Top 5 most outrageous 2020 doomsday predictions that didn't pan out

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

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1. The U.S. 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 Fahrenheit 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 as 6 degrees Fahrenheit."

 

Thirty years later, 2020 has finally arrived. The Earth has warmed approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit according to NASA. The United States also warmed roughly 1 degree.

 

2. Oil will effectively run out by 2020

CNN ran a headline in 2003 titled "World oil and gas 'running out'".

 

The New York Times reported in 1989 that "untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling," and that "William Stevens, the president of Exxon U.S.A., 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 U.S. oil output and U.S. proven oil reserves are dramatically higher now than they were in 1989, thanks to technology allowing deeper oil to be discovered and extracted.

 

3) By 2020, no glaciers will be left on Mt. Kilimanjaro

"It's now estimated that by the year 2020, there will be no glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro," Christian Lambrechts, an officer at the U.N. Environment Program, told CNN in 2003.

The Associated Press also reported in 2007 that “in 2001, [glaciologist Lonnie] Thompson predicted the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania would disappear within the next 20 years.”

But today, Kilimanjaro's glaciers are still there, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal Ecology and Evolution that includes photos and a new timetable: "most of 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 published a largely spot-on list of predictions about 2020.                                                

But it missed big when predicting a "grisly reality" of tech-caused inequality: "For [virtual reality pioneer Jaron] Lanier, the most heartbreaking scenario is festering in the third world, where, he believes, 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...'"

 

5. By 2020, "millions will die" from climate change 

Reuters newswire ran this headline 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 prediction 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.”

 

Some modern studies claim to find mass deaths; the Daily Beast covered a “shock report” that “Climate Change Kills 400,000 a Year,” but Human Progress' Marian Tupy said such estimates are grossly inflated.

“They say climate change causes everything. Some people try to pin the war on Syria on climate change, and then say when all those people die, that's because of climate change. They have a secondary agenda,” Tupy said.

 

 

https://www.foxnews.com/us/top-5-most-outrageous-2020-doomsday-predictions

 

I, for one, enjoyed the theme! By next decade we can look forward to more climate doomsday predictions failing. Thoughts?

 

On #4, while they got the starvation wrong, I found their list interesting:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/what-youll-need-to-know-in-2020-that-you-dont-know-now

 

Particularly the medical point about this:

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To reach that age you'll need to know enough to make more complicated medical choices: Do I want to jettison a limb and wait five years to regrow another? Shall I allow a phalanx of nanobots to scrape the plaque out of my arteries or opt to replace the vessels altogether? "Amateurs may be fooling around with black-market genetic manipulation," says Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, "maybe extending their lives by lengthening their own telomeres, the ends of chromosomes believed to control life span. Or they might, in fact, be growing new features in their brain."

 

Even though what I'm thinking of wasn't their point.. this actually reminds me of the paradox of choice:

 

 

Clearly we can have too much choice, and this is one of those areas, where such plethora of choice winds up being paralyzing, or counterproductive to the individual. It's a microcosm for psychology, and especially consumer psychology, which plays out in the medical/insurance industry as well.

[Boiler 45,972]

And Hillary was going to win in 2016.

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

14 minutes ago, Boiler said:

And Hillary was going to win in 2016.

Hillary for re-election!

 

Related.. Breitbart did a Top 10 hoaxes:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/31/ttop-10-most-bizarre-viral-hoaxes-of-2019/

 

2019.. year of the hate hoax.