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Lectro was RIGHT--post1626--(climate related)

awaken, sailor, and Junebug all appear to be missing the spirit of the holidays (or are too deep into the spirit of the holidays already)
 
Will the world end in 12 years? Maybe 30?

If history is any guide, it will not. Many similar predictions have been made in the past, but they came and went without tragedy.

Here are the five worst predictions made about 2020 that failed to pan out.

1. The U.S. may warm 6 degrees F from 1990 to 2020
US takes first step to exit Paris climate dealVideo
In 1990, The Washington Post reported in a front page story: "Carbon dioxide is the gas most responsible for predictions that Earth will warm on average by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2020."

The outlet further warned: "The United States, because it occupies a large continent in higher latitudes, could warm by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit."

2019 IN REVIEW: THE TOP 5 CRAZIEST WEATHER MOMENTS

Thirty years later, 2020 has finally arrived. The Earth has warmed approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit according to NASA. The United States also warmed roughly 1 degree.

Elliott Negin, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, declined to comment.

The latest UN IPCC report, AR5, however, addresses the issue of whether their models were accurate. (The UN predictions differed from the 1990 Washington Post ones, which did not cite its source.)

The latest UN report shows that current temperatures are just within the UN’s old predictions made in 1990, but acknowledges that actual temperatures came in “on the lower end” of expectations.

The UN report partly credits a 1991 volcanic eruption in the Philippines for the lower-than-expected warming, and says the new models account for volcanoes.

The UN now predicts a rise of about 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit from today to the year 2100.

2. Oil will effectively run out by 2020
Rising oil prices hit holiday drivers at the pumpVideo
CNN ran a headline in 2003 titled "World oil and gas 'running out'".

The New York Times reported in 1989 that "untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling," and that "William Stevens, the president of Exxon U.S.A., said ... by the year 2020 there would not be enough domestic oil left 'to keep me interested.'"

But doomsayers underestimated American ingenuity, and the opposite happened. Both U.S. oil output and U.S. proven oil reserves are dramatically higher now than they were in 1989, thanks to technology allowing deeper oil to be discovered and extracted.

New technology in natural gas ("fracking") also allowed the U.S. to become an energy independent net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years in 2018.

Reached by phone, Phillip Shabecoff, the former New York Times reporter who covered the disappearing oil in 1989, said that the Exxon CEO’s 2020 prediction was off.

“I’m not Nostradamus,” he said, adding, “it’s what the Exxon CEO said. He obviously did not anticipate the new fracking and gas technology. At the time the Permean Basin was being drained dry, so he had every reason to believe we were running out of oil,” Shabecoff said.

Marian Tupy, who tracks metrics like oil production at HumanProgress.org, told Fox News that people routinely underestimate humanity.

“People only think about how can we solve things with current technology. They underestimate human ingenuity,” he said.

Shabecoff said that “unfortunately, human ingenuity is often undermined by political ideology and greed, so we have not been able to bring human ingenuity to bear on urgent questions like climate change.”

3) By 2020, no glaciers will be left on Mt. Kilimanjaro
Inside Jon Scott's charity trip to top of Mount KilimanjaroVideo
"It's now estimated that by the year 2020, there will be no glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro," Christian Lambrechts, an officer at the U.N. Environment Program, told CNN in 2003.

The Associated Press also reported in 2007 that “in 2001, [glaciologist Lonnie] Thompson predicted the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania would disappear within the next 20 years.”

But today, Kilimanjaro's glaciers are still there, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal Ecology and Evolution that includes photos and a new timetable: "most of glaciers on Kilimanjaro ... will most likely disappear within 25 years."

Lonnie Thompson defended his prediction and said it was a bit different from how the AP summarized it. “My prediction was that there would be no glaciers, and that is true,” he told Fox News by phone.

“What we have now are ice bodies. The definition of a glacier is ice in motion. To be ice in motion, you have to have an accumulation zone. There’s been no recent accumulation. There are no glaciers on Kilimanjaro,” he said.

Asked about the study calling the current snow on the mountain “glaciers”, he said: “Sometimes people get caught up in semantics. The fact is all the glaciers in the tropics are disappearing.”

4. A billion people will starve due to missing the tech revolution
Pediatricians warn overuse of digital technology can lead to 'digital dementia' in childrenVideo
In 2000, Discover Magazine published a largely spot-on list of predictions about 2020.

