How many end-of-the-world predictions have we endured in the last three decades?
Real Clear Energy (6/24/21) column: "This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. 'Global Warming Has Begun,' The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West. Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required 'priority attention.' Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment 'whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.'...The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease."
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