The media breathlessly foretold a global catastrophe. The global rise in temperature would lead to food shortages. Less and worse fresh water. More frequent floods and droughts. Mega-droughts would start in Northern Europe and Southern China in 2010 and continue throughout the decade. By the end of the decade, Europe’s climate would be as bad as Siberia’s. Europe would suffer food shortages. People would abandon the continent for warmer countries.

The media based their predictions on a prestigious report. “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” appeared in 2003. Andrew Marshall, a Pentagon defense adviser and long-time director of a think tank called the Office of Net Assessment, had commissioned it. Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network wrote it.

They said, “We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.”

The experts they consulted warned that the bad things “would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than … globally.” They also said “the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.” But still, the report claimed there was a good chance life on earth was going to get worse, and soon.

Although the authors stated the scenario they put forth was not a prediction, merely plausible, the media ran with it, describing it as a doomsday scenario. The Guardian breathlessly reported, “The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy.” Grist referred to it as “intimations of fast-approaching environmental catastrophe.” Fortune and other news publications gave the report fawning, unskeptical coverage when it was released.

Global Warming Threat to Be Greater Than Terrorism

Longer, colder winters and hotter summers in China were to result in widespread famine. Much of Bangladesh would become uninhabitable due to coastal erosion. This would result in people fleeing the country. Refugees would wash up on the shores of Europe. Crop yields around the world would fall by 10-25%. The report called global warming a greater threat than terrorism.

“Catastrophic” shortages of water and energy would lead to war. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.” Nations would face nuclear conflict due to the scarcity of resources, bringing the world to the edge of anarchy. “Once again, warfare would define human life.”

The report also speculated on far-fetched events that might happen. One was that Canada and the U.S. would become one country, to ally against the feuding between other countries over food, water and energy shortages. Need we say it? Nothing even remotely close to that has happened.

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claimed that the changes would prove embarrassing to the Bush administration, which supposedly denied climate change. The reality is the authors of the report embarrassed themselves. The Guardian reported that the Bush administration suppressed the report to prevent it from getting out to the public. However, Grist reported that this sensationalism wasn’t true: The report had already been made public.

Less Plausible

Climate.gov admitted in a 2014 article, “Some of their speculations seem less plausible now.” However, the article observed that “the ‘abrupt change view’ has been drawing more attention from the American scientific community during the last 10 years.”

Climate alarmists have been predicting doomsday scenarios for years now. This is nothing new. Fabius Maximus compiled a list of these that made the rounds in 1971. None of them came true. Steven Spielberg directed a TV show in 1971 called “L.A. 2017,” which predicted that pollution would destroy the earth by 2017, forcing man to live underground.

Yet the doomsday predictions continue. Radical leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a shining star of the Democratic Party, predicted earlier this year that the world will end in 12 years if we do not combat climate change. She apparently doesn’t realize that the U.S. and many other countries are already taking action to decrease pollution and waste. Even though there has never been any solid evidence showing that man is causing global warming. If anything, all these efforts to reduce carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may be causing global cooling. These climate alarmists are playing with fire to demand all these radical, unaffordable and unproven changes. And their record proves over and over again that they are wrong.

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