Fascinating – take a look: 50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh
2000: “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”:
…within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
2021: UK weather: Snow across England and Scotland in pictures – BBC News
2022: Heavy snow disrupts UK travel; three boys die after falling into lake | Reuters.
2023: Heavy snow and high winds bring treacherous travelling conditions – BBC News
We could go on – you get the idea about future predictions of weather. Similarly, annual predictions for wild land forest fires in my area are random – and useless. Or predictions for drought. Last winter, they predicted we would be in extreme drought – and then we had 200% of normal precipitation. Over in Salt Lake, researchers forecast – in March of 2023 – that the Lake was dying and would be dead within 5 years with catastrophic consequences for Utah. Four weeks later, they rescinded their prediction as the lake surface height has been steadily rising. (It’s shrinkage, say the experts, is due almost entirely to diversion of source water for the lake – it is not climate change.)
Some one needs to read the fable “Never Cry Wolf” again.
NOTE – this doesn’t mean climate change is occurring or not occurring. But – during the pandemic I started taking notes – perhaps 15,000 in all. I began noting disease model projections, expert prediction of “superspreader events” and “surges” – and discovered that almost all were wrong, and typically wrong by miles or kilometers. I discovered that expert predictions of complex systems are near useless. This caught me by surprise – and I’ve taught university courses in modeling systems for use in business situations (optimization problems, for example, or simulations). You can see some of my notes as “Follow up” posts, linked in the column to the right of this post but most of my notes have not – yet – been made public.
Our current climate change campaign based 100% on fear and doomsday scenarios is stupid and useless, and has only led to severe mental health consequences for many. Today I was in a geothermal electric power plant that is producing huge amounts of power. This is an optimistic solution! They also demonstrated carbon capture technology that works – and turns sequestered CO2 into rock formations. Solutions and optimism are the exciting way forward, not absurd, scary projections of the future, based on physically impossible scenarios (e.g. RCP8.5) – as I have shown, modeled projections of the future are almost always wrong, and massively wrong.
