To conclude our series on Martin Durkin’s Climate The Movie, we remind you that if you haven’t yet watched it you should, and then suggest that if you want a two-minute version you should check out this 1982 CBS news item unearthed by Tony Heller that contains everything the movie rebuts. It’s all in there: references to unnamed legions of “the scientists” pronouncing authoritatively on the impending disaster, a warming that 40% of Florida will be underwater on an unspecified timetable and a cartoon explanation of the supposedly simple physics followed by, yes, Al Gore, then a junior Congressman citing these “scientists who are so alarmed” to start demanding money for the cause.
The science back then looked like this:
It has since progressed considerably, as you can clearly see in this picture from NASA’s website:
Note how much better the cartoons have become. You can now clearly make out the glass roof over the planet, for instance. The one that isn’t there.
Meanwhile on the National Geographic Greenhouse Effect website the picture shows quite remarkable detail:
The CBS news item, which we remind you aired 42 years ago, displayed all the elements of today’s media alarmism, especially forecasts of doom unless we “do something” while not providing anything like testable hypotheses. We learn that “the great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica are melting”, “the sea level has been rising with increasing swiftness over the past 40 years”, 25% of Florida will be flooded and the American farmbelt will dry out, forcing wheat and corn production to move north to Canada.
Forty-two years later we know that even though CO2 levels rose, none of these things happened. Antarctic sea ice extent has varied but shown no trend since 1980. The speed of sea-level rise rose then fell in the 20th century. Florida is still there and US crop production has boomed. But despite all the failed predictions, you could tidy up the graphics and re-run the same news item today and everyone would panic like they were hearing it for the first time.
At some point these “scientists who are so alarmed” need to step up and acknowledge that 42 years later reality didn’t live up to their computer-generated expectations.
Tim Ball (RIP) Plus ca change. Please note that I couldn't remember his name and Google has buried Mann's loss to Dr. B and only publishes Steyn's loss.
The movie was mainly science fiction and character attacks on consensus scientists.
It was awful. A main goal was to convince conservatives that CO2 does nothing, which is a myth
Conservative myths will never refute leftist climate myths. The conservative celebration of a science fiction movie indicates that the battle to refute leftist predictions of CAGW doom has been lost: Conservative junk science cannot refute leftist junk science.
"Consensus Scientists"? What is a Consensus Scientist? Do you mean a parishioner of the church of climate change or just zealots? Since when does "Consensus" equal fact in science? The "Consensus" used to be that the Bohr model was correct but we know how that turned out don't we.