Fifty Years of Apocalyptic Global Warming Predictions and Why People Believe Them, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

Scientists have known for some time that their predictive models of global warming were at increasing odds with the data. More recently, they have begun to pinpoint some of the faulty assumptions in the models used to make projections (not observations) of global warming. One example of this type of correction is a 2018 article published in the prestigious journal, Science.

Nitrogen availability is a central controller of terrestrial plant growth and, thereby, of the carbon cycle and global climate change. It has been widely assumed that the atmosphere is the main source of terrestrial nitrogen input. Surprisingly, Houlton et al. now show that bedrock is just as large a nitrogen source across major sectors of the global terrestrial environment.

Climate scientists have long known that plants offset some of the effects of climate change by absorbing and storing CO2. But they assumed that the ability to plants to perform this function was limited because the availability of nitrogen in the atmosphere was limited. As an earlier 2003 study published in Science stated, “there will not be enough nitrogen available to sustain the high carbon uptake scenarios.”

But this idea that the only source of nitrogen for plant life came from the air has been refuted in a more recent article, also in Science. Now we know that there are vast storehouses of nitrogen in the planet’s bedrock that plants can also feed on. In light of these findings, Ronald Amundson, a soil biogeochemist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Chemical and Engineering News that “If there is more nitrogen there than expected, then the constraints on plant growth in a high-CO2 world may not be as great as we think.”

With more nitrogen available, plant life might be able to absorb more CO2 than climate scientists have been estimating. This  “has the potential to change all projections related to climate change,” because there could be more carbon storage on land and less in the atmosphere than the models assume.

For interested readers, a series of articles on this topic reveal other evidence of weaknesses in climate models used to predict future warming. These models failed to predict a decade-long pause in global temperatures. Nor have various calamities that were supposed to have occurred by now materialized. And a recent paper published in another prestigious scientific journal, Nature, has also concluded that the planet is less sensitive to increases in CO2 than the computer models assume.

Of course the sky is falling, but maybe not as fast as is being predicted by the left-wing media. Beware of self-serving socialist projections based on outdated computer models, or sometimes just nothing at all. The notorious AOC and her ilk can get away with unprecedented levels of ignorance given the current state of American journalism as long as the errors are in the left direction. But any curious citizen can look back at what previous “experts” claimed was supposed to happen over the past half century and confirm just how erroneous and exaggerated their claims have been all along.

Over thirteen years ago, Al Gore declared the earth to be in a “true planetary emergency” with only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. The former vice president said, that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.”

Gore’s movie, Inconvenient Truth, was found by a British judge to contain nine errors. The judge said it could not be shown to students unless it included a notice pointing out the errors. Here are nine of Al Gore’s guilt/fear producing predictions that never materialized.

  1. Rising Sea Levels Threatening Coastal Cities and Islands
  2. Increased Tornadoes
  3. New Ice Age in Europe
  4. South Sahara Drying Up
  5. Massive Flooding in China and India
  6. Drastic Loss of Arctic Ice
  7. Polar Bear Extinction
  8. Dramatic Rise in Global Temperature Due to CO2
  9. Katrina a Foreshadow of Future Increase in Hurricanes

Gore’s point of “no return” was back in 2016. Of course, his movie won an Oscar, and the hero of Hollywood was fast-tracked to becoming the first “carbon billionaire.” In just 7 years between 2000 and 2007, Gore’s assets soared 50-fold from an estimated $780,000–$1.9 million to “well in excess” of $100 million. Besides his hit movie, Gore used his climate panic lobbying to sway the government to invest in the economic sectors he was poised and ready to profit from. By 2008, Gore put $300 million into a campaign to promote climate fears while offering carbon reduction solutions that benefited the firms he was invested in. When the sympathetic Obama Administration introduced a “renewable energy” solution for the economy, fourteen of the tech firms Gore was invested in had received and/or benefited from over $2.5 billion in loans, grants, and tax breaks.

Democrats count on the public to forget each dire warning that they issue about the end of the world in ten years. Then ten years later they make the same predictions. And the shocking thing is that somehow the public does forget, or at least the Democrats do. As each new generation of American schoolchildren are indoctrinated to believe this doomsday prediction, they march to protest “climate inaction” and set out to save the planet.

