An Old Failed Prediction of Global Warming

The Migrant Mind
Saturday, Dec 26th, 2009

Climate skeptics have taken some of the passages in this book to
indicate that climatologists were predicting a coming ice age. That is
not entirely true. Global warming advocates chose passages that show
that he was aware that CO2 could warm the planet and claim that
skeptics are simply wrong.

This is not the post to get into that but I was interested in one of the predictions this guy made

Schneider wrote:

“There are various estimates of the response of globally
averaged surface temperatures to a doubling of CO2 from a out 300 ppm
to six hundred ppm by volume – a value projected to occur by
about the years 2025 to 2040. State-of-the-art climate models
unequivocally predict that such a doubling of CO2 would raise the
surface temperature of the earth. Although these predictions vary
considerably, probably the best order of magnitude estimate that can be
made today is for a surface warming by some 1.5 to 3oK globally and
that the temperature increase in the polar regions might well be
amplified severalfold. But there is far less agreement over the
magnitude and location of tghe warming than over the fact that CO2 will
warm. Projection of the CO2 increase, granted the continuation of
present trends to the year 2000, suggests, as said earlier, an increase
in CO2 concentrations of about 20 to 25 percent, a change corresponding
to an approximately 1 deg K global surface temperature rise (plus the
assumed amplification at the poles.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 180
Now, we have continued to put out CO2 as he was worried about, but his
prediction of an additional 1 deg C change by 2000. This has not
happened. The trend has gone up about a third of what he predicted and
even the most beneficial interpretation says that he was wrong by half.

His book was also about the famine from droughts that would happen in the next 2 decades from when he wrote:

“Although it is possible that technology could provide for
basic human needs for all humanity in fifty or one hundred years, the
immediate fear is that serious threats to major portions of the human
species will occur in the present decade or the next one; the threats
will come if the production of essential goods and services continues
to be so closely balanced with absolute need that only the slightest
imbalance–whether produced inadvertently by the collapse of an
overtaxed ecosystem, or deliberately by political removal of a
technological prop–could mean death or extreme deprivation for
millions.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 17-18

The famines never arrived. How sad for Schneider but good for the world.

And of course, he played God pondering whether or not it was good to
let people starve in the 1970s so that people in the 1990s could live.
But the famine he predicted, didn’t come to pass. Strike two

” An evaluation of whether it is “better” to
let people starve now, even though food may be available, to prevent
possible greater suffering later presents a moral problem of immense
dimensions. I return to this issue shortly.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 33

Who put him in charge?

He did say in a 1971 Science article that man would put so many aerosols into the air that we would trigger an ice age.

However, it is projected that man’s potential to pollute
will increase six- to eightfold in the next 50 years. If this increased
rate of injection of particulate matter in the atmosphere should raise
the present global background opacity by a factor of 4, our
calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as
3.5°K. Such a large decrease in the average surface temperature of
Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient
to trigger an ice age.S.
I. Rasool and S. H. Schneider, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and
Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate,” Science
173(1971), p. 141

Even with China pouring billions of tons of aerosols into the atmosphere, we have yet to trigger the ice age.

False prophets of doom should not be allowed to remain prophets of doom with records like this.