Introduction: A Prophecy Movement That Keeps Failing
This article completes a subject raised in our examination of the World Council of Churches, where we noted how readily the modern church has taken up the cause of “climate justice” and made the alleged crisis of man-made climate change a centerpiece of its mission. Here we examine that premise directly.
Let it be said clearly at the outset: the climate has always changed, and it always will. No honest observer denies that the earth has warmed somewhat since the depths of the Little Ice Age in the 1800s, nor that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that exerts some warming influence. The dispute is not over whether the climate changes. It is over a far narrower and more consequential set of claims: that recent warming is primarily man-made, that it is catastrophic or about to become so, and that it justifies a sweeping transformation of the world’s economies and the surrender of liberty and prosperity to centralized control. On each of these points, the confident predictions of the alarmist movement have a remarkable record of failure.
I. Five Predictions That Never Came to Pass
For more than half a century, prominent voices have issued specific, datable forecasts of climate catastrophe. When the dates arrive, the catastrophes do not. Here are five of the most notable. In fairness, it should be said that some of these were later defended as having been “misquoted” or stated with longer timelines elsewhere — but as they were delivered to the public, and as the public received them, they failed.
In his 2007 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and again at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, Al Gore told the world that scientists projected a strong likelihood — he cited a 75 percent chance — that the entire north polar ice cap could be “completely ice-free” in summer “within the next five to seven years.” Those years came and went. The Arctic still has summer sea ice today. (Notably, the scientist Gore cited, Wieslaw Maslowski, later said he could not account for how the 75 percent figure was reached, and Gore’s office admitted it had been a “ballpark figure” from a private conversation.)
In March 2000, Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major hub of IPCC science — told the British press that within a few years winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event,” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” In the years that followed, Britain experienced some of its heaviest snowfalls in decades, including the coldest winter in a century in 2010.
Researchers warned in the early 2000s that the Scottish ski industry had perhaps twenty years left and that skiing there would soon be “just a memory” because of global warming. Yet in subsequent years Scottish resorts were repeatedly buried under so much snow that they had to close, and the BBC reported the mountains experiencing some of their snowiest conditions since the 1940s.
Though framed in terms of overpopulation rather than carbon, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb set the template for environmental catastrophism. He declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, agricultural productivity soared and global hunger fell dramatically. The catastrophist who is wrong by an order of magnitude is rarely held to account; he simply moves the date.
Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth dramatized a possible twenty-foot rise in sea level, depicting the flooding of Manhattan, Florida, and other regions, and warned that “within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.” The decade passed; Kilimanjaro still sees seasonal snow, and the dramatic, near-term sea-level inundations did not occur. (Defenders note that the twenty-foot figure was tied to a long, multi-century timescale — but that nuance was nowhere in the alarm the film raised.)
One could extend this list considerably — the “permanent drought” predictions, the “climate refugees by 2010” forecasts of the United Nations, the repeated “we have only X years left to act” deadlines that pass without consequence. The point is not that the climate never changes; it is that the catastrophic and imminent predictions, made with great confidence and used to justify enormous policy demands, have a long and unbroken record of failure.
II. The Flaws in the Alarmist Case
Why do these predictions keep failing? The dissenting scientists point to several deep flaws in the case for catastrophic man-made warming.
The Models Run Too Hot
The alarm rests almost entirely on computer climate models, not on observations. And the models have consistently predicted more warming than has actually been observed. The central question is “climate sensitivity” — how much warming results from a doubling of carbon dioxide. The models assume a high sensitivity, amplified by assumed positive feedbacks. But estimates derived from actual observations have tended to come in lower, which would mean far less future warming than the models forecast.
The Diminishing Effect of CO₂
The warming effect of carbon dioxide is not linear but logarithmic — each added increment produces less warming than the one before. Several of the dissenting physicists argue that the effect is already heavily “saturated,” so that further additions of CO₂ produce only modest additional warming, not a runaway crisis. They also note that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but the gas on which all plant life depends, and that the modest enrichment of the atmosphere has measurably “greened” the planet.
