“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…

“A new ice age would flood the world’s coastal cities and further lower temperatures to build up new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.” (1971)

The warming alarmists dismiss the cooling alarmists of yesterday as fringe and ignorant. But some of the biggest names of the day back then would not take too kindly to the know-it-alls of today.

Alex Epstein has coined the term catastrophicism to describe the age-old Malthusian itch. Back in the 1970s, top scientists such as NASA’s S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University, and Stephen Schneider of National Center for Atmospheric Research, were making headlines about future climate change–from people, not nature.

“Scientists have long debated whether man’s activity is actually heating or cooling the earth,” the Washington Post article below notes.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?trk=…

“Back to Lindsey Gulden, the self-described Data/Climate Scientist. She would/could not provide a time series example to back up any part of her claim of ‘global climate to go off the rails’ … ‘more extreme events’. I asked her repeatedly for data, and she could only sign-off with ‘I made no such claim‘.”

On LinkedIn, Saul Humphrey stated: 2023 was the hottest year on record and 2024 is threatening to be hotter still.  Humphrey then quotes from an article in The Independent, “Do the People Care About the Climate Crisis? These Voters Say Yes – but Polls Do Not” (April 19, 2024):

In the US 🇺🇸 wildfires destroyed more than 1.7 million acres in the first three months of 2024, already half of last year’s total, and forecasters expect an unprecedented number of Atlantic hurricanes.

“I don’t agree with many (any?) of [Alex Epstein’s] points in his response, and it is conspicuously lacking in arguments about climate itself.”  Tyler Cowen

“It’s sad that a guy as smart as Tyler not only 1) irresponsibly commented on a book he was not willing to read carefully, but also 2) refused to admit any wrongdoing whatsoever.” Alex Epstein

It was distributed on social media by the director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s loan programs office, Jigar Shah, described as “The man in charge of how the US spends $400bn to shift away from fossil fuels.” Shah forwarded Tyler Cowen’s post (at Marginal Revolution) critiquing Alex Epstein’s book, Fossil Future: Why Human Flourishing Requires Using More Oil, Gas, and Coal–Not Less.

A ‘classical liberal’ handing an intellectual gift to a DOE grifter?…