But it missed big when predicting a "grisly reality" of tech-caused inequality: "For [virtual reality pioneer Jaron] Lanier, the most heartbreaking scenario is festering in the third world, where, he believes, the current generation ... will be lost in the next techno-revolution ... ‘You're going to have to somehow live while you watch a billion people starve...'"

But from 2000 to 2020, global extreme poverty fell by about a billion people, according to the World Bank, as technology connected the world and allowed people in developing nations to access capital, production know-how, and aid from developed countries.

Lanier told Fox News that his prediction was really more about how poverty would be “more in your face” due to technology and said that the developing world could still collapse by, say, 2030.

“It is true that poverty has fallen... but the developing world is headed towards a reckoning. I still worry about Lagos [Nigeria] in 2030. Look at the population projections. Where will the water come from?...” he said.

“I’ll stand by what I said for now, but I still hope to be proven wrong,” he added.

5. By 2020, "millions will die" from climate change
United Nations report on oceans show worsening conditions and climate changeVideo
Reuters newswire ran this headline in 1997: "'Millions will die' unless climate policies change."

The report said 8 million people would die by 2020, citing a prediction in the Lancet medical journal.

The mass death prediction was clearly way off.

“None of these predictions came true, and aren't even close to coming true,” said Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It's amazing that the public can continue to believe apocalyptic predictions despite a 95 percent decline in weather-related deaths in the last 100 years.”

Some modern studies claim to find mass deaths; the Daily Beast covered a “shock report” that “Climate Change Kills 400,000 a Year,” but Human Progress' Marian Tupy said such estimates are grossly inflated.

“They say climate change causes everything. Some people try to pin the war on Syria on climate change, and then say when all those people die, that's because of climate change. They have a secondary agenda,” Tupy said.

The five predictions highlighted here join a host of similar failed predictions for 2010 and 2015 that Fox News tracked.

Tupy said that an overly negative view of humanity may be one cause of the bad predictions.

“Humans are not a curse upon the planet, but are actually a benefit, because we are problem-solvers. We are creators, not destroyers, on average.”
top-5-most-outrageous-2020-doomsday-predictions
“When people ask you when was the best time to be alive – the answer is, tomorrow,” he added.
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Hang in there little red lubette, you'll surely make this list in 2030.
 
WTF, let's let Australia continue to burn and lost the Great Barrier Reef.

Let's let there be more wildfires around the world. We don't need the oxygen.

Buy some land inland from Miami and let your descendants become billionaires.
 
RJKarl said:
WTF, let's let Australia continue to burn and lost the Great Barrier Reef.

Let's let there be more wildfires around the world. We don't need the oxygen.

Buy some land inland from Miami and let your descendants become billionaires.
Click to expand...

Area burned due to wildfires has decreased 25% over the last 20 years. But don’t let the facts get in the way of your feelings.
 
sailordeac said:
Hang in there little red lubette, you'll surely make this list in 2030.
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I gave up after the first sentence. No one said the would would end in 12 years, well, except for the Christians hoping that the new US Embassy in Jerusalem would initiate the second coming. Some people did said we have 12 years before we'll be past the point of no return wrt to carbon in the atmosphere, and there after society as we know it will circle the drain for several decades. Admittedly, that 12 year threshold was improbably precise and foolishly lacked uncertainty boundaries. In fact, as I recall, that 12 years was the lower bound of a 95% prediction interval that indicated we were anywhere from 12 to 50 years from the point of no return.
 
WFcatamount22 said:
No I’m not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hat-wildfires-are-actually-burning-less-land/

In the western US fires are increasing, but globally they’re decreasing.
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Your link is from almost three years ago and things have gotten worse since then

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html

"In South America, the Amazon basin is ablaze. Halfway around the world in central Africa, vast stretches of savanna are going up in flame. Arctic regions in Siberia are burning at a historic pace.

While the Brazilian fires have grown into a full-blown international crisis, they represent only one of many significant areas where wildfires are currently burning around the world. Their increase in severity and spread to places where fires were rarely previously seen is raising fears that climate change is exacerbating the danger.

Hotter, drier temperatures “are going to continue promoting the potential for fire,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, describing the risk of “large, uncontainable fires globally” if warming trends continue.

Wildfires contribute to climate change because not only do they release carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere but they can also kill trees and vegetation that remove climate-warming emissions from the air.

This year has so far seen a dramatic increase in wildfires in some arctic regions that traditionally rarely burned.

