Global warming’s awful fortune tellers

Remember Jeane Dixon, the famous astrologer/psychic who in the 1950s and '60s would annually make a few hundred vague and nebulous predictions, and then boast about the one or two that appeared to come true? Such was her 1956 prediction in Parade magazine that some president some day would be assassinated or die in office. She later boasted that John Kennedy's death was a proof of her ability, ignoring the hundreds of her predictions that came nowhere near the mark.

A mathematician dubbed this bent the Jeane Dixon Effect.

The global warming doomsayers aren't even that good.

In October 2005, Britain's The Guardian newspaper quoted Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, predicting there would be 50 million climate change refugees by 2010. Mr. Bogardi was quoted as saying, "There are well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change."

The Guardian story went on to point out "100 million people live in areas that are below sea level or liable to storm surge. A total of 213 communities in Alaska are threatened by tides that creep three metres further inland each year." It also noted New Zealand was planning to take in the 11,000 residents of Tuvalu, a low Pacific island.

The United Nations report included a map showing hundreds of islands in jeopardy because of rising seas.

The residents of Tuvalu have yet to evacuate, nor has anyone from the United Nations or anywhere else had to shelter those 50 million climate refugees. In fact, researchers from Duke University and Meredith College, using satellite images, have discovered 657 new islands around the globe.

As for the rising seas that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore's movie warned about, that's another failed prediction.

Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner of Stockholm University, who has been studying the sea level for 35 years, said in an interview, "There is absolutely no signal that the sea level is rising. If anything, you could say that maybe the tide is lowering a little bit, but absolutely no rising.

"And again, where do they get it from?

"They get it from their inspiration, their hopes, their computer models, but not from observation. Which is terrible."

The editorial writers at Investor's Business Daily chewed on the unsavory irony of the fear-mongering predictions of the global alarmists.

"If there is any disruption in food supplies," they wrote, "it's caused by rising food prices ironically caused by increased demand for biofuels to save the earth, and the diversion of cropland and even the clear-cutting of sacred rainforests to produce them.

"The endless fraud perpetrated by the climate hucksters knows no bounds."

Even Jeane Dixon had a better record.