Half a Century of Failed Climate Disaster Predictions
As I note in my upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one defining feature of upper-middle-class life over the past 50–60 years has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true.
Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report?
Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced regression analysis to argue that the planet at some point must run out of key resources. [They provided] quite specific dates for this global near-apocalypse. And then none of the predictions came true.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years later in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”
Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture, humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports, “malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of the world population to about 15 percent.
“Nor are we choking on pollution,” as electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic growth.”
This same lesson — that resources are obviously not infinite but new supplies can be found or even grown if we turn to human ingenuity — applies to “peak oil,” perhaps the ultimate recurring boondoggle prediction.
As every commodities investor knows, Very Serious People have predicted on a dozen occasions that the Earth will run dry of key fossil fuels in the near future. As Forbes notes, peak oil is at some level “grounded in reality.”
Oil is “a finite natural resource, produced over a geological timespan, whereas demand continues to climb.” However, given different computer models and continuing exploration by the oil companies, “nobody can quite agree on when we will reach the point of Peak Oil or even what will cause it.” …snip…
A piece of this kind could go on almost forever, documenting similar blooper projections, huge and small.
Read full post at National Review
Charles Higley
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It has been illuminating to me how Russian scientists have been ignored over the years in certain areas. Sure, Lysenko was a joke and crime at the same time, but good work has been done in geology at least.
These scientists pointed out years ago that the C-14 content of oil and gas was all wrong and basically out of wack with surface content. They posed the idea of abiotic oil and gas and it took us decades to realize they were right. So, the center the Earth is producing carbon and hydrogen and even oxygen from the breakdown of neutron-rich atoms. The effects of this is profound.
First off, these light atoms percolate upward from the core and take up more space than the parent atoms, this expanding the planet slowly over time. This gives a clue as to why the oldest sea floor is only about 250 million years (mya) old. Up to that time the planet was 100% covered with lithosphere and much smaller. Building pressure from the inside caused periodic releases of pressure in the form of the gargantuan Deccan traps and Siberian Traps. However, these venting events cooled and sealed themselves under miles of lava, thus trapping the pressure to build up again. So, about 250 mya, the lithosphere cracked and the resulting continents started to pull apart, releasing the world-covering shallow seas of Earth into the chasms which were forming. [There is no subduction, only spreading.]
The continents were sections of the crust which were curved by being part of early Earth’s surface. As Earth expanded, these curves no longer fit on the ever-flattening surface curves. The lithosphere chunks then collapsed to conform with the new less-curved surface and mountain ranges formed where the continents were weakest and crumpled. This is why we can find marine fossils high atop mountains. Those materials used to be at the bottom of shallow seas before the lithospheric break up. [We say shallow seas because a lot of the water in the oceans today were released during this breakup.] Mountain ranges are long chains of peaks because that is the way crust wrinkles as it settles.
So, with even NASA admitting that Earth is expanding, we have light elements percolating upward to the bottom of the crust and sea floor. As it goes, hydrogen and even oxygen are lost to the surrounding molten materials; for example, methane, CH4, would lose H and neighboring carbons would form bonds. This proceeds and eventually forms oil as chains of carbons and even cyclic hydrocarbons as more H is lost. Coal would be organic material laid down in the shallow seas, buried by sedimentary layers of rocks and subjected to permeation and conversion by oil and gas from below.
Recently, the question was asked as to why coal is found in mountain ranges. This is because of the earlier buryial and conversion of these layers before Earth’s expansion and then elevation of these regions by the mountain-forming crumpling as Earth expanded.
Moving to a bigger picture, one wonders why Earth’s core has such a neutron-rich content. It suggests that the cores of the rocky planets might be pieces from an asymmetrical supernova event, which would have to be by our Sun, which is now a spernova remnant.
Scientists have reported for decades that the gamma ray flux from the Sun is way wrong for a fusion core. [The myth we were taught in school for generations.] It is claimed that it takes many 1000s of years for light to move from the fusion core to Sun’s surface. Solar sunspots are interesting because, when the surface of the Sun is blown back, it is dark inside, instead of being brighter than ever, which it should be with a fusion-based Sun. NASA has even reported clouds in larger sunspots and lower temperatures than the surface. Hmmm.
But, if the Sun was a supernova remnant, all of this would fit, with even the Sun slowly expanding along with the rocky planets. Perhaps the gas-giant planets also have remnant cores as well.
However, why is the Sun’s surface so hot and, also, why is the surface 6000 deg C and a million miles out the solar wind is one million deg C? Nothing can cause such a heating except by electric work being done on the charged particles of the Sun’s atmosphere. Apparently there is a current travelling from a neighboring star that heats this up. Stars pick up charge as they travel through space, just as helicopters and dirigibles do, and there are currents, Birkland currents, which have been mapped between stars.
This would explain the ice age we are in, with alternating glacial and interglacial periods. The two stars are acting as an R-C circuit (resistor-capacitor). When the charge difference is too small to induce a current, we have a glacial period, and, when it becomes large enough, current flows and we have an interglacial period in which the Sun heats up and Earth warms.
Again, like an R-C circuit, the current starts and the system heats up, lowering the resistance. This would be the warming from the beginning of the interglacial to the Holocene Optimum, about 3000 years later. Meanwhile, the current flows and the charge difference decreases, resulting in a fluctuating pattern of current in a linear downward trend. This is completely typical of an R-C circuit and exactly what we see after the Holocene Optimum, with the Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and Modern Warm Periods, with intervening cooler periods (“little ice ages”)—all in a linear downward trend. The unknown here is how low this goes before the current stops and we move into the next glacial period.
So, the Russian scientists and abiotic gas and oil lead us to an expanding Earth and explaining our Sun, the current Ice Age, which has roughly 10 million years to go, and a lot of geology. It also shows that climate and CO2 is WAY, WAY beyond our influence or control and that “fossil fuels” are mislabeled and renewable. What great fun.
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Francois Stallbom
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Spot on Charles:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-10-02-oil-gas-not-fossil-fuels-renewable-resources.html
https://principia-scientific.com/oil-is-not-a-fossil-fuel-and-agw-is-non-science/
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Seriously
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Well, you know….Russia, being promoted as our ‘mortal enemy to our way of life’…they’ll not get any traction. But I love it…thanks Charles! Interesting to say the least.
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LLOYD
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Well, Putin and company are far from friendly!
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Seriously
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Pretending to be ‘friendly’…that’s the u.s….ask any country that’s had their elections rigged, despots put in power ( saddam – just to name ONE anyone?), troops deployed in secret to sow dissent, bring about it’s ‘aims’, for a country that doesn’t belong to them, so it can grow it’s gnp, vaccines forced on the pop. America shows a friendly face with a dagger behind her back…to take what it wants and deceive. The record is clear…but I’m sure in future, all such records will ‘disappear ‘…
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