Before the global warming catastrophists held sway in our politics and in the media, we were warned that another ice age was in our near future. [emphasis, links added]
But that prediction was overwhelmed by fearmongers who have been telling us for decades that we’re burning our world with greenhouse gas emissions. Now we’re hearing again that the big freeze is coming. What do we do with this new information?
Best just to ignore it, since predicting the future climate based on human activity is a narcissistic folly.
In 1970, University of California-Davis ecologist Kenneth Watt pulled the alarm handle. Our planet, he said, “has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Didn’t happen.
Instead, climate activists have been promising an overheated future. In a 1988 Senate hearing, James Hansen claimed “the greenhouse effect is here.”
We have since been inundated by predictions that man’s combustion of fossil fuels was not just going to roast Earth, it would cause more frequent and more damaging storms, calamitous droughts, overflowing rains, the wildest of wildfires, and life-threatening sea level rises, to name a few of the end-is-near predictions.
The existential threat is always just around the bend, where we can’t see it, but we just know it’s there. Convincing you of that is what the green left has always done to accrete power, wealth, and influence to itself.
And yet, despite this, humanity has plugged on.
But now a new threat has emerged. Carbon dioxide (CO2) might be a factor in turning “warming events into ice ages,” thus saith a report recently published in Science.
Or maybe it’s not.
It’s too soon to tell. And it’s likely that it will always be too soon to tell, since, contrary to the left-leaning media’s take, most climate-warming science is hotly debated and therefore not at all certain.
In any event, let’s not confuse this report with one that, according to the New York Post, also floats the idea that a new ice age is coming, in this case because the “Gulf Stream is near collapse.”
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