It’s hard for the average citizen to read the news these days and not be worried for the future of the planet. We are told that 13 of the last 16 years have been the warmest on record. We hear that coastal cities such as New York and Atlantic City, as well as nearly all of Florida, are at risk of flooding due to unprecedented sea-level rise. We are told that the wildfires in California and Greece are the worst ever recorded, and that these fires represent a “new normal” because of man-made climate change.

But to get a good gauge of such predictions, it is wise to look at how similar predictions have turned out in the past. So, don’t sell your beachfront property just yet.

Beginning back in 1988, certain scientists have been predicting climate doom, some of which should already be evident. That was the year when James Hansen, then the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that the greenhouse effect was causing warming on Earth and that man was at least partially responsible for it.

“Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,” Hansen told Congress. “It’s already happening now.”

Hansen and fellow scientist Michael Oppenheimer reported that if the buildup of carbon dioxide and methane continued at the current rate, the Earth would be between three and nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the years 2025-2050, and that sea levels would rise between one and four feet in the same time frame.

Now, of course it’s not 2025 yet, but that’s only seven years in the future, and unless Hansen and Oppenheimer predicted that the warming would happen all at once (they didn’t), their predictions don’t seem to panning out, as global temperature has risen only slightly more than 0.5° F in that time.

Sea-level predictions are also not on pace with Hansen and Oppenheimer’s prognostications, as even the highest data sets show only a 3.15” rise since 1990, which, as climatologist Dr. Judith Curry points out, is hardly unprecedented.

“The rate of sea-level rise during the period 1925-1960 is as large as the rate of sea-level rise in the past few decades,” Curry said. “Human emissions of CO2 mostly grew after 1950; so, humans don’t seem to be the blame for the early 20th century sea-level rise, nor for the sea-level rise in the 19th and late 18th centuries.”

When carbon-credit salesman Al Gore joined the climate fray with his “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, the climate lies only worsened. Gore’s film predicted a 20-foot sea-level rise in the “near future” owing to ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica. As you can see, it hasn’t happened yet. Gore also predicted the devastation of low-lying Pacific Island nations such as Tuvalu because of sea-level rise. But Tuvalu and some other island nations have actually grown in size since Gore’s pronouncement. A British judge concluded in 2007 that the film contained at least nine factual errors and was, therefore, a political film — not a scientific one.

Whenever these predictions of doom don’t pan out, the climate charlatans simply move the prediction back another few decades, long past the time when they’ll actually have to answer for them. It’s a shell game. The real global warming is always under a different cup.

A good illustration of this is the “tipping point” game that alarmists have been playing for more than two decades. If we don’t act in a certain amount of time, then the planet is doomed, they say. In 2009, Prince Charles told us we had a mere 96 months before it was too late to save the planet. That 96 months was up last year. The former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, told us in 2007, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” If the proper action was taken before 2012, Pachauri never told us about it. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown once ridiculously asserted that there were only “50 days to save the world from global warming."

People such as Prince Charles, Gore, Pachauri, Brown, and Hansen don’t deal in real science; they pedal fear masquerading as science to the gullible. When challenged, they pull out the “97 percent of scientists agree on global warming” malarkey, as if that ends all discussion on the subject. They compare skeptics of anthropogenic global warming to holocaust deniers, as if there were some moral equivalence between the two. They willingly prevaricate, obfuscate, and outright lie in order to frighten the masses.

But the masses have caught on. Polls show that climate change is consistently near the bottom of issues that people are concerned about.

As the climate-alarmist movement ever so slowly fades from our consciousness, the alarmists are becoming more desperate; their shrill cries and declarations of doom sounding even more unhinged than they were before.