The Neglect of Natural Variability
The earth’s climate has swung dramatically throughout history with no help from human industry — the Medieval Warm Period, when Greenland was farmed and English vineyards flourished; the Little Ice Age, when the Thames froze solid; the Roman Warm Period before that. These changes were driven by natural forces — the sun, ocean cycles, and more — that the alarmist models tend to minimize in favor of the single variable of human carbon. A theory that attributes nearly all change to one factor, while history shows large changes from many factors, has reason to be doubted.
III. The Scientists Who Dissent
The public is often told that “the science is settled” and that all credible scientists agree. This is not true. A significant number of highly credentialed scientists — including physicists, atmospheric scientists, and climatologists from leading institutions — dissent from the catastrophic consensus. Their arguments deserve a hearing that the alarmist movement has worked hard to deny them.
One of the most distinguished atmospheric scientists of his generation. Lindzen argues for low climate sensitivity due to negative feedbacks — most famously his “iris” hypothesis, that tropical clouds adjust to vent heat to space and stabilize temperature. He acknowledges some CO₂ warming but holds it to be modest, with the models overestimating the risks and natural factors playing a far larger role. In 2015 Senate testimony he highlighted the discrepancies between observations and models, the lower observational sensitivity estimates, and the role of natural variability. He has co-authored recent papers emphasizing CO₂ saturation and the absence of any catastrophic warming.
Developers of the UAH satellite temperature dataset — one of the principal global temperature records. They document real warming, but at a slower rate than many surface records and models predict (on the order of 0.16°C per decade in the lower troposphere). They consistently highlight the discrepancies between models and observations, the influence of natural variability such as El Niño, and the weakness of the high-sensitivity estimates.
A renowned physicist who argues that CO₂’s warming effect is heavily saturated — diminishing returns from each added increment — and that more CO₂ is on balance beneficial for plant life. With Lindzen he has co-authored papers asserting that greenhouse gases pose no danger of catastrophic warming or extreme weather. He served on scientific panels during the Trump administration.
Both emphasize solar and cosmic-ray influences on climate through their effect on cloud formation — Svensmark’s pioneering hypothesis that cosmic rays seed clouds, and Shaviv’s work linking the sun’s activity and the earth’s passage through the galaxy to long-term climate. Shaviv argues that natural drivers explain much of the observed change, and that the human contribution has been overstated.
A leading critic of the statistical methods behind climate alarm. With Stephen McIntyre he challenged the famous “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction that erased the Medieval Warm Period. He critiques the adjustments made to temperature data and the exaggerated economic-impact estimates used to justify costly policies.
The late S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, founded the Science and Environmental Policy Project and the NIPCC reports challenging the IPCC. Patrick Michaels, former Virginia state climatologist, long criticized the models and the “catastrophic” framing. The French geophysicist Claude Allègre, once an alarmist, reversed himself and accused the “prophets of doom” of exaggeration, calling the cause of change “unknown.” These men were not cranks; they were serious scientists who looked at the evidence and dissented.
IV. The Strongest Argument: History Over Hysteria
When the dissenting case is gathered into one, its strongest form is this: the climate has changed greatly and repeatedly throughout history with no human cause; the warming effect of additional carbon dioxide is real but modest and diminishing; the catastrophic projections come from models that have failed to match observations; and the confident, datable predictions of doom have failed again and again. Set against the long record of natural climate variation — the warm periods and ice ages that came and went before the first factory was ever built — the claim that today’s modest warming is uniquely man-made and uniquely catastrophic is not the cautious conclusion of settled science. It is a leap of faith, and one with an enormous political price tag attached.
In fairness, this remains a contested matter. The great majority of climate institutions hold that recent warming is primarily human-caused and a serious long-term risk, and they marshal real evidence for that view. This article does not pretend the dissenters have won a settled debate; it insists, rather, that there is a debate — that honest, credentialed scientists dissent on solid grounds, and that the confident cry of “settled science,” used to silence them and to justify sweeping policy, does not match the actual state of the evidence or the actual record of failed prophecy.