Since July, fire has charred about six million acres of Siberian forest, an area roughly the size of the state of Vermont. In Alaska, fires have consumed more than 2.5 million acres of tundra and snow forest, leading researchers to suggest that the combination of climate change and wildfires could permanently alter the region’s forests.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and some studies have noted that, as it warms, “there also is expected to be more lightning,” said Dr. Abatzoglou, and in remote areas, lightning is a significant cause of fires.
 
RJKarl said:
Your link is from almost three years ago and things have gotten worse since then

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/climate/fire-amazon-africa-siberia-worldwide.html

"In South America, the Amazon basin is ablaze. Halfway around the world in central Africa, vast stretches of savanna are going up in flame. Arctic regions in Siberia are burning at a historic pace.

While the Brazilian fires have grown into a full-blown international crisis, they represent only one of many significant areas where wildfires are currently burning around the world. Their increase in severity and spread to places where fires were rarely previously seen is raising fears that climate change is exacerbating the danger.

Hotter, drier temperatures “are going to continue promoting the potential for fire,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, describing the risk of “large, uncontainable fires globally” if warming trends continue.

Wildfires contribute to climate change because not only do they release carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere but they can also kill trees and vegetation that remove climate-warming emissions from the air.

This year has so far seen a dramatic increase in wildfires in some arctic regions that traditionally rarely burned.

Since July, fire has charred about six million acres of Siberian forest, an area roughly the size of the state of Vermont. In Alaska, fires have consumed more than 2.5 million acres of tundra and snow forest, leading researchers to suggest that the combination of climate change and wildfires could permanently alter the region’s forests.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and some studies have noted that, as it warms, “there also is expected to be more lightning,” said Dr. Abatzoglou, and in remote areas, lightning is a significant cause of fires.
Click to expand...

I am not going to argue for or against either side of this argument, I’m definitely reluctant to support catamount, but there should be caution when using time series data to support a systemic change argument. All the available time series should be considered not just the year to year change. Disaster occurrence is an especially difficult metric to draw a trend out of because disasters like hurricanes and wildfires are so random in occurrence (you literally need lightning to strike for most wildfires), you’d need a lot of years of data to detect a significant trend in one direction or another, probably by the time you are actually able to measure a trend and confirm a priori model predictions it will be way too late to do anything about it.
 
birdman said:
I gave up after the first sentence. No one said the would would end in 12 years, well, except for the Christians hoping that the new US Embassy in Jerusalem would initiate the second coming. Some people did said we have 12 years before we'll be past the point of no return wrt to carbon in the atmosphere, and there after society as we know it will circle the drain for several decades. Admittedly, that 12 year threshold was improbably precise and foolishly lacked uncertainty boundaries. In fact, as I recall, that 12 years was the lower bound of a 95% prediction interval that indicated we were anywhere from 12 to 50 years from the point of no return.
Click to expand...

 
sailordeac said:
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Touché! A young non-scientist congress woman from a single small district in NY repeated an erroneous talking point in a public forum for political gain that she probably read in a popular science article that misrepresented the results of a valid and rigorous scientific study. It doesn’t invalidate the prediction or the risk that climate change poses. What I meant was, nobody with actually scientific or statistical training made the prediction that the world would end in 12 years. It’s a double red herring, climate advocates are using the 12 years timeline to drum up panic on climate action and climate deniers are using it to undermine the credibility of climate science, when no actual climate scientist made that prediction.
 
Meanwhile, we have Republicans bringing snowballs into Congress to "disprove" climate change.
 
birdman said:
Touché! A young non-scientist congress woman from a single small district in NY repeated an erroneous talking point in a public forum for political gain that she probably read in a popular science article that misrepresented the results of a valid and rigorous scientific study. It doesn’t invalidate the prediction or the risk that climate change poses. What I meant was, nobody with actually scientific or statistical training made the prediction that the world would end in 12 years. It’s a double red herring, climate advocates are using the 12 years timeline to drum up panic on climate action and climate deniers are using it to undermine the credibility of climate science, when no actual climate scientist made that prediction.
Click to expand...

Of course.

But no, you see, because of AOC's mistake ALL climate change concerns are invalidated! That's how it works in the minds of the stupid.
 
Every time this thread gets bumped I laugh and then cry because Moonz says Lectro was “right” and sailor posts Fox News articles as if they don’t have an agenda.

That video is nuts.
 
Was the 12 years thing that we had 12 years before the impact of climate change was irreversible?
 
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