Predictions of Doom and Gloom!

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Jimmy M, PLEASE tell us what a managtivist is? it's driving me crazy, the mystery of it

The article "Davos Doom-mongers herald a new dark age for climate science" was written by a Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs and appeared in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Apparently she tends to coin new words like "metrollectual".

I would guess that the meaning of the word managtivist is a splicing of two words "managerialism" and "activist".

Wikipedia defines Managerialism as the belief in the value of professional managers and of the concepts and methods they use. Scholars linked managerialism to control, to accountability and measurement, and to an ideologically determined belief in the importance of tightly-managed organizations, as opposed to individuals or to groups that do not resemble an organization. So in this instance I would interpret the phrase to mean:

An activist who wants to impose management techniques with top down management approach across the entire world, with strict controls, accountability and measurement; such as putting the U.N. in complete charge of controlling all aspects of individual's life across the globe in order to achieve their goals.

Thank you Jimmy IOW a global socialist. with a global gov't body in charge of "the means of production." mebbe the opposite of an Objectivist.

I was slightly surprised when Greta Thunberg announced at Davos that we had eight years left to save the planet. As long as that? Admittedly, that’s four years less than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who put it at 12, although, come to think of it, that was last January, so presumably she now thinks we’ve got 11 years left. But some doomsayers have been much less optimistic. According to Peter Wadhams, a Cambridge professor interviewed in the Guardian in 2013, Arctic ice would disappear by 2015 if we didn’t mend our ways, while Gordon Brown announced in 2009 that we had just 50 days to save the Earth. Then again, playing the long game can also catch up with you. In 2004, Observer readers were told Britain would have a ‘Siberian’ climate in 16 years’ time. We’re supposed to be in the midst of that now.

On the face of it, we should be grateful that these gloomsters make such oddly precise predictions. It’s like putting a sell-by date on their credibility. After all, when the soothsayer in question is proved wrong, they just shuffle off with their tail between their legs, never to be heard from again, right? In eight years’ time, when the planet hasn’t disappeared in a cloud of toxic gas, presumably Greta will throw up her arms and say: ‘Sorry guys. Looked like I was wrong about you ruining my childhood. I’m now going to become a flight attendant.’

But, weirdly, that never happens. No matter how often these ‘experts’ are shown to be no better at forecasting than Paul the Octopus — worse, actually — they just carry on as if nothing has happened. Take Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. ‘We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,’ he told the New York Times in 1969. Ehrlich also predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. Ehrlich’s ‘bomb’ failed to explode, but his career didn’t. On the contrary, he’s now the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and the president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. All I can say is, it’s lucky he didn’t become a bookmaker.

The fact that Ehrlich is still an eminent environmentalist — and Prince Charles can pose alongside Greta Thunberg in Davos in spite of claiming we had eight years left to save the planet 11 years ago — helps explain why these Mystic Megs have no hesitation about making these forecasts. It’s a great way of drawing attention to their cause and there’s literally no cost to getting it wrong. The panjandrums of the mainstream media forgive them for spinning these yarns because they know they’re doing it ‘for the right reasons’. They’re not peddling alarmist nonsense — no, they’re just exaggerating the risk. In any case, they might be right and doesn’t the ‘precautionary principle’ dictate that we should change our behaviour just in case? Oddly, these same secular humanists don’t apply the logic of Pascal’s Wager to believing in God. That would be unscientific.

But is there also something else going on? I’m generous enough to think that these activists are not cynics trying to grab headlines, but are sincere in their prophecies of doom. For instance, when George Monbiot predicted a ‘structural global famine’ in as little as ten years’ time if we didn’t start eating less meat — this was in 2002 — he genuinely believed it. And when that famine failed to materialise, he didn’t abandon his apocalyptic environmentalism, but doubled-down, as readers of his Guardian column can testify.

