Yesterday, in honor of Earth Day, Glenn Beck regaled his conservative radio audience with faulty predictions made years ago, for example, that in 1970 we were entering an ice age.
“Because Earth Day started in 1970 and we so respect it, we want to go back and give you some of the predictions,” Beck said with heavy sarcasm on his radio program. “Let me tell you something, you won’t believe how spot-on these things are.” Link
Beck's point was that if past predictions were so wrong, today's predictions about climate change and sea level rise are equally "ridiculous." It is obvious, however, that in his review of past predictions Beck did not look for any that proved true, such as those reported in
1981 Climate Change Predictions Were Eerily Accurate published in 2012. This describes a 10-page paper in the August 1981 journal
Science that projected future climate change and global warming based on CO2 emissions. The paper was written by a team of atmospheric physicists led by James Hansen at the NASA Institute for Space Studies.
According to Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection by the Dutch scientists who rediscovered the Hansen team's work in 2012, the paper shows climate science was "a mature field" in the early 80's:
the concepts and conclusions have not changed all that much. Hansen et al clearly indicate what was well known (all of which still stands today) and what was uncertain....At a time when the northern hemisphere was cooling and the global mean temperature still below the values of the early 1940s, they confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions. They assume that no action will be taken before the global warming signal will be significant in the late 1990s, so the different energy-use scenarios only start diverging after that.
In the following passage quoted in 1981 Climate Change Predictions.... the Hansen paper predicted more warming, more droughts and melting ice:
It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980’s. Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climate zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Now we see our “drought-prone regions” experiencing record droughts, the Antarctic ice cracking, and Arctic ice thinning. We know the role of fossil fuels in global warming and the need to replace them with clean energy. In 1981 the Hansen team, predicting "almost inevitable" major climate change because of CO2 emissions, called for energy conservation and a gradual phasing out of fossil fuels:
In light of historical evidence that it takes several decades to complete a major change in fuel use, this makes large climate change almost inevitable....CO2 effects on climate may make full exploitation of coal resources undesirable.... An appropriate strategy may be to encourage energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources, while using fossil fuels as necessary during the next few decades. http://www.universetoday.com/...