4.5.PROPHETS OF DOOM AND GLOOM

In 1970, quite exactly 50 years ago, the first Earth Day promoted ice age fears, and environmentalist Nigel Calder warned "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind" and C. C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed". On the same first Earth Day Kenneth E. F. Watt "If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1900, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000... This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age" quotes from (Markovsky, 2016).

In the early seventies, two prominent scientists working for the Institute for Space Studies, Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the USA published in Science that:

«From our calculation, a doubling of CO2 produces a tropospheric temperature change of 0.8°K (12). However, as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the rate of temperature increase is proportionally less and less, and the increase eventually levels off. Even for an increase in CO2 by a factor of 10, the temperature increase does not exceed 2.5 °K. Therefore, the runaway greenhouse effect does not occur because the 15-µm CO2 band, which is the main source of absorption, "saturates," and the addition of more CO2 does not substantially increase the infrared opacity of the atmosphere». (Rasool and Schneider, 1971).

Which is correct and concluded that (which is not so far):

«However, it is projected that man's potential to pollute will increase six- to eightfold in the next 50 years (24). If this increased rate of injection of particulate matter in the atmosphere should raise the present global background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5°K. Such a large decrease in the average surface temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age». (Rasool and Schneider, 1971).

These dire predictions which have been made over the last five decades have regularly been emphasized by the mass media and for example the previous «ice-age coming» quote aforementioned was relayed by Victor Cohn, Washington Post Staff Writer, in The Washington Post Times Herald (1959-1973); Jul 9, 1971 with the paper « U.S. Scientist Sees New lce Age Coming ».

Then in the late 1980s Schneider’s message changed diametrically (Schneider, 1989): «Results from most recent climatic models suggest that global average surface temperatures will increase by some 2° to 6°C during the next century... Sea level rises of 0.5 to 1.5 meters are typically projected for the next century » and stressed that policy responses could encompass a "Law of the Atmosphere".

Then in a paper in Detroit News, dated December 5, 1989, p. 10A, Schneider claimed that a statement that he was "among those actively warning of a returning ice age" ... "is blatantly false". This is in tune with is advice on scientific honesty "... we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public imagination. That of course means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, male simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have... Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest" (Quoted in Discover Magazine, p. 45–48, October 1989).

As stated by Ebell and Milloy (2019) «More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science. While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited».

One thing did not change since 1970, the doom-sayers keep running their businesses. As displayed on the Earth Day Website http://www.earthday.org/ «Scientists warn us that climate change could accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival and everything we love. We call on you to keep global temperature rise under the unacceptably dangerous level of 2 degrees C, by phasing out carbon pollution to zero. To achieve this, you must urgently forge

realistic global, national and local agreements, to rapidly shift our societies and economies to 100% clean energy by 2050. Do this fairly, with support to the most vulnerable among us. Our world is worth saving and now is our moment to act. But to change everything, we need everyone. Join us.»

Those rantings are in fact very positive as none of what these people have ever anticipated has never happened. The other positive is that CO2 is not a pollution, it is the gas of life, what enables us to live on this planet by benefiting of the growth of the vegetation which enjoys the 0.007% bonus that it was offered.

Think about it, this is what they claimed in 1970 for the first Earth Day:

Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated «the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990».

Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any'”

Paul Ehrlich who has consistently been wrong on everything and made a fantastic academic career warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945. Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out», and more “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years”.

Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine”. Take notice of the reference to a «consensus», the specialists «agree almost unanimously».

Among the worse doom-sayers, scare mongers and falsehoods propagators rank the international bureaucrats who keep driving the people's deception with the pedal down to the metal. The reader was already instructed of the amazing story of the latest UN report on climate catastrophes (p. 298), where the organization does not even embarrass itself with scientists nor truths any longer, but resorts to Mami Mizutori (diplomat) and Debarati Guha-Sapir (an Indian epidemiologist) to explain us that the world need to decarbonize asap in their fantasy tale. These delirious reports are in fact nothing new as Legates et al. (2015) report that “For example, the United Nations Environment Programme issued a statement in 2005361 proclaiming ‘fifty million climate refugees by 2010’. Those numbers, of course, never materialized. But in 2011, the UN was back362 with another forecast: ‘60 million environmental refugees by 2020’. Examples like this are legion, largely because the popular press is overrun by articles which agree with the contrived consensus”. The fortunate but inconvenient truth is that none of these dire scenarios ever materialized and that even including the very special case of the Carteret Islands addressed later p. 326, there are no environmental refugees so far. We are in 2020 and we have zero environmental refugees, shame on the climate-bonkers.

