Quote:
Originally Posted by oil pan 4
The problem I find is all these predictions have been made, dooms dates have come and gone, nothing happened and some times the predictions get recycled and extended out another 20 to 70 years. Other wise not a single one has even came close.
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And why don't a lot of the predictions come true? Because once a disaster is predicted, in most cases a lot of sensible people work their butts off doing something to avert the disaster. See Y2K as probably the prime example.
If you want to consider just environmental predictions, how about the Ice Age being triggered by sulfate emissions that the denialists like to go on about? What happened is that because of the prediction (and other things like smog & acid rain that had their own disasters attached), sensible people enacted various pollution-control regulations, the amout of emissions was greatly reduced, and without the emissions the disaster didn't happen. I find it amusing that the same denialists who use this as an example of a failed prediction are quite happy to speak out of the other side of their mouths and recommend sulfate aerosols as a geoengineering solution to the global warming that isn't happening.
Or we could consider that flurocarbons destroying the ozone layer thing. That's a nice example of a double-edged prediction: the environmental types were predicting a disaster from continuing use of flurocarbons, while the business-as-usual types were predicting economic disaster if they couldn't use them. Well, most flurocarbon use was banned, the ozone hole stopped growing (score one for environmentalists), and the economic disaster didn't happen.