If they had not already moved the goal posts so many times, it would be easier to accept what they tell us as the gospel truth.
In 1970, the Smithsonian scientists predicted that we humans would have caused the extinction of 75 to 80% of all species on Earth within the next 25 years. (The fact is that between .01% and 1% of all species have always gone extinct each year even as others are appearing and that prediction was pure fantasy.)
In 1975, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said that cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed. Scientist Nigel Calder wrote that “(t)he threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
Noel Brown, director of the New York Office of the U.N. Environmental Program, said that 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.
Climate Scientist David Viner predicted that by 2020 snow would be extinct in the United Kingdom.
In 2001, the IPPC predicted much less snow for all over us over the next 20 years. There has been little change since the 1960's before climate was a problem. Also we have various IPPC reports predicting colder winters or milder winters--we can take our pick I guess.
During the negotiations for the Copenhagen agreement in 2009, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that if they didn’t solve the “impasse” they found themselves in within 50 days, the world was pretty much doomed. Evenso neither the Copenhagen agreement or the Kyoto protocol did anything to reduce CO2 emissions but did a lot to transfer wealth and increase government control. I think it was around 2008 that Prince Charles stated the Earth had just 96 months to save itself from climate change. The same year a study by Forum for the Future predicted that we would be living in a world so dire that we would actually have to move to Antarctica as “climate refugees.
New York Times environmentalism reporter Philip Shabecoff wrote a piece of alarmism based on the work of the aforementioned James Hansen, fresh from his congressional testimony.
In 1988 NY Time environmentalist report Philip Shabecoff quoted climate scientist James Hansen: “The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.” That's not showing up yet.
And of course Al Gore who won a Nobel prize for his film "An Inconvenient Truth", since shown to be pretty much an empty fabrication in its entirety, predicted the snows of Kilaminjaro and the polar ice packs would cease to exist within the next 5 to 10 years. Both are still very much there.
And every time there is any reduction in Arctic sea ice, the internet goes nuts with renewed dire predictions. But since satellite records have only existed for 39 of the 4.5 billion years the Earth has existed we don't really know what 'average' is there. And the extent of sea ice for the last two years continues above the 'record' (meaning 37 year low) reached in 2016.
So I think rational, thinking people continue to take a less alarmist view of climate change. Should we study it? Yes. Should we fund the study of it? Yes. But when funding is only available to those who are promoting a vision of catastrophic climate change, we might want to follow the money and be a bit suspicious about their 'absolute' findings, most especially as each tipping point arrives and goes by and they just set a new one.