More recently one will have to add to the posterity of the deranged forecasters two influential scientists and this is where things become worrying, when those supposed to know and to act responsibly in their communication while shaping the public understanding of these complex question, lose their balance and become prophets of the Apocalypse as a headlong rush into ever more catastrophic forecast which are not supported by the weakest scientific evidence: • “That’s the big thing – sea-level rise – the planet could become ungovernable.” Dr. James Hansen, former Director, NASA GISS (Wallace-Wells, 2017). For sure, had we a lot of people like him been paid a life-time

361From Norman Myers, ‘‘Environmental refugees. An emergent security issue’’. 13 Economic Forum, Prague, OSCE, May 2005;

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. 3628 http://phys.org/news/2011-02-million-environmental-refugees-experts.html

180,000$ with tax-payer monies for dubious and inconclusive research as their AGW theory remains controversial and elusive363 to say the least, already arrested twice as an environmental activist in 2009 and 2010 before being arrested again before the White House with dozens of eco-activists on Aug. 29, 2011 (Fox, 2011), and also now suing the federal government alleging complicity on climate change (which Hansen and his fellow litigants argue is a violation of the equal protection clause), the planet would become certainly very hard to govern, much more than due to the minuscule observed sea-level rise; • “We’re talking about literally giving up on our coastal cities of the world and moving inland 364.” Dr. Michael

Mann, Penn State University.

Then Mann asserts in the same interview with Science Friday “There’s very little doubt among scientists that climate change has ratcheted up the potential intensity of hurricanes and other large storms”. The fabricators of the IPCC’s 2001 (in)famous Hockey Stick graph had already heavily weighted the result by using the widths of annual tree-rings from bristle-cone pines (Pinus longaeva) to reconstruct pre-thermometer temperatures knowing that bristle-cones annual tree-rings widen not only in warmer weather but also when it was wetter and when there was more CO 2 in the air (Lamarche et al., 1984; McIntyre, 2006), they have indulged themselves again into pure deception and this is unforgivable. Let's remind here what IPCC says in their latest SREX report: “ There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities”. SREX, p.8, (IPCC, 2012). Therefore, and contrary to what Mann asserts, the better are the observations and the more accurate are the records, the less confidence IPCC have in an increase in tropical cyclone activity. In fact the deception technique reminds of one of the “errors” attributed by Justice Burton with respect to the paragraph 31 of the ruling dealing with - An Inconvenient Truth - "In scene 12 Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is ascribed to global warming. It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that" (EWHC 2288, 2007). Even WMO also clarified that "no individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change" (WMO, 2016).

As Hansen is never thrifty of a bold prevision, I let the reader meditate this last one made in 2008, “ The arctic will be free of summer ice in 5-10 years“ (Borenstein, 2008). We're in 2020, 12 years later, and 'We're NOT toast'. With respect to the ice-free Arctic, I remind you of the travel of the USS Skate (SSN-578), in 1959. “ On 30 July, Skate steamed to the Arctic where she operated under the ice for 10 days. During this time, she surfaced nine times through the ice, navigated over 2,400 miles (3,900 km) under it, and on 11 August, 9:47 pm EDT (the week after USS Nautilus) became the second sea ship to reach the North Pole365”. See captain's Calvert 1960 book, "Surface at the Pole: The Extraordinary Voyages of the USS Skate". Given the technologies used to build USS Skate, she could certainly not have surfaced thick ice and was not designed either for that.

