Fox News:
Will the world end in 12 years? Maybe 30?
If history is any guide, it will not. Many similar predictions have been made in the past, but they came and went without tragedy.
Here are the five worst predictions made about 2020 that failed to pan out.
1. The U.S. may warm 6 degrees F from 1990 to 2020
In 1990, The Washington Post reported in a front page story: “Carbon dioxide is the gas most responsible for predictions that Earth will warm on average by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2020.”
The outlet further warned: “The United States, because it occupies a large continent in higher latitudes, could warm by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit.”
2019 IN REVIEW: THE TOP 5 CRAZIEST WEATHER MOMENTS
Thirty years later, 2020 has finally arrived. The Earth has warmed approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit according to NASA. The United States also warmed roughly 1 degree.
Elliott Negin, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, declined to comment.
The latest UN IPCC report, AR5, however, addresses the issue of whether their models were accurate. (The UN predictions differed from the 1990 Washington Post ones, which did not cite its source.)
The latest UN report shows that current temperatures are just within the UN’s old predictions made in 1990, but acknowledges that actual temperatures came in “on the lower end” of expectations.
The UN report partly credits a 1991 volcanic eruption in the Philippines for the lower-than-expected warming, and says the new models account for volcanoes.
The UN now predicts a rise of about 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit from today to the year 2100.
2. Oil will effectively run out by 2020
CNN ran a headline in 2003 titled “World oil and gas ‘running out'”.
The New York Times reported in 1989 that “untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling,” and that “William Stevens, the president of Exxon U.S.A., said … by the year 2020 there would not be enough domestic oil left ‘to keep me interested.'”
But doomsayers underestimated American ingenuity, and the opposite happened. Both U.S. oil output and U.S. proven oil reserves are dramatically higher now than they were in 1989, thanks to technology allowing deeper oil to be discovered and extracted.
New technology in natural gas (“fracking”) also allowed the U.S. to become an energy independent net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years in 2018.
Reached by phone, Phillip Shabecoff, the former New York Times reporter who covered the disappearing oil in 1989, said that the Exxon CEO’s 2020 prediction was off.
“I’m not Nostradamus,” he said, adding, “it’s what the Exxon CEO said. He obviously did not anticipate the new fracking and gas technology. At the time the Permean Basin was being drained dry, so he had every reason to believe we were running out of oil,” Shabecoff said.
Marian Tupy, who tracks metrics like oil production at HumanProgress.org, told Fox News that people routinely underestimate humanity.
“People only think about how can we solve things with current technology. They underestimate human ingenuity,” he said.
Shabecoff said that “unfortunately, human ingenuity is often undermined by political ideology and greed, so we have not been able to bring human ingenuity to bear on urgent questions like climate change.”
The rest are here
All those rediculous and idiotic predictions and not one of them has happened or ever will happen just gose to show you that the Earth is Not Fragile and there is No Delicate Balance of Nature
Miraculously, there has been no erosion of the left’s belief in ongoing predictions, as long as they align with there prejudices.
Herein lies a big problem for socialists like Bernie, Joe, Pete, Liz, AOC and others.
Human ingenuity is not cheap and is rarely accidental.
Under socialism the money needed to develop an idea into a new process goes to the gov’t instead.
There will be no innovation.
That’s why the Chinese steal so much.