Jerry Shenk: Climate alarmism — everything old is new again

I’m old enough to remember when half of the Earth’s population was going to freeze to death, and everyone else was likely to starve.

Throughout the 1970s, following a period of cooling trends, climate scolds fretted about a potential New Ice Age that would cause glaciation and destroy agriculture.

Their alarmism was amplified by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine, among other outlets.

Nonetheless, today, D.C., LA and Manhattan remain un-glaciated.

The anxious and/or ambitious people predisposed to apocalyptic fears and/or who profit from alarmism soon turned their attention to “global warming,” an “existential man-made phenomenon” that has remained “imminent” for decades.

Addressing global warming in 1982, United Nations Environment Program official Mostafa Tolba predicted “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust,” by the turn of the century.

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore declared that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

In January 2009, NASA’s James Hansen told America that [President Barack] Obama had only four years to save the planet.”

In summer 2013, a party of global warming alarmists sailed to Antarctica to prove that man-made global warming had made the Antarctic Sea ice-free. Unfortunately, their boat got stuck in the 10-foot thick sea ice they just knew(!) wasn’t there. They had to be rescued by helicopter.

Then, in April 2014, 32 years after the body first predicted a climate apocalypse, the UN moved the goalposts and predicted another climate tipping point, this time in 15 years.

None of it happened, of course, but alarmists never ran out of hope — or hype.

Fast forward to November 2025, when the New York Post reported: “A key Atlantic current could be pushed to the brink of collapse within decades, supposedly ushering in a new ice age and dramatically raising sea levels, climate scientists have claimed in a controversial new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.” […] “The apocalyptic predictions came as a result of a collaboration between researchers at the…Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, San Diego.”

In short, some ChiCom and People’s Republic of California researchers who always have America’s best interests at heart predict that Atlantic Ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream, could reverse course and cause a New Ice Age.

Oddly, panic-mongers somehow see this as another catastrophe rather than as relief from their predicted humanity-ending global warming cataclysm.

Summarizing, in about a half-century, alarmists have gone from “ice” to “fire,” and back to “ice.” Everything old is, indeed, new again.

Some perspective, please …

Even if ocean currents were to change, glaciation isn’t imminent. The last glacial cycle began more than 100,000 years ago, and likely peaked 17,000 to 18,000 years ago.

Remember, too, there’s plenty of self-interest in the climate community: the UN seeks global governance; third-world nations demand “climate reparations”; environmental activists solicit donations to their NGOs; crony capitalists harvest public funds for “sustainable” energy; researchers seek grants and tenure at the expense of sound science; and politicians love to demagogue climate change without fear of refutation.

For the gullible, global warming has become an evangelical theological movement outside of normally accepted skeptical approaches to the rest of science.

In November, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the quiet part out loud. Speaking on the “climate crisis” to the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, Pelosi said: “This is a religious issue.”

In 2014, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute, tweeted: “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community. Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”

Astonishingly, the right to professionally research and interpret climate science must be subject to a faith test.

In fact, climate warming science is hotly debated within the scientific community, and, at more than 4 billion years old, Earth’s geologic record reveals plentiful evidence of natural climate volatility.

The Issues and Insights editorial board sums it up nicely:

“Whatever the supposed state of the climate is, no matter what dangerous trends have allegedly been identified, we suggest that everyone should take the new information [ocean current/Ice Age fear-mongering] and do … nothing. Because that’s roughly what it’s worth.”

Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at jshenk2010@gmail.com