The Arctic was not ice-free summer time in 1959 as captain's Calvert had searched “in vain for a suitable opening to surface in”, but Skate did manage to surface and make contact with Drifting Ice Station Alpha at 85ºN, 300 nautical miles away. From the pictures (see Figure 116), summer-ice was not that thick nor covering entirely the pole either as free water is seen around on many pictures. In fact, it is worth remembering, that at the end of LIA, how strange, the Arctic was ice-free in June 1854 at 80-81°N, to the north of the Kane Basin, along the Kennedy Channel that leads north to the Lincoln Sea. This reported by Kane (1856) in “Arctic Explorations”. “In the midst of this danger, they had sighted open water and now they saw it plainly. There was no wind stirring and its face was perfectly smooth…Hans could scarcely believe it. But for the birds that were seen in great numbers, Morton says he would not have believed it himself.” (Kane, 1856).

“A rather common assumption of recent studies of arctic sea ice cover is that what has been observed in recent decades is a unique event, unlike any previous conditions, although the quotation [at the head of this chapter] before describes open water in June 1854 at 80-81°N, to the north of the Kane Basin, along the Kennedy Channel that leads north to the Lincoln Sea; a sledding party, searching for traces of Franklin’s expedition, found open water as far up the channel as they could see from hilltops. But, in summer 1980, our ice-strengthened CSS HUDSON could not penetrate even into the northern bight of Kane Basin, which remained ice-covered in mid-August”. (Longhurst, 2015)

363Appointed lead-author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes”

Santer determined to prove humans were a factor by altering the meaning of what was agreed by the others at the draft meeting in Madrid (Ball, 2011). 364https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/hurricane-harvey-and-the-new-normal/ 365https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv9NxOrKDow

Figure 116. USS Skate (SSN-578) was the third nuclear submarine366 commissioned, the first to make a completely submerged transAtlantic crossing, and the second submarine to reach the North Pole and the first to surface there.

Furthermore, even as recently as 1500-1600 (CE), the Wrangel Island which is located in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea and is covered in sea ice for all but a few weeks of the year today was sea ice-free 4-5 months per year, suggesting the Western Arctic is much colder today than it was even during the Little Ice Age (Porter et al., 2019) see Fig. 3 p. 6. Thus, even though Hansen's prediction would become true (for once) and would Arctic be ice-free summer time in the future, this would remain in the range of short-term natural variability and would have nothing exceptional to be attributed to man-made emissions.

Notice though, that Arctic was ice-free during the Holocene optimum and not summer time but quite all year round. That was just 7000-8000 years ago and man-made emissions had nothing to do with that. As noticed by Richard (2020) “Wild Horses And Mammoths Were Still Eating Grass Year-Round In The Arctic Until 2500-4000 Years Ago. Surface temperatures needed to have been much warmer than today to supply enough grass year-round for horses and mammoths to subsist in the Arctic through the Late Holocene”. If until the 1990s, it was thought the Earth’s last woolly mammoths went extinct during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition about 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, the fact is that Arctic’s Wrangel Island is home to extensive mammoth remains and radiocarbon dating indicates that the woolly mammoth continued living on this island until 3700 years ago, or until the Arctic climate became too cold to provide enough grass year-round to sustain them (Bryson et al., 2010; Arppe et al., 2019).

According to Bryson et al., 2010, a small mammoth is modeled to have conservatively required 25 kg of grass per day to survive. Richard (2020) states “mean July temperatures decreased from above 5°C during the Early Holocene to below -2.5°C – the threshold for grass production – by about 4,000 years ago. Consequently, without enough year-round grass to feed on, the woolly mammoth died out”. Even though the study by Graham et al. (2016) points to other factors that could have contributed to the demise of these populations such as a reduction of available freshwater “ Five independent indicators of extinction show that mammoths survived on St. Paul until 5,600 ± 100 y ago. Vegetation composition remained stable during the extinction window, and there is no evidence of human presence on the island before 1787 CE, suggesting that these factors were not extinction drivers. Instead, the extinction coincided with declining freshwater resources and drier climates between 7,850 and 5,600 y ago” thus all evidences suggest a much warmer climate then today during the HCO and an ice-free Arctic all year round or so.

