Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a socialist former bartender newly elected to Congress, says, “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change — and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”

Her claim is not new. The mainstream media have touted it for months. On January 24, former Vice President Al Gore claimed that “time is running out to fight climate change.” Earlier that week, former Secretary of State John Kerry declared, “People will die because of this president’s (Trump) decision to pull out of the Paris agreement.”

Some respond with ridicule. Others view the claims merely as politicians riling up the troops with over-the-top rhetoric. But the matter is scientific. However ludicrous the claims are, criticism will be constructive only if it addresses the science.

Inaccurate Climate Models

Will our world really end in 12 years (or 50, or 100, or 500) if we don’t act now to curb climate change?

All the rhetoric is based on the 2018 United Nation’s SR15 Report on climate change. The report warned that the world is doomed if governments don’t act immediately. But the report, like earlier ones on climate change from the United Nations, is fundamentally flawed.

Climate doomsday theory hinges on computer climate models. Scientists use them to predict future climate and advise on government policy. But there’s a problem. The models are wrong. Most failed dramatically in their predictions of what would happen over the past 18 years. Their forecasts bear no resemblance to real-world temperatures. Surface warming predictions diverge increasingly from observations.

Worse, in the last 40 years, model projections for the global lower atmosphere exceeded observed temperatures by 67 percent.

Many in the climate establishment acknowledge this. Yet they have not corrected the fundamental error. They still assume, wrongly, that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change.

The Doomsday Juggernaut

How do we know that carbon dioxide isn’t the primary driver of climate change?

Carbon dioxide emission levels have increased dramatically in the past 7 decades. But global temperature has gone up and down.

For instance, global temperature dropped steeply in the 1950s and 1960s. It rose rapidly from 1970 to 1999. After 1999, it failed to rise as rapidly as before — or as rapidly as the models predicted. In contrast, between 1950 and 2018, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rose steadily.

Millennials remember the Gore’s doomsday prophecies, which never came to pass. It seems Ocasio-Cortez has taken over his mantle.

The mainstream media seldom discuss this mismatch. The doomsday zealots ignore it completely.

Actual climate scientists, however, have pointed it out in testimony to Congress. Even staunch doom-sayer Michael Mann openly acknowledged the models’ failure. Hundreds of scientific papers show that polar regions are not in peril. There has been no drastic increase in sea levels. Extreme weather events are neither more frequent nor more severe. In short, nothing unusual is happening.

In fact, 2018 was one of the coldest years on record for the Northern Hemisphere. Hundreds of new records for cold were set across North America. Yet the doomsday juggernaut rolls on. Scare mongers cling tightly to their models and use the media as their loudspeaker.

Millennials remember the Gore’s doomsday prophecies, which never came to pass. It seems Ocasio-Cortez has taken over his mantle. She is misleading people, especially Generation Z. Her doomsday narrative belongs in the pulp fiction aisle of our bookstores.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.