William Buckley had this to say about predictions. “I remember participating in a forum in the late 1970s, in which the principal speaker was the representative of The Economist (the London weekly). He had been designated its 'futurist.' The original idea was to devote an entire issue every ten years forecasting the primary concerns of the ensuing ten years. To prepare himself for that assignment, he had gone over the futurist issues of the past hundred years and learned that there was only this constant: the predicted concerns of the next decade turned out in no case—not ever—to be the actual concerns of the ensuing decade.” 1
Those same words could apply today. Here are a number of predictions made about 2020 that failed to pan out.
From predicting ecological collapse and the end of civilization to warning that the world is running out of oil, all environmental doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be flat wrong. The best prediction from the first earth day five decades ago was that 'the pending ice age as earth had been cooling since 1950 and the temperature would be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000.' 2
Then in 2004, it was predicted that Britain will be plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. 3
A contrary prediction was that the US may warm 6 degrees F from 1990 to 2020. In 1990, The Washington Post reported in a front page story: “Carbon dioxide is the gas most responsible for predictions that Earth will warm on average by about 3 degrees F by the year 2020.” The outlet further warned: “The United States, because it occupies a large continent in higher latitudes, could warm by as much a 6 degrees F. Thirty years later, 2020 has finally arrived. The earth has warmed approximately 1 degree F according to NASA. 4
Oil will effectively run out by 2020 according to a CNN headline in 2003 titled 'world oil and gas running out.' 5 The New York Times reported that 'untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling' and that William Stevens, the president of Exxon USA, said, by the year 2020 there would not be enough domestic oil left to keep me interested.' But doomsayers underestimated American ingenuity, and the opposite happened. Both US oil output and US proven oil reserves are dramatically higher now than they were in 1989, thanks to technology allowing deeper oil to be discovered and extracted. 4
New technology in natural gas (fracking) also allowed the US to become an energy independent net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years in 2018. 6
By 2020, no glaciers will be left on Mt. Kilimanjaro. “It's now estimated that by the year 2020, there will be no glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro,” Christian Lambrechts, an officer at the UN Environment Program, told CNN in 2003. The Associated Press also reported in 2007 that in 2001, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson predicted the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro would disappear within the next 20 years. But today, Kilimanjaro's glaciers are still there, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal of Ecology and Evolution that includes a new timetable: 'most glaciers on Kilimanjaro will most likely disappear within 25 years.' 4
'A billion people will starve due to missing the tech revolution.' In 2000, Discover Magazine missed big when predicting a 'grisly reality' of tech-caused inequality: “For the most heartbreaking scenario is festering in the third world, where the current generation will be lost in the next techno-revolution. You're going to have to somehow live while you watch a billion people starve.” But from 2000 to 2020, global extreme poverty fell by about a billion people, as technology connected the world and allowed people in developing countries to access capital, production know-how and aid from developed countries. 4
By 2020 millions will die from climate change reported Reuters news wire in 1997: “Millions will die unless climate policies change.” The report said 8 million people would die by 2020, citing a prediction in the Lancet medical journal. The mass death was clearly way off. “None of these predictions came true, and aren't even close to coming true,” said Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It's amazing that the public can continue to believe apocalyptic predictions despite a 95 percent decline in weather related deaths in the last 100 years.” 7
“Futurists and technology experts say robots and artificial intelligence of various sorts will become an accepted part of daily life by the year 2020 and will almost completely take over physical work,” Elon University noted in 2006. The robots are still coming. There are a lot of them, and they suggest anything from a moderate displacement of jobs to a total workforce automation, with varying degrees of alarm, but they have yet to 'almost takeover physical work.' 8
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We're not vacationing on the Moon- yet- “By 2020 you'll have seen private citizens circumnavigate the moon,” Eric Anderson of Space Adventures told the website Space.com in 2009 and SpaceX founder Elon Musk went further. “I'm going to go out on a limb and say that by 2020 there will be serious plans to go to Mars with people.”