366“The US Navy regards levels of 5000 ppmv on nuclear submarines as safe; ambient levels are currently 400 ppmv” (Lindzen, 2016); this safety level also corresponds to the OSHA Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) of 5,000 ppm (ESHG-Health-02.00), this document adds “10,000ppm (1.0%) Typically no effects, possible drowsiness”

That's natural climate variability. No need for dubious IPCC “attribution”.

But the relentless scare mongers are always back to full steam trying by all means to justify their salaries and the massive budgets of the so many agencies involved, NOAA and 13 more in the last particular case (USGCRP, 2018), that reports after reports they come up with more frightening previsions immediately publicized in the mass media newspress, e.g. (Rice, 2018), that are either baseless affirmations such as the increase of extreme events, which is not even attempted by IPCC, or with exotic and magical forecasts of sea-level rise or else that never happened so far and will not. Of course, all these people do not make science but politics and use the massive financial and human means at their disposal to push harder each time their agendas, adding layers of deceptions over layers of computer models that deliver ever more science-fiction scenarios but nothing very useful for the average citizen who had to fund by the force of the tax system these elucubrations. Report co-author Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists said it "makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future. It’s happening right now in every part of the country. U.S. residents are now being forced to cope with dangerously high temperatures, rising seas, deadly wildfires, torrential rainfalls and devastating hurricanes," she said. Of course, none of these nice meteorological events have ever happened in the past, and claiming that they are worse than before without any evidence of such lies only aims at frightening the populations.

We've eared all these glib, goof-balls and loony predictions for so long now, a masterpiece of quackery, that they are not even distracting anyone any longer. This is not just appalling to observe these visionary leaders or all these scholars being so consistently wrong as reported by Ebell and Milloy, (2019) or Perry (2019a), but leaves aghast to see them now teaming up by the hundreds in IPCC or USGCRP reports to deliver the same lurid forecasts, fortunately always so consistently wrong, that the pattern of intentional deception is now unmissable unless it would simply be mere collective madness, sort of a social schizophrenic. Harping on again and again their dire vision of the future is the strategy followed by these climate-tricksters, they have relentlessly regurgitated their obsessional scenarios of catastrophe in the making for five decades. They populate their jabberwocky climate tales of horror-land with their unfathomable CO2-fed stupidities and delusions, strangely hoping that some day, by some divine (in)justice, the sins of the mortals consumerists who spoiled the terrestrial Eden would finally be punished by the revenge of Gaia. A plethora of climate-illusionists who read in the digital coffee grains and push the scare in order to keep cashing in their salaries do their best to kick the can of delusion down the road to the detriment of everyone else, and more importantly of the truth. After that “in 2008 climate genius Al Gore predicts ice-free Arctic by 2013” (Perry, 2019a), we have New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019 according to Hansen (Salon.com, October 23, 2001), and now the last but not least fortune-teller has just pronounced (Cummings, 2019) her sentence “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change” Ocasio-Cortez says. USA TODAY Dec 14, well as Perry (2019a) says “if we don’t immediately convert to socialism and allow Alexandria Ocasio-Crazy to control and organize our lives, the planet will become uninhabitable”.

This reminds of the great books of Mackay (1841) 'Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'367 who stated in his preface p. VIII “Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history - a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes! ”. Viewed with such a perspective, the AGW will not look that impressive, just one very good chapter.

Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund368 (EDF) said “it is worth nothing that the report was released by an administration that has persistently ignored the warnings of scientists, economists, businesses and community leaders that corroborate the report’s findings. As long as government leaders sit on their hands, Americans will suffer for generations to come. The evidence is clear: the Trump administration is failing to protect the American people". The EDF is so replete with cash with more than 150 millions per year and conflicts of interests in the matter, that designating the Trump administration as a political target is a disservice to their otherwise sometimes legitimate actions and serves only to point to the political agenda and motives underlying all AGW actions.

Nathaniel Keohane should meditate that “However, whereas expert credibility and prominence may dominate the opinion of what is true, it can never alter truth itself”.

367https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds 368https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Defense_Fund