[lowercased]

But then you have things like

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...

which call out dozens of warnings over the past 50+ years, and seemingly didn't come true. Now some are still years off being 'done', but the tone of the piece (and many others like it) is that this is basically all a hoax to 'control' us. I disagree with that notion, but it does demonstrate that whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you.

[bmitc]

Of course there will be misses or extreme predictions. However, the fact remains that climate and environmental scientists, among several others, have been warning about these things for going on a century now.

The detrimental effects of a technocratic-oriented society have been predicted since Lewis Mumford to the publishing of Limits of Growth and onward. The effects are social, economic, and environmental, and the general gist of the predictions has come true. Actions have consequences and we're at the point where we can't engineer our way out of our problems.

[eesmith]

This isn't "weaponized back at you" but often lies, cheating, and misrepresentation,

Some of those doomsday events were averted by prohibiting certain kinds of pollution, after these doomsday scenarios were understood.

"Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life" didn't happen because CFC emissions were mostly banned internationally. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Public_policy

"Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes" didn't happen because of laws passed to reduce SO2 and NOx emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#In_the_United_States

Kinda makes me think that prohibiting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions might work too.

Then there are ones which seem to shoot itself in the foot.

"1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s" points to https://realclimatescience.com/2019/05/hansen-got-everything... , which in turn cites a Gannett News Service article about what Hansen reported to Congress.

That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC?

Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given.

But https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/24/heat-dc-90... says:

> The number of hot days per year in D.C. has increased in recent decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the annual average of 90-degree days was about 25. In the mid-1970s, D.C. might have expected about 33 days so hot. From 2010 to 2020, the 90-degree average is about 49 days.

Hansen's prediction seems to be on track. While Realclimatescience seems to pull a slight-of-hand and not address the actual prediction.

So was Hansen's sea level rise prediction from the same source, saying 1-6 feet between 1988 and 2050. The current prediction is a foot of rise between 2020 and 2050 - on top of the rise from 1988 to 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...

Does that really count as a failed prediction?

The "Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past" is a newspaper headline contradicted by the content, which says 'within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"' and 'Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.'

Headline writer are the clickbait of newspapers. The real question is, was the content wrong?

I noticed that several referred to Paul Ehrlich ("Dire Famine Forecast By 1975", "Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989", "America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980", "Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide", "Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980", "Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century", and likely more).

Isn't it rigging the numbers to cite the same person so many times?

The 1970s cooling papers (Rasool, Schneider, etc.) appear to be the ones warning that greatly increased aerosol production would provide a cooling effect more powerful than the CO2 warming effect. We reduced aerosol production (because "acid rain", above), so this didn't happen.

In any case, these are cherry-picked because the "large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2." https://skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-g... . See for example https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam... :

> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.

If you look carefully, you'll see most of the links are to newspaper articles, not scientific publications. Most seem to be essentially sensational press reporting.

So it's not even a "whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you" but rather that places like the AEI manufacture doubt out of whole cloth.