Wood Romances

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 updated a list from Tony Heller of 27 failed predictions to 41 failed predictions. Then they updated this again to 50. Perry claims, "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 are to accept this at face value. If there are 41 (updated to 50) failed predictions that he put on this list, that doesn't indicate a 0-41 (or 0-50) record on climate predictions, since Perry has only listed predictions he b...

In my last post I covered one failed prediction having to do with Arctic sea ice . Here I'll cover two essentially failed predictions covering mountain glaciers .  Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2017 Mt. Kilimanjaro  Thompson et al 2002, a paper published in the prestigious journal Science [1],   predicted that we should expect the remaining ice fields on Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear sometime between 2015 and 2020. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased ∼80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020. This prediction was featured in an Inconvenient Truth , so it gained a bit of attention, but by 2011, Mass Live  reported that it was becoming clear that trends were not persisting as the study expected. By 2022, Politifact was writing factchecks about it, admitting this to be a failed prediction, but also (correctly) pointing out that this does not mean that ...

In March 2000, the Independent ran a story by Charles Onians with the title, "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past." The article begins by noting trends over the last 30 years for UK winters. "The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland  Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991." The overall point of the story is that snow frequency has been decreasing in the UK. However, Onians reported some content from Dr. David Viner, a scientist with CRU at the University of East Anglia. It reads like it was taken from an interview, with some statements coming from Onians summarizing the interv...