___In 1798 Thomas Malthus saw that the world population was growing faster than the food supply. He predicted worldwide starvation and wars fought over resources.
___What happened is that automation and chemicals dramatically increased the food supply and made harvesting and transporting it easier. Wars still occurred, but not over food.
___In 1968 Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. As a “scientist” he closely follows Darwin and calls for a 2 billion cap on human population by 2050 using a “responsible breeding program” which would allow “superior” humans to breed while “inferior” humans are sterilized. He is willing to accept increased intelligence through “environmental” changes to home and school and improved diet. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”, and “we must take action to reverse the deterioration of our environment before population pressure permanently ruins our planet. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself onto oblivion.”
___Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. The current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but underwent global warming throughout the 20th century. The evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
___On October 23, 2006, Newsweek issued a correction, over 31 years after the original article, stating that it had been "so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future" (though editor Jerry Adler claimed that 'the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate."')
___An Inconvenient Truth...Or Convenient Fiction? is an American documentary film by Dr Steven F. Hayward, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The film, produced by the Pacific Research Institute and filmed at the Heritage Foundation, disputes many of the claims in the film An Inconvenient Truth, arguing that it goes too far in predictions of doom. Dr Hayward generally believes that the Earth's environment is far more resilient than public opinion would think. "Global warming extremists" "distort the science, grossly exaggerate the risks, argue that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, and suggest that solutions are easy and cheap," and that dealing with the issue in such a manner creates "an all too convenient fiction."
___Five years ago, Al Gore predicted the North Pole’s ice cap would become a fond memory, a casualty of the raging inferno of global warming. The “entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years,” he solemnly told a German TV audience.
___Mr. Gore’s deadline has passed, and neither Santa Claus, Rudolph and the other reindeer, nor the polar bears are looking for a life raft. There were 7.3 million square miles of Arctic ice on Dec. 7, 2008. Fast-forward five years, and there are still 7.3 million square miles of Arctic ice, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This figure does go up and down with a natural cycle of melting and freezing, but the total today is within 5 percent of what it has been for the past 30 years.
___In “The Inconvenient Truth,” the country’s foremost doomsayer warned that the world’s sea levels would rise 20 feet as a result of the polar ice melting. Mr. Gore saw dire portents in the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Two weeks after the storm hit, Mr. Gore announced that “the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming.”
___Wrong again. The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ended Nov. 30, was the meekest since 1982. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that “no major hurricanes formed in the Atlantic basin [for the] first time since 1994.” This was despite 19 additional years with carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/16/editorial-al-gore-soothsayer/#ixzz3MfY0rYKn
