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The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.
Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.
I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.