Why Choice is an Illusion?

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Off Topic: Climate Change Prediction Bust Leaves Park Scrambling To Change Signs

 By Amanda Prestigiacomo, Jan 9, 2020   DailyWire.com

In another global warming or climate change prediction gone awry, Glacier National Park is scrambling to change signs warning visitors about glaciers being melted by 2020.

The signs were originally placed in the Montana park more than a decade ago, in accordance with predictions made by the U.S. Geological Survey.

According to Glacier National Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen, the park was made aware of the bunk prediction about the glaciers in 2017, “but tight maintenance budgets made it impossible for the park to immediately change the signs,” CNN reported Wednesday.

Some placards have been changed at St. Mary Visitor Center, but others throughout the park have not.

According to the Glacier National Park, “Glaciers are masses of ice that are so big they move under the influence of gravity. They grow when winter snow accumulation exceeds summer melting. They retreat when melting outpaces snowfall.”

“The minimum size criterion for a glacier is 0 .1 km², or about 25 acres. Below this size, the accumulated ice generally does not move and is stagnant,” the site explains. “Many years of snow accumulation compacts the bottom layers of snow into ice. Under the huge weight of the snowpack (usually 100ft/30.5m thick or more), the ice becomes viscous and allows the mass to slide downhill. The appearance of crevasses and cracks attest to a glacier’s movement. Glaciers don’t “bulldoze” landscape as much as they melt and re-freeze, plucking material from areas of snow deposition and moving it to other areas, like downhill conveyor belts.”

This is not the first time global warming or climate change predictions have fallen flat, of course. Nonprofit libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute complied “50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions” in September.

In 1967, for example, it was predicated that climate change would cause “dire famine by 1975.” There was a predicted “ice age by 2020” in 1970. In 1989, it was predicted that New York City’s West Side Highway would be “underwater by 2019.” Snowfalls are a thing of the past, The Independent predicted in the year 2000. “Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020,” The Guardian said in 2004.

And the list goes on.

Environmental hysteria has been tied to political aims, historically. Far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a transparent example of this, with her proposed big-government “Green New Deal.”

“The bill, dubbed the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, would use seven grant programs to upgrade housing units into carbon-neutral communities with organic grocery stores, on-site child care and community gardens,” The Washington Post reported. “Residents of public housing would be given preference in hiring to renovate those units.”

As noted by The Daily Wire, estimates for the price tag for AOC’s socialist and supposedly climate-friendly utopia range from $119 billion to $4.6 trillion over the next decade:

The Post cited far-left think group Date for Progress, which claimed that the project would cost between $119 billion and $172 billion over the next decade.

However, when citing numbers from a conservative think tank — the American Action Forum — The Post declined to show the full range of estimated cost, reporting that it was “$1.6 trillion or more.” The “more” the Post intentionally did not include is $4.6 trillion.

* * *

Photo by: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.