The inconvenient truth for Gore, Obama, and the current crop of Democrat hopefuls is that there is no planetary emergency. Not one of their dire predictions has come to pass. Why do they and their multitude of followers continue to believe their doomsday prophecies in the face of 50 years of disconfirmation? It turns out that psychologists have a compelling explanation.

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger became intrigued with a news story about a doomsday cult led by Dorothy Martin, a suburban housewife who claimed she’d received messages about the impending flooding of the Earth. Festinger was already developing his theory of cognitive dissonance and recognized the situation as a unique laboratory to study what would happen when a deeply-held belief was disconfirmed. He saw this as a case that would lead to the arousal of dissonance when the prophecy inevitably failed. He thought that altering or denying the original belief would be very difficult, as Martin and her group were fiercely committed to it. For an excellent application of cognitive dissonance theory to the liberal mind, see here.

Thus began a unique observational study of this small apocalyptic cult that laid the foundation for one of the most influential psychological theories in the history of the field. Martin claimed to have received messages from “the Guardians,” a group of superior beings from another planet, who said a flood would destroy the world on December 21, 1954. Three psychologists and several more assistants joined the cult and observed proceedings firsthand for months before and after the predicted apocalypse. Many of the group members quit their jobs and disposed of their possessions in preparation for the apocalypse. When doomsday came and went, Martin claimed that the world had been spared because of the “force of good and light” that the group members had spread throughout the world. Rather than abandoning their discredited beliefs, group members adhered to them even more strongly and began proselytizing with fervor.

Festinger had predicted exactly this reaction. He argued that proselytizing provided a way for them to gain more social support and thus lessen the dissonance of disconfirmation. As Festinger wrote, “If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.” As he wrote in his classic book about the case, When Prophecy Fails, the group’s belief system did not just remain intact, it became even stronger.

This has close parallels with today’s climate alarmists who have been forecasting the end of the world as we know it in ten years and renewing that prophecy with more fervor with each passing decade since 1970. The pervasive cultural and institutional power held by the Democrat media (film, the talk show universe (whether morning, noon or late-night), TV news broadcasts, major newspapers and magazines, etc.) represent a particularly powerful form of social support. After all, if you are in a position of tremendous institutional or political power, then not only are you hugely confirmed by the colleagues who share your beliefs, but questioning them would threaten everything you hold dear: job, reputation, future career and social standing. Festinger paid special attention to this role the society plays in keeping dissonance at bay: “The more people who hold a belief in common with you, the greater the amount of consonance that is built up and the less dissonance that is encountered when there is a disagreement.”

The doomsday paradigm initiated by true believers on Earth Day in 1970 and echoed by multiple generations of Democrat leaders from Gore to Obama to the current “Green New Deal” continues to develop widening cracks as the ratrio of contradiction to reality increases. The cognitive dissonance caused by being on such intellectually shaky ground insures that this doomsday belief system will remain intact for the foreseeable future, producing more denial and dysfunctional thinking, more hysterical calls and campaigns for the moral exclusion of “climate deniers”, and more desperate measures against them.


For Festinger’s theory, see:

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

18 replies
  1. anarchyst
    anarchyst says:

