1.
Apocalyptic warnings on repeat
A group of
1,700 scientists and experts signed a letter 25 years ago
warning of massive ecological and societal collapse if nothing
was done to curb overpopulation, pollution and, ultimately, the
capitalist society in which we live today.
The Union of
Concerned Scientists put out a
second letter earlier this year, once again warning of the
dire consequences of global warming and other alleged ecological
ills.
Now numbering
15,000, the group warns,
"soon it
will be too late to shift course away from our failing
trajectory, and time is running out."
"We must
recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing
institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only
home," the scientists and experts warned.
It's a
terrifying warning - if you ignore the fact that none of their
1992 warning has come to fruition...
2. The
planet will be "uninhabitable" by the end of the century
New York
Magazine writer David Wallace-Wells
published a 7,000-word article claiming global warming could
make Earth "uninhabitable" by "the end of this century."
Wallace-Wells's
article warned of terrors, like,
"Heat Death," "Climate Plagues,"
"Permanent Economic Collapse" and "Poisoned Oceans."
"Indeed, absent
a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their
lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to
uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as
soon as the end of this century," Wallace-Wells wrote.
3.
Prince Charles's global warming deadline passed… and nothing
happened
Prince
Charles
famously warned in July 2009 that humanity had only 96 months to
save the world from,
"irretrievable climate and ecosystem
collapse, and all that goes with it."
That deadline has
passed, and the prince has not issued an update to when the
world needs to be saved.
Though the
recently-released "Paradise Papers"
show Charles lobbied U.K. lawmakers to enact policies that
benefited his estate's investment in a Bermuda company that does
sustainable forestry.
So, there's that...
4. 'Ice
Apocalypse' Now
Liberal writer
and climate scientist Eric Holthaus
claimed manmade global warming would set off the "ice
apocalypse" at a pace,
"too quickly for humanity to adapt."
Holthaus warned
the wholesale collapse of two
Antarctic glaciers - Pine Island
and Thwaites - could happen sooner than previously believed,
resulting in,
"flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of
millions of climate refugees."
Sounds terrible, but his
conclusions aren't really backed up by the science.
"I think his
article is too pessimistic: that it overstates the possibility
of disaster. Too soon, too certain," Tamsin Edwards, a scientist
who's studied Antarctica, wrote in
The Guardian about Holthaus's article.
5. 2015
is the 'last effective opportunity' to stop catastrophic warming
World leaders
meeting at the Vatican issued
a statement saying that 2015 was the,
"last effective
opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced
warming below 2-degrees [Celsius]."
Pope
Francis
wants to weigh in on global warming, and is expected to issue an
encyclical saying basically the same thing.
Francis reiterated
that 2015 is the last chance to stop massive warming.
But what he
should really say is that the U.N. conference is the "last"
chance to cut a deal to stem global warming… since last year when
the U.N. said basically
the same thing about 2014's climate summit.
6.
France's foreign minister said we only have "500 days" to stop
"climate chaos"
When Laurent Fabius
met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to
talk about world issues he said,
"we have 500 days to avoid
climate chaos."
Ironically at
the time of Fabius' comments, the U.N. had scheduled a climate
summit to meet in Paris in December 2015 - some 565 days after
his remarks.
Looks like the U.N. is 65 days too late to save the
world.
7.
Former President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global
warming
When
Obama made
the campaign promise to "slow the rise of the oceans," some
environmentalists may have taken him quite literally.
The United
Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth
told Climatewire in 2012 that Obama's second term was "the
last window of opportunity" to impose policies to restrict
fossil fuel use.
Wirth said it's,
"the last chance we have to get
anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade," adding that if "we
don't do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically
different place."
Even before
that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard
Space Flight Center head James Hansen
warned in 2009 that Obama only,
"has four years to save
Earth."
8.
Remember when we had "hours" to stop global warming?
World leaders
met in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009 to potentially hash out
another climate treaty.
That same year, the head of Canada's
Green Party wrote that there was only "hours" left to stop
global warming.
"We have hours
to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy
civilization as we know it," Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens
in Canada, wrote in 2009.
"Earth has a
long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no
longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour
on Saturday."
9.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only
50 days left to save Earth
The year 2009
was a bad time for global warming predictions.
That year Brown
warned there was ,
"50 days to save the world from global
warming," the BBC
reported.
According to Brown there was "no plan B."
Brown has been
booted out of office since then.
10. The
U.N.'s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years
to save the world
Rajendra
Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change said
in 2007 that if,
"there's no action before 2012, that's too
late."
"What we do in
the next two to three years will determine our future. This is
the defining moment," he said.
Well, it's 2017
and no new U.N. climate treaty has been presented.
The only
thing that's changed since then is that Pachauri was
forced to resign earlier this year amid accusations he
sexually harassed multiple female coworkers.
11.
Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go
green
Environmentalist write George Monbiot
wrote in the UK Guardian that within,
"as little as 10 years,
the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either
continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed
the world's people. It cannot do both."
About 930
million people around the world were undernourished in 2002,
according to U.N. data.
By 2014, that number shrank to 805 million.
Sorry, Monbiot...
12.
Global warming apocalypse 1980s edition
The U.N. was
already claiming in the late 1980s that the world had only a
decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.
The San Jose
Mercury News
reported
June 30, 1989 that ,
"senior
environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown,
says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth
by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by
the year 2000."
That prediction
didn't come true 17 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same
alarm today...
