Hansen's (and others) predictions...

As we move into 2011, it's pertinent to remind ourselves and others of the threats, warnings and outright lies from the green left over AGW. NASA's James Hansen has been one of the most upfront and outrageous of the lot. Now he's getting skewered. Hansen has been wetting himself over global warming for 20 years. 25 metre sea level rises, England to become "a tropical paradise"...Now delighted bloggers are highlighting his ecoporn fetish. From the comments after this Bishop Hill post......


...One by one these wild doomsday predictions are coming back to haunt the Chicken Littles. When I started to doubt the whole Global Warming thing my first thought was that time will tell as the predictions that were then being made either happened or failed to happen. The hallmark of good science is that it makes predictions which are later verified. It is not necessarily a sign of bad science when predictions don’t work out because at the cutting edge everyone is still learning and refining what they know. However, anyone making confident predictions of the future when all of their previous predictions have spectacularly failed, is unlikely to be taken very seriously. At least we hope not....

The whole article is a delight. More here...


...and in the same vein, bowing towards Julian Simon, this is a treat from JoNova...Busted predictions from brazen prophets...

...examples..

• Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.”
  David Viner, East Anglia CRU, 2000.
• In June 2007, Tim Flannery warned Brisbane that its “water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months”. Last month Brisbane recorded the wettest December in 150 years.

...and here, with thanks to Samizdata, Spiked Online commentator Brendan O'Neill puts it very nicely indeed...

"What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis."