Many of the people who ridicule and criticize Christianity the hardest do so by quoting The Book of Revelations. Author Lee Child had a cynical character in the novel Hope and Despair describe it as a bad acid trip. Amazingly, these same individuals don’t express a similar sentiment when some over-credentialed huckster from NCAR tells us that the end is righteously now. The Devine Revelation of Good Morning America, presented on 12 June 2008 predicted woe and despair for the summer of 2015. Today, the last of the flea-bitten dog days of August is a convenient time to check up on these Doom-Sayers and see how close we are to climate-driven perdition.

We start with New York City. The picture atop the post shows the predicted geography of NYC in 2015 according to Good Morning America. The map on the right shows today’s MapQuest image of NYC. The non-graphical predictions often aren’t much better. Here are some excerpts from the 12 June 2008 Good Morning America special.

HEIDI CULLEN (WEATHER CHANNEL/CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERT): There’s about one billion people who are malnourished. That number just continually grows.

Here’s how that really has been working out. Voxeu had the following data on world poverty.

Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.

Here are some more “predictions” brought your way be the coruscating brilliance of “Science.”

UNIDENTIFIED TEENAGER: It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.
SECOND UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gas reached over $9 a gallon.

Let’s price a carton of milk on 31 August 2015 in Huntsville, Al. I usually choose to shop at a nearby Kroger. I typically buy 1 Gallon of 2% Reduced Fat. I’m seeing a special on the store brand: 2 gallons for $4. I’d have to buy 6 gallons to pay $12.

Let’s also examine the price of 1 Gallon of gasoline. Checking Gasbuddy.com for Huntsville, AL gives me a range of $2.01 to $2.09 in the Madison, AL area (Zip code 35757).

Physicists have proven that CO2 and several other gaseous substances undergo quantum transitions to excited states when presented photons of given Infra-Red wave numbers. This is about as close as legitimate scientists have come to proving that Anthropogenic Global Warming is an ongoing problem directly attributable to the pollution emitted by human beings.

The better, more legitimately concerned members of the scientific community probably look at blatant alarmism such as Good Morning America’s schlockumentary on Global Warming and reach for an air sickness bag. The better, more legitimately concerned scientists also lack the political connections or the megaphone to do anything about the tripe that gets pedaled in their name. Maybe it wasn’t poor, old John who was doing the psychedelic drugs.