Two wildly wrong climate predictions have anniversaries in June. And since ABC and the NBC-owned SyFy Channel don’t like to be embarrassed by explaining their botched global warming prognosticating, we’ll do it for them.
Fourteen years ago, on June 12, 2008, ABC’s Earth 2100 offered a special on the then-far-off year of 2015. [bold, links added]
Correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”
The special featured one of ABC’s experts warning that in 2015, the sea level would rise quickly. An on-screen graphic showed New York City being engulfed by water. (Spoiler alert: That didn’t happen.)
Interestingly, the special included predictions such as this one from the future world of 2015: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.”
Now, while gas was $2.75 on that day, it IS skyrocketing in 2022. However, the causes are energy and production-related. Not the apocalypse.
On June 13, 2008, ABCNews.com promoted the special by hyperventilating: “Are we living in the last century of our civilization?”
The special made predictions through 2100. (A “storm of the century” wipes out Miami. By 2084, Earth’s population will be just 2.7 billion.) Check back in the decades to come for those claims.
On June 14, 2006, the not-yet-disgraced Matt Lauer hosted a special for the SyFy channel ominously titled Countdown to Doomsday. (We’re still here so the countdown must be continuing.) Lauer blamed his fellow humans: “We are the problem.”
Predicting a quick end to civilization, the NBC host offered the tired (and debunked) warnings of overpopulation:
Today, life on Earth is disappearing faster than the days when dinosaurs breathed their last, but for a very different reason. … Us homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid.
Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.
Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives. … The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home. …
It will take a massive global effort to make things right, but the solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption, develop green technologies.
Don’t worry though. The nice thing about DOOM predictions from the media is that you can keep pushing the date back. 2015 may not have submerged New York City, but there’s always 2025? 2031?
For more examples from our FLASHBACK series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
Read more at NewsBusters
Nothing but False Prophets making false statements and the M..S. Media sucking t his stuff up like sponge and Parroting this fake stuff to the rest of us
Sadly, journalists don’t get a basic education in science. Particularly relevant today is journalism’s naivete of CO2 biology and our naturally driven climate. Even science fiction has understood for decades that life is carbon-based. Life’s carbon ALL comes from CO2. And all life dies without it. In today’s starvation level lows, more CO2 makes life greener, stronger, more drought-tolerant, and abundant. Because life essential CO2 has been declining dangerously and inexorably since life was born. Declining from life luxuriant levels (8000-10000ppm) more than twenty times those of today. Declining to within a whisker of the beginning of the death of all things (nominally at 150ppm) – from a lack of CO2! Any CO2 level below 2,000ppm is a starvation level low. Described as such because any addition of CO2 to an atmosphere below 2000ppm CO2 will cause photosynthetic life to bloom! Journalism has no idea that climate moves in cycles. And no idea that CO2 concentrations FOLLOW temperature changes, they do not cause them. Because CO2 solubility is temperature dependent. Climate today is the coldest since multicellular life evolved nearly 600 million years ago. And climate has nothing to do with 0.04% CO2. 12 degree C temperature cycles (glacial/interglacial) characterize today’s ongoing Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age (the latest of several ice ages in earth’s history). During the coldest eight degrees (85 thousand year glacial phase) of this ice age, it is not warm enough to prevent snow from accumulating into ice sheets thousands of feet thick. Accumulating to latitudes as far south as NYC! During the warmest four degrees C interglacial temperatures, which last about 15 thousand years, ice sheets retreat to today’s current latitudes. We are 12 thousand years into the latest interglacial warm phase climate scientists call the Holocene. There have been about thirty interglacial phases in this ice age (so far)! I don’t believe we name any of the others. Interglacial phase temperatures typically rise and fall four degrees C over nine hundred cycles. Dr. Judith Curry calls this rise and fall “Eddy” cycles. The warming phase of our latest “Eddy” cycle began in the 1600s. (About a hundred years before the invention of the thermometer). While climate alarmists call this temperature rise “unprecedented” and “catastrophic”, they are completely unaware that temperature rising phases like today’s have happened at least 500 times during the 30 interglacial phases of our ongoing three million year ongoing ice age. While climate author Bjorn Lomborg points out that climate related death rates have improved tenfold over the last century. And energy poverty deaths are as many as 300 times the number of deaths from the weather. So much for a climate catastrophe. The Bell Tolls for Climate, CO2 and energy ignorance. And it is killing people.