It’s a textbook example of cognitive dissonance — of not abandoning your beliefs when they run aground on the shore of reality. I am reminded of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who believed there was a spaceship flying in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet that would beam them up and transport them to a distant planet. When the comet came and they remained on Earth, they didn’t conclude they were wrong about the spaceship. No, it must be concealed by some clever cloaking device, and the way to get on board was to commit suicide so their spirits could float upwards through the atmosphere. Sure enough, on 26 March 1997 the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department found 39 bodies in the cult’s headquarters in Rancho Santa Fe.

Source: Climate doomsayers keep putting sell-by dates on their credibility

On 10 August 2010, almost 10 years ago, a U.K. newspaper The Guardian published an article headlined:

Greenland ice sheet faces 'tipping point in 10 years'
Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23 ft. rise in sea level

Source: Greenland ice sheet faces 'tipping point in 10 years'

The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University

"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he said.

Speaking by phone, Alley was addressing a briefing held by the House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming.

Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said.

The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland's largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.

The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.

Robert Bindschadler, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, told the briefing: "While we don't believe it is possible to lose an ice sheet within a decade, we do believe it is possible to reach a tipping point in a few decades in which we would lose the ice sheet in a century."

The ice loss from the Petermann Glacier was the largest such event in nearly 50 years, although there have been regular and smaller "calvings".
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So now 10 years have past. How accurate were those predictions?

The article was written in 2010, which was the warmest on record. Since then, however, Greenland’s temperatures have returned to normal, and are no higher than they were in the 1930s.

Far from being the start of a new trend, 2010 was simply an outlier:



The Peterman Glacier is still more or less in the same position as it was ten years ago:



And DMI report that, despite a slight dip last year, Greenland’s major glaciers stopped retreating seven years ago:



And climate scientists wonder why they are a laughing stock!

Source: What Happened To Greenland’s Tipping Point?

Ten prominent examples where alarming predictions by warming campaigners failed to come to pass:

* In 1987, a former NASA scientist was quoted in nearly all U.S. newspapers that by 2020 the world’s temperature would increase by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The actual increase was less than a single degree Fahrenheit.

* In 1978, The Vermont Sun quoted multiple scientists predicting that by 2020 the Earth’s CO2 concentration would double from its then current level of 330 parts per million. It actually increased by only about 27% to 420.

* In 2009, it was predicted that China would decrease their CO2 emissions by 40 to 45% and India by 20 to 25%. Instead their emissions have increased in the past 11 years.

* In 2008, Al Gore and most of his friends predicted the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro would have disappeared. There has been little change at all in its snow cap.

* In 1986, U.S. EPA predicted a two foot sea level rise for Florida in 2020. It has risen about one inch, a rate which has been experienced for 800 years. An additional apparent rise of 3 inches has been the result of land subsidence.

* In March of 2000 at Britain”s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, scientist David Parker told the English newspaper The Independent that British children will soon experience snow only virtually on the internet. When it does snow 20 years hence (2020) it will cause chaos due to its rarity. England has not been short of normal snow.

* In 2000 it was reported by the Tarawa, Kiribati newspaper that a study by Greenpeace indicated that Global Warming will ruin Pacific Island Nations economies by 2020 with Tuvalu considered most critical. Tuvalu’s 2019 budget report stated that Tuvalu had enjoyed an unprecedented six consecutive years of economic growth.

* A secret Pentagon study in 2004 reported to President Bush that climate change-caused resource shortages may cause a global war by 2020. It said that shortages of water and energy will become increasingly harder to overcome plunging the planet into war as it is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. Enough said.

* USA Today reported in 2013 that the Arctic should be free of ice in the summer by 2020. The prediction was off by 3.9 million square kilometers, which was the amount of remaining ice in September of 2020.

* In 2009, The Los Angeles Times reported from a number of government reports that it was expected that all glaciers in Glacier National Park would be gone by 2020. The Park officials posted signs warning visitors that the end of glaciers in the Park was near. In 2020 no glaciers were gone but the signs were removed.