(Oct. 27) Credit to a tweet by Tony Heller of Real Climate Science for reminding us how climate alarmists have been the Chicken Littles of the modern world for a quarter century.
Heller’s tweet highlighted a 1995 New York Times report headlined “Scientist Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions.” The particular sentence Heller tweeted said that “at the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”
Really.
Well, here it is more than 25 years later, and most of the East Coast beaches are decidedly intact, thank you very much. Heller has posted a plethora of information about why and how the alarmists have been wrong about the projected rise of sea levels and why much (although, of course, not all) of the conventional wisdom about climate change is actually junk science.
If the doomsayers were wrong only a quarter century ago, when the now-official climate consensus was new, then perhaps the error of their early assessments would be more forgivable. If their warnings had become less hysterical through the years as more data emerged, and if they didn’t so consistently err only on the side of predicting too much destruction necessitates too much regulatory command-and-control, then they might actually deserve the credibility most of the establishment media wrongly gives them.
Alas, that’s not the case. As think tank leader Bjorn Lomborg has detailed weekly in the Wall Street Journal, climate change may be real but significantly less drastic and more manageable than establishment dogma insists. For example, he cites a study showing that just by building better dikes, humankind probably will “negate almost all that terrible projected damage by 2100. Only 15,000 people would be flooded every year, which is a remarkable improvement compared with the 3.4 million people flooded in 2000.”…. [The full column is here.]
