by Robert M. Traxler

Climate change, the latest in the long list of disaster predictions from environmentalists, is perhaps the best term they have coined. Global cooling, mass starvation, global warming, pestilence, pollution, disease and a few smaller ones all come and go, but climate change is brilliant, it is heads I win tails you lose.

The climate is always changing; it has for  as long as humans kept records, and even longer if we believe in what ice cores from the arctic tell us.

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated in 1970 that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

I was in Asia in the 1980s, and must have missed that one?

Former Vice President Al Gore stated that all the correct scientists, all the real scientists believe in global warming. If you do not support the current politically correct predictions, you will not be hired or funded in the industry, so dissent is not allowed. Gore was worth $1.7 million when he departed congress, he is worth more than $300 million today; so being a climate change activist pays fairly well.

Worldwide, the numbers for funding are large, even by my humble standards, gargantuan. In 2014, a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) issued a study which found that “Global investment in climate change” reached $359 billion that year. Then to give you a sense of how money-hungry these planet-saviors are, the CPI moaned that this spending “falls far short of what’s needed,” a number estimated at a few pennies north of $5 trillion.

Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, that by 1975 global cooling will result in widespread famines that 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 even sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions and by the year 2000, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.

In January 1970, Life magazine reported that scientists have irrefutable experimental and theoretical evidence to support the predictions that in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear protective (gas) masks to survive air pollution, and by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half. Global cooling and famine will be the result. Must have missed that one as well?

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.’” Back in the days that someone pumped gas for you. Missed that one also.

Kenneth Watt also warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he reported. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

Is cleaning up the planet a good thing? Sure it is, but enough with the over the top, wild, apocalyptic “end of the world is near, pay me” tactics. Can we have “common sense” climate predictions?