If it ever seems like climate alarmists are constantly and ceaselessly updating the dates of their dire, doom-laden climate predictions, that's because—surprise!—climate alarmists are constantly and ceaselessly updating the dates of their dire, doom-laden climate predictions.
That is obvious and has been for years. This week, they're at it again: The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is declaring that we have like ninety minutes to draw down carbon emissions before we all bake ourselves to death or something:
The fight to keep global heating under 1.5 degrees Celsius has reached "now or never" territory, according to a new report released Monday by the world's leading climate scientists.
The highly anticipated report, delayed slightly due to last-minute disputes over the exact wording of the document, says curbing global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would require greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest.
Oh man! That sounds serious! It sounds just as serious, as a matter of fact, as every other time we've heard it for years and years.
This is no exaggeration: Climate alarmists (and the U.N. in particular) have been declaring loudly every few years that we only have a short window to get the climate under control before we all die.
It's climate science's bread-and-butter; that's how they make their money. Every half-decade or so, an intern at the IPCC just goes into the C: drive and updates all the years on the press releases. Then, everyone gets all freaked out about the impending climate catastrophe, then it doesn't happen, then the intern goes in and updates the years again.
Case in point: They have been making these claims as far back as 1972:
If it all sounds slightly familiar, consider this news story from 1972:
"We have ten years to stop the catastrophe," said the UN's environmental protection boss. That's one of the headlines collected by Bjorn Lomberg, author of "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet."
"Ten years to stop the catastrophe!" And man, that was 50 years ago. We must've catastrophized the planet five times over since then!
Catastrophe did not strike 10 years later, in case you wondering.
Actually, everything turned out more or less fine. So 17 years after Maurice Strong warned the world it had 10 years to get things fixed, the U.N. was once again warning us we only had 10 years to get things fixed:
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.
Well, as you might imagine, 10 years came and went... and not much happened. To be sure, Noel Brown was specifically warning that nations could be "wiped off the face of the Earth" at some point after 2000. But it is presently 2022. If we were going to see nations "wiped off the face of the Earth" and "coastal flooding" and "crop failures," wouldn't you imagine it would've, you know... happened by now?
Well, it didn't and it hasn't. And you can imagine, if you work at the U.N., feeling a little impatient when all of these eco-catastrophes fail to materialize. So by 2007, they were not only warning us again of looming disaster, they were also cutting our window for action fully in half:
Members of [the IPCC] said their review of the data led them to conclude as a group and individually that reductions in greenhouse gases had to start immediately to avert a global climate disaster, which could leave island states submerged and abandoned, African crop yields down by 50 percent, and cause a 5 percent decrease in global gross domestic product.
The panel, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, said the world would have to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 to avert those problems and others.
"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
"If there's no action before 2012... What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future."
Well, guess what: There wasn't any "action." We kept on burning those sweet, sweet fossil fuels, spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, driving our sixteen-wheeler SUVs to every soccer game played by every one of our 12 kids. And we're all fine now.
It's not just the U.N., by the way. Pretty much every major authority has been predicting, every few years, that we only have a few years left before we're all murdered by carbon:
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
Well, to their credit, the authors of the report were correct insofar as there was "widespread rioting" in 2020. Everything else... not so much.
Don't worry, folks, the United Nations is definitely right about it this time. You can take it to the bank. But hurry up before rising sea levels wash away all the banks!
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