The further back you go, the more outlandish the predictions for 2020 get.
In 1964, the RAND Corporation conducted a long-term forecasting report, putting questions to 82 experts in various fields to come up with a number of predictions for our times. Had they been right, we'd be communicating with extraterrestrials and time-traveling by now. Our lives would be extended by half a century, and Mars would be old news. We'd have landed there by the mid-1980s, and Venus and the moons of Jupiter would have been conquered in the early 21st century. We'd even have flown to Pluto, which, back then, was still a planet before it was downgraded in 2006.9
“Primitive forms of artificial life will have been generated in the laboratory,” the report goes on. “A universal language will have been evolved and on the moon, mining and manufacture of propellant materials will be in progress.”
One of the most eyebrow-raising claims in the RAND report, however, was that by 2020 we'd have bred animals, including apes, to carry out daily chores in the home.
For most of the last 30 years, Al Gore has been a prophet of doom, time and time again warning of catastrophe if we don't repent, time and again coming up empty. His 2006 film, an ‘Inconvenient Truth’, warned of devastation from rising sea levels- animations showed Manhattan under water, along with San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, the Netherlands and much of Florida. Time and again Gore predicted the melting of the polar caps, in 2008 announcing that “The entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in 5 years.” That never happened; today there is more sea ice in the Arctic than in recent years at this time. In 1993, Gore said that 'one-half of all species could disappear in our lifetime.' 10
In 2012, former President of the Maldive islands, Mohammed Nasheed, said, “If carbon emissions continue at the rate they are climbing today, My country will be under water in seven years.” Not so said researchers at Finders University in Adelaide, who had the task of settling the sea level situation once and for all by installing state of the art tide gauge equipment on 12 Pacific Islands. There was no overall change in sea level at any of the islands after sixteen years. 11
So, where are we today? How did they miss COVID-19? Will the world end in 12 years?
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change and combat CO2,” Democrat firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) stated explaining her views and those of “millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us.” 12
So, if AOC is a better predictor than all those mentioned above, better get your affairs in order because time is running out.
However, if history is any guide, it will not. Many similar predictions have been made in the past, but they came and went without tragedy.
References
William F Buckley, Jr., Nearer My God, (New York, Doubleday, 1997)
Ron Stein, “Earth Day at 50: none of the eco-doomsday predictions have come true,” wattsupwiththat.com, April 22, 2020
The Guardian, February 2004
Maxim Lott, “Top 5 most outrageous 2020 doomsday predictions that didn't pan out,” foxnews.com, January 1, 2020
Graham Jones, “World oil and gas running out,” edition.cnn.com, October 2, 2003
Javier Blas, “The US just became a net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years,” bloomberg,com, December 6, 2018
Marlo Lewis Jr., “Climate related deaths are at a historic lows, data show,” fee,org, June 7, 2019
Rob Picheta, “Nanobots, ape chauffeurs and flights to Pluto. The predictions for 2020 we got horribly wrong,” cnn.com, January 5, 2020
T. J. Gordon and Olaf Helmer, “Report on a long-range forecasting study,” rand.org, September 1964
Stephen Budiansky, “The Teflon doomsayers,” budiansky.blogspot.com, September 26, 2010
Michael Fox, “Maldives seal level fraud,” Hawaii Reporter, October 26, 2015
Lawrence Solomon, “The unspoken danger of CO2: it makes people go absolutely nutty,” business.financialpost.com, February 8, 2019
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
William Buckley had this to say about predictions. “I remember participating in a forum in the late 1970s, in which the principal speaker was the representative of The Economist (the London weekly). He had been designated its 'futurist.' The original idea was to devote an entire issue every ten years forecasting the primary concerns of the ensuing ten years. To prepare himself for that assignment, he had gone over the futurist issues of the past hundred years and learned that there was only this constant: the predicted concerns of the next decade turned out in no case—not ever—to be the actual concerns of the ensuing decade.” 1
