Newsweek's enviro-alarmist and resident green propagandist, Sharon Begley, has a new future-forecasting puff piece on why we can be so 'stupid', especially with her looking out for our well-being. She has predictions galore based on very bad science already discredited by far wiser persons than her, but that doesn't stop Begley from scolding us dumb Americans who are in for a very bumpy near future. Below, just a few of her ridiculous predictions from this very slanted piece: (emphasis added)

The required adaptations will be much more profound than turning up the air conditioning a notch come summertime. Melting glaciers will trigger "glacier lake outburst floods," warns the IPCC; if you have a child wondering which field to enter, damengineering and -building look like excellent bets. Permafrost is melting, so villages and roads in the (once) frozen north that are built on it will have to be relocated. Sea-level rise is inundating the wetlands and mangrove swamps that once absorbed storm surges; sea-wall design and construction will also be a growth industry, at least in areas that can afford it. For the tens of millions of Bangladeshis and other impoverished people living in coastal regions that will be underwater, inland areas can "adapt" by making room for unprecedented waves of environmental refugees. In a warmer world, the atmosphere holds more moisture. When moist air collides with Arctic air, freezing rain will fall, as it did in the nation's midsection in December, leaving tens of thousands of people without power for more than a week. Let's hope some smart utility engineers are figuring out how to build power lines that don't snap when they've got hundreds of pounds of ice on them.

Already some cities (New York, Seattle) and states (California, Alaska, Maryland, Oregon, Washington) have adaptation plans. Alaska is figuring out how to protect or relocate villages at risk from wave surges or flooding. California is beefing up its firefighting capacity because, in a greenhouse world, more forest fires will rage; it has also proposed desalinization plants for when seawater must substitute for rain that never fell and snowpack that never accumulated. Other locales are requiring new bridges to be built above anticipated storm surges (as for existing bridges, good luck) and developing heat-wave early-warning systems so they can ramp up cooling centers and get the word out to at-risk populations such as the elderly. They are vulnerable for both biological reasons (old bodies have trouble keeping cool) and social ones (they resist leaving their homes).

It's one thing to have confidence in your predictions based on sound scientific principals and be right. It's another thing to have confidence and be wrong. And as Begley knows, only time will tell if her gloom and doom ever comes true. And by then, no one will remember she was a prominent alarmist in a major newsmagazine. 

Average user rating