Climate-change activists alarmed to find that summer is hot

High temperatures across the United States are giving climate change fanatics ammunition to continue their endless campaign of “saving the planet,” mostly by wrecking the economy of the United States, not that Joe Biden needs any help in doing that!

The climate-change crowd has been sounding the alarm about how we are wrecking the climate for years. I found a climate change video from 1978, featuring the late Leonard Nimoy, warning us that we were facing a dramatic shift in weather conditions. Nimoy warned us about global cooling.

He stated that “climate experts” believed that the next Ice Age was on the way, stating that “during the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn our planet into an arctic desert.”

In an April 28, 1975, article in Newsweek, science editor Peter Gwynne predicted the same thing, that the planet was cooling. Ecologist Kenneth Walt, speaking at Swarthmore College in 1970, said: “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Of course, none of that happened, and the “climate experts” switched gears, going into the “global warming” mode.

Now we have constant doomsday warnings emanating from the “science is settled” crowd that the Earth will soon turn into an uninhabitable, burning hell. These alarmists, all on the political left, keep issuing expiration dates for mankind if we fail to give gazillions of dollars and total power to the government to save the planet. Their dates for destruction keep moving, which reminds me of a joke by the late comedian Henny Youngman, who used to talk about a doctor who gave a man six months to live and when the man couldn’t pay his bill, the doctor gave him another six months.

The Farm Journal’s website AGWEB has a good compilation of global warming doomsday predictions in a May 23, 2023, article, beginning with 1982, when Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN’s Environment Program, pointed to the possibility of widespread devastation in less than 20 years. Then, the AP published a prediction by Noel Brown, another UN “climate expert,” that rising seas resulting from global warming would “topple nations’ by the year 2000.

Of course, former Vice President Al Gore told us that it would be “game over” by 2016. In April 2008, media mogul Ted Turner stated “Not doing it (climate action) will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10 but 30 or 40 years and none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state like Somalia or Sudan, and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn growing.”

In July 2009, Prince, now King, Charles asserted that the planet had 96 months to avoid decimation: “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it."

Fast forward to the present day, and all of our leftwing brainiacs, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden, seem to be pushing doomsday out until 2030-2031. Nothing like giving yourself a little breathing room.

Climate alarmists like to cherry pick data to support their doomsday predictions. The media claims of record setting conditions this year are exaggerated, NASA satellite data shows a drop in global warming for the last eight years and Weather Bell charts show that most of the United States is cooler this summer than it was 20 years ago, all as discussed here. The core data issued by Climate.Gov also shows that world temperatures have gone from a high of 15 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average to 4 degrees below Celsius over the past 65 million years, so current heatwaves aren’t caused by MAGA Republicans, Hillary!

Unfortunately, many people are comparing weather to climate. If we have a heat wave, it’s global warming, if we have a cold snap, it’s the next ice age. With manmade climate change being pounded into young heads in the schools and being the mantra of the left wing media, many are falling for it, and that’s why we need to replace climate alarmism with critical thinking.

Dwight Weidman is a resident of Greene Township and is a graduate of Shepherd University. He is retired from the United States Department of Defense, where his career included assignments In Europe, Asia, and Central America. He has been in leadership roles for the Republican Party in two states, most recently serving two terms as Chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. He has been an Amateur Radio Operator since 1988, getting his first license in Germany, and is a past volunteer with both Navy and Army MARS, Military Auxiliary Radio Service, and is also an NRA-certified firearms instructor. In his spare time, he dabbles in genealogy and learning new languages. 

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Opinion: Climate-change activists have warned of doomsday for decades, including cooling