    If environmentalism restricted itself to truly caring for our natural resources, I would have no problem with it. However, with the secret science and questionable funding that these environmental groups possess taints the whole barrel. It turns out that many claims that environmentalists make have no basis in fact and are not based on good, honest, scientific investigation. This is why environmental scientists have to hide their data, as it does not fit their agenda. A good example of this is the so-called global warming crap, now renamed climate change. For one, the climate is always changing. The East Anglia emails in which data was purposely falsified by climate scientists comes to mind. Not only that, the climate scientists purposely installed temperature monitoring sensors in cities, contrary to manufacturers recommendations and good scientific practices, in asphalt-covered parking lots, and other heat sink areas in order to prove their (faulty) hypothesis. This is scientific dishonesty at its worst.
    It turns out that the solar system is in a cooling cycle due to decreased solar activity. There are two long-term solar cycles that reinforce themselves when in phase and cancel themselves out when out-of-phase. Look up the Maunder minimum. There are no SUVs on Mars or other planets, yet they are also experiencing the same solar variability.
    Environmentalism has been the method used to impose communist principles on western society, especially in the USA.
    Environmentalists are not content with promoting clean water, air and land, but are hell-bent on controlling human behavior, and yes, promoting extermination plans for much of humanity as these anointed types consider mankind to be a pestilence (except for themselves) to be reduced in population by any means necessary.
    Environmentalists HATE the God-given concept of private property and have imposed government-backed and enforced land use controls on private property owners without compensation, clearly an unconstitutional taking of private property. If environmentalists want to control land use, let them purchase it themselves, not by government force. Today the only method of negating government-imposed land use restrictions is shoot, shovel, and shut up.
    If environmentalists had their way, the earth’s human population would be reduced by approximately 90%, with the remainder to (be forced) to live in cities, in soviet-style high rise apartments, utilizing bicycles, buses and trains for transportation. The use of automobiles and access to pristine wilderness (rural) areas would be off-limits to us mere mortals, and would only be available for these anointed environmentalists.
    The endangered species act is another abuse of environmentalism. Species are always changing, to adapt to their environments-survival if the fittest. In fact, the hoopla over the spotted owl (that placed much northwest timber land off-limits to logging) turned out to be nothing but scientific misconduct and arrogance. There are virtually identical species in other parts of the northwest.
    More scientific malpractice occurred when government biologists attempted to plant lynx fur in certain areas to provide an excuse for making those areas off-limits for logging or development. Fortunately, these scientists were caught, however, no punishment was imposed.
    In order to promote the false religion of “global warming” aka “climate change”, NASA “scientists” purposely installed temperature sensors in city parking lots and roads contrary to good scientific principles and practices in order to “skew” the “global warming” results.
    In a nutshell, today’s environmentalism IS communism like watermelon-green on the outside and red (communist) on the inside.
    It is interesting to note that communist and third-world countries have the WORST environmental conditions on the planet. Instead of the USA and other developed countries spending billions to get rid of that last half-percent of pollution, it would behoove the communist countries to improve their conditions first. Here is a question for you environmentalists: Why is there a push for restrictive environmental regulations, but only on the developed first-world countries, and not the gross polluters such as India and China?

  2. andy
    andy says:

    Great article! Thank you.. Just a note to let you know there’s a typo in last paragraph, “ratrio ..” instead of “ratio of contradiction..”. Cheers, Andy [don’t worry about putting this post up as such.. Happy Easter!]

  3. alan
    alan says:

    Dr. Baggins is very generous in granting and allowing ‘the left’ the benevolence of ‘ignorance’, malleability and being easily persuaded to embrace stupidity. I am not as gracious with the left as Dr. Baggins. I do grant and accept the notion that their irrational stupidity is an easy target, but these people and their owners have always associated ‘panic’ with a source of easy income. Let’s face it; stealing beats working. The now famous quote from parasite Rahm Emanuel is their ‘sacred creed’. “Never let a crisis pass before extracting the maximum amount of profit”. That is my paraphrase, but you get the gist. Gore was a master at this. Bush (W) was too stupid to be anything other than ‘bush’, but the Clintons, the Gores, the McCains and McConnells and Obamas of this vulnerable experiment we call a ‘constitutional republic’, and all of the handlers of the ilk mentioned above and their progeny and predecessors, have only one agenda; global control of everything that ensures the position of money control, and power distribution. They have no other agenda. Their agenda is their only ‘god’. And the ‘corporate leadership’ of this agenda is none other than the parasite money cabal, owned and operated by the zio-rothschild entity, solidly encamped in City of London and Washington DC, and in New York, that wonderful place that the Jews happily refer to as ‘New Jerusalem’. We must stop coddling these cancers in our midst, and begin to expose them for what they are, and apply the only effective remedy for this corrosive disease. Excise the tumors, and throw them out!

