points to a 2013 Guardian article discussing a paper by Wadhams, not Al Gore, and Wadhams said by 2016, not 2014. I discuss this here. Since the author can't even be bothered to get actual failed predictions accurate, I'm leaving it here. I cover the actual failed prediction here in the duplicate of this below in #26.

50. 2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter

This WaPo article is behind a paywall, but the title asks this as a question (Could Cherry Blossoms One Day be Blooming in the Winter?"), not a prediction. An exceptionally warm Jan-Feb in 2011 led to an early bloom of cherry blossoms expected to peak around March 29, and so the WaPo article apparently asks the question about whether they could bloom in the future. The end of winter is Mar 21, so it seems a plausible question. I don't know how they answer the question, but obviously at worst this a matter of reporting, not a prediction in the scientific literature. And a small percentage do bloom in the winter.

27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’

This is a link to a Washington Examiner opinion piece about a claim by French foreign minister Laurent Fabius that “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.” This was not intended to be a scientific prediction. The "500 days" was not a prediction of the onset of climate chaos, but a diplomatic timeframe to emphasize the urgency of reaching a comprehensive, legally binding international climate agreement at the Paris conference. The 500-day mark roughly coincided with the start of the Paris talks (November 30 to December 11, 2015).

Perry Got one Right!

26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015

This links to the same article as #25, and and it does refer to a failed prediction in the literature, that I describe here.

Sensationalistic Language and Bad Reporting by Media/Politicians

5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030

I've found a snippet of the WaPo article that includes, "the world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts." This is attributed to Dr. S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Columbia University. I've not found the full article yet, but I know Rasool and Schneider's work published in the scientific literature was much more careful than that.

Rasool and Schneider's 1971 paper[3] attempted to model the effect of aerosols to parse out the relative difference between the forcings from aerosol pollution that leads to global dimming versus the forcings from increasing CO2.  RS71 suggested that a 4x increase in global aerosol concentrations, "which cannot be ruled out as a possibility," could trigger an ice age. Criticisms to this view led them to revise this in a paper the following year.[4] Instead, "using data on aerosols from volcanic eruptions, showed that while cooling could result, the original Rasool and Schneider paper had overestimated cooling while underestimating the greenhouse warming contributed by carbon dioxide."[1]

42. 1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production

The link here is broken, so I can't evaluate it. It sounds like it might be a duplicate of #10 below. If I find the actual source of this, I'll update it.

10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent

This is a book review of The Genesis Strategy by Stephen Schneider. The article misrepresents Schneider's views as if they were the consensus view of climatologists. This was not the case.[1] I haven't read this book, but given that it's not a scientific paper, and Schneider did not represent a consensus of the day, I'm including this as an example of sloppy reporting.

15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018.

From the article: "A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years, according to authorities. The Environmental Affairs Director, Mr Hussein Shihab, said an estimated rise of 20 to 30 centimetres in the next 20 to 40 years could be "catastrophic" for most of the islands, which were no more than a metre above sea level. The United Nations Environment Project was planning a study of the problem." Mathematically this article is flawed, since 30 cm of SLR won't completely cover 100 cm (1m), either by 2018 or by 2028. There's a bit of hyperbole in the language here. The Maldives had seen 11 cm SLR from 1987 to 2018 and is increasing at a rate of 3.4 mm/yr, so we can add an additional 2.4 cm for a grand total of 13.4 cm by 2025. If we assume a constant rate of SLR through 2028, that's about 15 cm, a little below 20 cm in 40 years, not correcting for vertical land movement. The Maldives have been dredging up sand from the ocean floor to restore their coastlines as sea levels rise, so at best we can say this is sloppy reporting. I know of no scientific paper predicting 20 cm of SLR by 2018. 

16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
This article appears in The Oshkosh Northwestern from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The text reads:

U.N. officials UNITED NATIONS (AP) 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, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. Coastal regions will be inundated; one sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people.

This appears to be sloppy reporting. To be clear, the logic of the article is that the warming trend must be reversed by 2000 to avoid rising sea levels threatening nations at some point in the future. The due date here is when we need to reverse global warming, not when nations will be wiped off the earth. But the sloppy, sensationalist reporting here is pretty obvious. 

49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming

The link here is broken, but I strongly suspect it's a duplicate of #16 above.

20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024

This was not an actual prediction. It was a part of a pentagon report evaluating the possibility of extremely unlikely scenarios. The 2004 report was commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall and a pdf of it can be found here. The beginning says it all:

Imagining the Unthinkable 

The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable – to push the boundaries of current research on climate change so we may better understand the potential implications on United States national security. We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller. 

We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.

It's unclear to me if this text was added after its initial publication. This would explain why the Guardian appears to have treated it as if it were a secret, suppressed report. Since it may have fooled the Guardian, I'm including it here instead of in the contrarian lies category, but Perry should have tracked this down.

23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World

According to the article, Charles said, that without "coherent financial incentives and disincentives" we have just 96 months to avert "irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it." A sympathetic reading would indicate that this is a reference to the IPCC's warmings about the need to rapidly meet mitigation goals to avoid eclipsing the +1.5 C target, but the language his is a bit sensationalistic. However, by 8 years from 2009, it was immensely clear that we were not going to stay under the +1.5 C target, above which irreversible changes become much more likely. He's guilty of sensationalistic language, but that's about it.

Not Climate-Related

I haven't chased all of the following down, but many of these are references to Paul Ehrlich, and his predictions had more to do with other environmental hazards beyond climate. These headlines do not indicate failed climate predictions, and so there does not appear to be any reason to think a failed prediction in the scientific literature would be found in these links. If someone knows of a failed prediction that appears in the scientific literature referenced in these links, let me know in the comments, and I'll track it down and amend this post. I'm including the full list here for completeness. 

 

30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years

1. 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975

28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide

2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)

43. 1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century

4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980

38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985

29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources

39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
41. 1970s: Killer Bees!

45. 1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980

31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years

44. 1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum

9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph)
32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s

11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)

33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000

13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s

34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020

19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy

35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010

I plan on updating this from time to time to address these more fully if needed, perhaps linking to other responses written by others as I find them.

References:

[1] Peterson, T. C., W. M. Connolley, and J. Fleck, 2008: THE MYTH OF THE 1970s GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 1325–1338, https://doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1.

[2] Choudhury, B., and G. Kukla. Impact of CO2 on cooling of snow and water surfaces. Nature 280, 668–671 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/280668a0

[3] Rasool, S. I., and S. H. Schneider, 1971: Atmospheric carbon dioxide and aerosols: Effects of large increases on global climate. Science, 173, 138-141.

[4] Rasool, S. I., and S. H. Schneider, 1972: Aerosol concentrations: Effect on planetary temperatures. Science, 175, 96.