V. The Political Price Tag: Why It Matters
If this were merely an academic dispute about cloud feedbacks, the believer might leave it to the specialists. But it is not. The alarm is being used to justify a vast expansion of government power over energy, industry, travel, diet, and daily life — the redistribution of wealth between nations, the suppression of cheap and reliable energy on which the poor most depend, and the steady transfer of decisions from free people to centralized authorities. This is the same pattern we observed in the ecumenical movement’s embrace of “justice” causes: a secular, collectivist political agenda dressed in moral and even religious language.
The discerning Christian notices that the proposed remedy is almost always more centralized control, and that the movement carries the fervor, the certainty, the heretic-hunting, and the apocalyptic timeline of a religion — a religion in which man is the sinner, carbon is the sin, and the state is the savior. It is, at bottom, a rival faith.
VI. The Christian Position: Stewardship, Not Nature-Worship
How should the believer think about the earth itself? The Bible is neither indifferent to creation nor idolatrous toward it. God placed man in the garden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15), and gave him dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28). We are stewards, accountable to God for how we treat what He has made. Pollution, waste, cruelty, and the careless ruin of land and water are real sins against good stewardship, and no Christian should defend them. To care for the creation is part of our God-given charge.
But stewardship is the opposite of worship. The modern environmental movement, at its ideological core, does not merely care for nature; it deifies it — treating the earth (“Gaia,” “Mother Earth”) as a living goddess to be served, and man as a parasite upon her. This is precisely the exchange the Apostle Paul condemned:
The Christian honors the Creator by caring wisely for the creation, but he never bows to the creation itself, nor surrenders his liberty and his reason to a movement that does. He remembers that the earth is not a fragile goddess but the handiwork of an Almighty God who upholds it by the word of His power and has promised its seasons until the end:
VII. Conclusion: Confidence in the Creator, Not the Crisis
The believer can hold this whole subject with a steady mind. He is free to weigh the evidence honestly, to notice the failed prophecies and the dissenting scientists, and to decline the role of either polluter or panic-monger. He cares for the earth as a faithful steward, because it is God’s; he refuses to worship it, because it is not God; and he will not surrender his liberty or his prosperity to a political movement that trades on fear and dresses collectivism in the robes of a secular religion.
The God Who Holds the Earth
The Christian’s confidence does not rest on the latest model or the next forecast, but on the God who made and sustains the world:
“The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” (Psalm 24:1)
“Upholding all things by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3)
And his deepest concern is not the temperature of the planet but the state of the soul — for the creation will pass away, but the Word of the Lord, and those saved by it, will endure forever:
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35)
Let the believer, then, be a wise steward and not a fearful worshipper; let him love the truth more than the consensus, and the Creator more than the creation; and let him keep his eyes fixed not on a manufactured crisis in time, but on the eternal God who holds the earth and the soul alike in His hand.
Sources and Scripture References
- The Holy Bible (King James Version) — Genesis 1:28; 2:15; 8:22; Psalm 24:1; Romans 1:25; 12:2; Hebrews 1:3; Matthew 24:35.
- Al Gore, Nobel Prize lecture (2007) and Copenhagen remarks (2009) on Arctic sea ice; An Inconvenient Truth (2006). See fact-check coverage (Snopes, PolitiFact) noting both the claims and their later qualification.
- David Viner, quoted in The Independent, “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” (March 2000).
- Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968).
- Richard S. Lindzen, U.S. Senate testimony (2015); Lindzen & Happer, papers on CO₂ saturation and climate sensitivity.
- Roy W. Spencer & John R. Christy, the UAH satellite temperature dataset and associated publications.
- Henrik Svensmark, cosmic-ray/cloud hypothesis (DTU Space); Nir Shaviv, solar and cosmic-ray climate forcing.
- Ross McKitrick & Stephen McIntyre, critiques of the “hockey stick” reconstruction and temperature-data adjustments.
- S. Fred Singer (SEPP / NIPCC reports); Patrick Michaels (Cato Institute); Claude Allègre, public reversals on climate alarm.
- Note: major climate science institutions (e.g., the IPCC) maintain that recent warming is primarily human-caused; this article presents the dissenting case and the record of failed catastrophic predictions.