Prince Charles is warning that there are only 35 years left to save the planet from climate disaster, which represents a 33-year extension of his previous deadline.
In March 2009, the heir to the British throne predicted that the world had 100 months “before we risk catastrophic climate change,” as pointed out by Climate Depot’s Marc Morano.
“Prince Charles gives world reprieve: Extends ’100-Month’ climate ’tipping point’ to 35 more years,” says the Tuesday headline on the Climate Depot website.
The British blog Not A Lot of People Know That announced in a July 19 post, “Charlie Gives Us a Reprieve!”
Prince Charles, who updated his forecast in a July 18 interview with the Western [U.K.] Morning News prior to his visit to the Westcountry, began issuing warnings six years ago about imminent ecological disaster driven by climate change.
“The best projections tell us that we have less than 100 months to alter our behaviour before we risk catastrophic climate change,” the Prince of Wales said in a speech in Rio de Janeiro, as reported by the [U.K.] Telegraph.
Four months later, he predicted in an interview with the [U.K.] Independent that the Earth had 96 months left to avoid “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
That prediction, which he continued to reference in other interviews, would have given the world until 2017 before reaching the “tipping point” of environmental catastrophe driven by climate change.
Others have also extended their original “tipping point” predictions in recent years, much to the amusement of climate-change skeptics.
For example, Climate Depot notes that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave the world 15 years to act starting in April 2014, even though its then-chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, had set a five-year deadline in 2007.
In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore said the world may have only 10 years to reverse course, prompting climatologist Roy Spencer to comment in 2014 that, “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, his prognostication is not shaping up too well.”
Skeptics point out that the global mean temperature has not increased for more than 18 years, a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “the pause.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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