You probably think that the classical reference in the title is to a saying originating from baseball humorist Yogi Berra. But....
...You and I are not going to be around in 2100 to see if any of these predictions about the future have come true. But meanwhile the climate alarm crowd obliges us with shorter term predictions to help us get some handle on how reliable they are. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing a very good job of keeping track of these predictions and seeing how they are turning out.
...For example, there was the prediction that our national weather bureaucracy (NOAA) came out with back in October as to the severity of the upcoming winter. How do they come up with that prediction? Eric Niler at Wired wrote a post on the prediction on October 29 that revealed that the seasonal predictions rely on models using the same theories of "heat trapping" greenhouse gases as they use for the longer-term models....
...[NOAA predicted] Warmer-than-normal conditions are most likely across the southern two-thirds of the continental U.S., along the East Coast, across Hawaii and in western and northern Alaska.
Oops! For those who haven't checked up on the weather on the East Coast of the U.S. lately, it's been record-breaking deep freeze around here for the last week, and expected to go even lower over the approaching weekend. It has snowed as far south as the Florida panhandle. ...
...Susan Crockford is a scientist specializing in polar bears, who writes scholarly articles on the subject, and also has a blog called Polar Bear Science. She has been making a thing lately about taunting the alarm community for their failed polar bear predictions. For example, Crockford points to this report in Canada's National Post in May 2007 of a presentation by Al Gore:
[Gore pointed to] an iconic photograph that was distributed worldwide last month by Canada's Environment Ministry, . . . The photo, taken in the summer, shows two polar bears on a melting ice floe in the Beaufort Sea, north of Barrow, Alaska. "Their habitat is melting -- beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet," Mr. Gore said, with the photo on the screen behind him. "They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go." Audience members let out gasps of sympathy . . . .
Crockford also points to scholarly articles, particularly by a guy named Steven Amstrup, predicting rapid decline of polar bear populations if sea ice levels reach . . . levels that they actually did reach in years including 2012. But unfortunately, from Crockford's blog on December 21:
...And from Crockford's blog on January 4:
Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues. This has left many folks unhappy about the toppling of this important global warming icon but ironically, consensus polar bear experts and climate scientists (and their supporters) were the ones who set up the polar bear as a proxy for AGW in the first place.
