50 Years of Climate Apocalypse Bingo: Every Square a Miss
The Greatest Misses in Doomsday Forecasting History
Friends, skeptics, and fellow survivors of yet another unfulfilled end-of-the-world prophecy—gather ’round. It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: Climate Apocalypse Bingo. The rules are simple. For half a century, experts, headlines, and assorted prophets of doom have been filling out cards with predictions of famine, flood, freeze, fry, and total societal collapse. Every single square has been called… and every single one has been a bust. We’re still here, the planet is still spinning, and somehow we haven’t all disappeared in a cloud of blue steam.
I know you have been playing along at home. Let’s validate your astute observations BY playing the game.
Round 1: The Ice Age Cometh (1970s Edition)
1970: Ice Age by 2000
1971: New Ice Age by 2020 or 2030
1972: New Ice Age by 2070
1974: Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast
1974: Another Ice Age?
1976: Scientific consensus: Planet cooling, famines imminent
Welp, known of that came to be. Taxes did and a whole lotta guilt, but we survived! What did we get for surviving? A whole new bunch of propaganda that lead to the golden era of climate panic—when the terror made it clear we were all going to freeze to death.
Scientists were “certain,” headlines screamed, and Newsweek ran its famous “The Cooling World” cover. Spoiler: It got warmer instead. Funny how that happens when your “consensus” is based on a handful of papers and a lot of media hype.
Round 2: The Switcheroo (1980s–2000s)
Suddenly, cooling was out, warming was in. The same voices that warned of glaciers crushing Manhattan now warned of Manhattan drowning. Seamless pivot!
1988: Maldives will be underwater by 2018 (they’re not; in fact, they’re building new airports)
1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations by 2000 if nothing done
2000: Children won’t know what snow is
2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018
2009: Prince Charles gives us 96 months to save the planet (spoiler: time ran out in 2017)
2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015
2014: Only 500 days before “climate chaos”
Al Gore, the patron saint of inconvenient PowerPoint slides and creator of the internet, personally guaranteed an ice-free Arctic multiple times. The Arctic, rude as ever, still has ice. Maybe it didn’t get the memo.
Round 3: Resource Panic (Any Year, Really)
1970: World will use up all its natural resources by 2000
1972: Oil gone in 10 years
1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in 1990s
1980: Peak oil in 2000
1996: Peak oil in 2020
2002: Peak oil in 2010
Every decade we’re told we’re about to run out of something—oil, tin, copper, gold, you name it. Every decade we find more, extract it more efficiently, or invent substitutes. But the panic never runs out. Panic = Money is the most consistent most perverted equation there has been.
Round 4: Bonus Squares (The Classics)
1967: Dire famine by 1975 (Paul Ehrlich’s greatest hit)
1970: America subject to water rationing by 1974, food rationing by 1980
1988: Acid rain kills life in lakes
2004: Britain will be Siberia by 2024
2005: Fifty million climate refugees by 2010 (UN quietly deleted that map when 2010 arrived and… nothing)
2006: Super hurricanes!
We were promised killer bees, nitrogen buildup making all land unusable, oceans dead in a decade, and worldwide plague. Instead we got better crop yields, cleaner air in the West, and more polar bears than when the warnings started.And yet—and yet—every time one of these deadlines whooshes by without incident, the response is never “Huh, maybe we got that wrong.” It’s always “The science was sound; we just need more urgency, more money, more control—quick, before the next arbitrary deadline!”If a stock picker was this consistently, catastrophically wrong for 50 years, he’d be selling pencils on a street corner. If a weather forecaster missed this badly, he’d be fired before the first commercial break. But climate doomsayers? They get Nobel prizes, private jets to conferences, and billion-dollar budgets.So here we are in 2026, still waiting for the apocalypse that’s been “just around the corner” since 1967. The goalposts have been moved so many times they’ve got frequent-flyer miles.When is enough enough? When we stop treating every failed prediction as a reason to double down, and start treating them as evidence that maybe—just maybe—the models aren’t as infallible as advertised.Until then, keep your bingo cards handy. The next “irreversible tipping point” is always only 10–12 years away. Funny how that works.
The best part of this is that how ever much we are skeptics, we will always get a tax levied to “fix” climate. If we were paying a little more. Were a little more urgent. Tried a little bit harder we’d be better people and more effective.
In the end though, mother nature doesn’t give a damn and she’s going to do what she does. You’re naive and virtu signaling if you think anything different.