While stories like the one below should not dismiss an intelligent discussion about the environmental challenges we face today, this 1989 report does raise legitimate questions about the apocalyptic and absolute predictions promoted by many who support a similar narrative in 2019.
From a June 29, 1989, Associated Press dispatch:
UNITED NATIONS (AP)—A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study. . . .
Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
A 1989 AP Report: Nations “Wiped Off Face of the Earth” by 2000 added by Staff on
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Anyone with an ounce of critical thought knows that Global Warming is a scam to take away our rights. The Earth is now 5% greener than it was 20 years ago. CO2 is plant food and crops are growing in abundance.
Only the deeply brainwashed still believe in the catastrophic global warming propaganda.
They’re the same ones who typically still believe that the Covid vaccines work to.
Too many gullible people in the world today that’s for sure.
It was a comment by an official who was not a climate scientist (see https://www.pace.edu/sites/default/files/files/commencement/hdr-2003-dr-noel-j-brown.pdf). He was a lawyer and a diplomat. Climate models have historically done well at predicting the future Global global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes. See https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL085378. The bottom line quote:
“We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.”
And Dee Dee’s comment is apt. The guy did not say countries would be devastated by 2000. He said that it would happen at some point in the future if we did not get things under control by 2000. As I said, the guy was not a climate scientist. But, even if he had been, the fact that 2000 passed and countries were not devastated does not show his “prediction” to be wrong.
That was never a consensus view among climate scientists anyway.
Response to Dee dee,
Yet greenhouse gasses exponentially rose and still none of the “predictions” came to pass. We did NOT reverse anything- perhaps you need the comprehension lesson. This entire “global warming”/”climate change” rhetoric is total BS and in hindsight anyone who doesn’t realize it is stupid, brainwashed or a bit of both. PERIOD.
My god, how stunned can you people be.
Read the first paragraph. Read it closely.
It DOES NOT say nations would be wiped off the face of the earth BY 2000.
It said they will be if global warming was not REVERSED by 2000.
You’re a newspaper and you can’t even read the article properly. smh
EVERY generation since cavemen first stumbled into a cave had wingnuts who thought theirs was the last generation on the face of the planet.
Now we combine leftist agenda, mass media, and fake news and viola: much more wingnuts giving legitimacy to the same old crap.
Calm down and unbunch those panties this world is going on and on for many many many generations yet to come.
Relax fools and live your lives without fake fear.
The 1989 article remains correct. The year 2000 was the point where we needed to lower Co2 emissions before a positive feedback loop would kick in causing some of the effects mentioned in the article by later in our current century. The only difference between then and now is that the effects are predicted to be earlier and earlier because we have not sufficiently lowered emissions because corporations like Exxon and Monsanto realized lowering emissions would be bad for business and funded a campaign to create confusion and make this a partisan issue. Co2 absorbs heat. That’s what it does. It takes 100 years to leave our atmosphere. The amount of Co2 in the atmosphere is easy to measure. This is 1+1=2; not rocket science.
https://realclimatescience.com
The truth
Every few years it seems this same report is recycled….We are going to face extinction in 10-12 years if we dont send all our money to the environmentalists, stop using fossil fuels and eating farting cows. Just so everyone knows…once all the carbon restrictions are passed, no one except the government elites will be allowed to fly, own a vehicle, eat meat, consume excess energy, or do anything else they deem “not good for you”. None of the so called climate change proponents will stop using fossil fuels, but they demand you do….and it will be ok for them to have a huge carbon footprint, because they are trying to effect change!
And after all that if they’re successful… it will have no effect on earthquakes, volcanos, meteorites, hurricanes, tornados, typhoons, tsunamis, or any catastrophic weather event that begins in the atmosphere or deep in the earths core.
If anyone thinks we as humans can change the course of nature…I’d like to hear how they propose to do it. All this climate change agenda will do is make everyone poor, reduce our quality of life, take away our liberty,our freedoms, the Bill of Rights….and give a few thousand elites the power to control our lives completely.
Wiping the UNITED Nations off the face of the earth is the correct solution. Hello, DJT!
We will be better off without this uber-corrupt, socialistic bunch of America-hating tin pot dictators and their junk scientists in Kenya.
Kenya…really? If they’re in NYC, there better be a marathon going on!
And AP failed to get a second opinion from a non-UN scientist who thought this report was the total crap it turned out to be.