Despite the fact that none of these dire predictions has come to pass we still hear the same sort of apocalyptic doom and gloom from numerous sources today. There seems to be something in human nature, a trait possessed in common among religious enthusiasts and some scientists, that makes predicting the eschaton nearly irresistible.
Anyway, here's a pastiche of the predictions Bastasch unearthed. The details can be perused at the link:
Ten years ago, the U.N. predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.”
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.
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.”
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].”
When France’s foreign minister 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.”
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 be 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.”
“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.”
In 2009 United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned there were only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”
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.
Environmentalist George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian in 2002 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.”
The San Jose Mercury News reported June 30, 1989 that a “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.”
In any other science except climatology (and maybe evolutionary biology) this many failed predictions would discredit whatever theoretical models the predictions were based upon. Climatology, however, is apparently a privileged discipline. It's theories are not held to the same standard of predictive success as are other scientific theories. We might understandably wonder why that is.