  4. Deep North
    Deep North says:

    Environmentalist are worried over a small increase global temperatures. They wish to drastically alter our way of life to prevent this. What happens if global temperatures cool? Will they want humanity to increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere? This amounts to regulating the climate over several decades if not centuries. Are we to believe this is possible? These are very abstract concepts that general public could care less for. The elites should be focusing on overfishing, plastics in the ocean, deforestation and the ever increasing suburban sprawl among other things. The Third World needs to understand that natural resources aren’t unlimited and should check their population growth.

    • Charles Frey
      Charles Frey says:

      Decades ago, some of us conspiracy freaks found out about the US Army [ weaponizing ] Weather Modification Program in Alaska. A subsequent, televised investigative one hour piece by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation metamorphosed us freaks into the omniscient.

      Google PROJECT HARP. Luckily, the funding public and US enemies du jour have been ‘ reliably ‘ informed, by the ever transparent Pentagon [ 9/11 CFO; Rabbi – son of Rabbi, Dove Zakheim ] that this Project was cancelled.

      Or, far more likely, transferred to the DOD’s DARPA under Steven H. Walker and a shiny new deodorized acronym. All of its ‘ accomplishments ‘ will have been passed, gratis, to Israeli Intelligence Collection and been incorporated into its Policy, before Washington even files it. As soon as a method for a localized drought in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Russia or even the EU, can be induced. Far more effective than blocking all oil sales and US rationalized confiscation/unmitigated theft of billions in gold from accounts unwisely deposited in GB, that other sharer of our [?] trumpeted common Western Values.

      Keeping the essential, raison d’état multiply-profitable caldron of ISIS topped up and bubbling – its fire, coincidentally fueled by Christians.

  5. Robert Dolan
    Robert Dolan says:

    Sadly, the environmental movement has become nothing more than high level jewing.
    I used to be an environmentalist and I used to give to all the groups.
    I finally discovered that the entire movement is connected to globalism, the UN, Agenda 21, etc.
    Major jewing.
    I gave to the Sierra Club for many years until a jewish donor convinced them to sellout on immigration.
    The bastards sent me an email asking me to march with them to give amnesty for illegals.
    I called their office and screamed at them and told them to go to hell.
    I was furious and wounded by that betrayal.
    I no longer give to any environmental orgs.

    • TJ
      TJ says:

      I used to be an environmentalist- now I love smog.

      It was David Gelbaum who gave the Sierra Club [Carl Pope] One Hundred Million Jewish Federal Reserve Notes, in exchange for the Club not mentioning immigration.

      • TJ
        TJ says:

        Before the Pope was bought off, the Sierra Club held the [correct] position that mexicans [mestizos, not Whites] are a form of pollution.

  6. milan
    milan says:

    A military base?

    Baseball sized hailstones damage cars at Fort Carson

    https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/wonder/baseball-sized-hailstones-damage-cars-at-fort-carson/vi-BBVLZ8u?ocid=spartandhp

    in light of such a sentence shouldn’t we be saying hmmmmm with a question mark?

    “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? Job 38:22

    Further to this go here

    [http://thesaker.is/foreign-backed-terrorism-in-iran-part-one-us-israeli-backed-salafists-in-iran/#comment-633939]

  7. Gunter
    Gunter says:

    When environmentalists and the UN start talking about HARP and military programs I’ll be interested, in the mean time they are bought and paid for by globalists who want us to get accustomed to drastically shrinking living standards – eat insects, ride bicycles, etc – that they’re planning for us as money goes up in smoke. All the while they’ll offer a tyrannical global government as a saviour. Israel positions itself as the global middleman in energy and operates a mafia blackmail racket with kill switch diplomacy on western politicians.

    • TJ
      TJ says:

      Environmentalism, HAARP [High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program], UN and MIC- different branches of the same tree.

      btw- If memory serves, there may be a joke about an Ape becoming Branch Manager. . .

  8. Neil C
    Neil C says:

    Come on guy’s it’s not all bad!
    David De Rothschild sailed the sea in a plastic re-cycled boat to save the world! He is a big fan of Carbon Credits (which is big Biz)
    David De R is an environmentalist and deeply cares! his family care so much they are taking control of world water reserves.
    Bottled water is now more expensive than petrol.
    Rumors abound that there are water conflicts behind the Palestine/Israeli war.
    Nothing it seems is sacred anymore.

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