Revisiting failed climate predictions offers a fresh perspective for parents, teachers and kids, who need to know that the doomsayers have been wrong time and again.
Numerous catastrophist climate predictions have already been proven wrong. But testing them has necessarily taken years. In the meantime, not only have these claims become widely accepted, they have become entrenched in our collective consciousness.
As the IPA has repeatedly demonstrated, Australian schoolchildren are regularly exposed to cataclysmic predictions in the classroom as if these were true and settled as fact. Students are not always told when alarmist claims have been proven wrong or are merely speculative. Instead, they are all too often presented with a one-sided narrative of environmental catastrophe and denied the opportunity to test this by way of genuine critical thinking.
Through the ‘Sustainability’ cross-curriculum priority, the National Curriculum introduces alarmist concepts and asks children as young as five to confront ideas they cannot properly contextualise. Educational Psychologist and IPA Adjunct Fellow Clare Rowe has observed:
The alarmist environmental messaging spread in schools is causing an epidemic of climate anxiety that is creating a generation of psychologically paralysed young Australians … [exhibiting] fear, hopelessness, and a sense of impending doom related to what they are taught at school about climate change.
Rather than focusing just on literacy, numeracy, and fact-based academic foundations, Australian children have been fed ideology disguised as science.
Here are just ten of the most outrageous debunked claims and dud predictions that shatter the credibility of climate fanaticism.
(1) The Arctic will lose its ice by 2018
The Argus Press, in 2008, stated that, according to climatologist Professor James Hansen: “in five to ten years [by 2018], the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer”.
Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum extent each September. The minimum extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2008 was 4.59 million km2.
Ten years later, in September 2018, it grew to 4.66 million km2.
It fell to 3.82 million km2 in 2020, rose to 4.70 million km2 in 2022, and remained roughly at the same level, at 4.60 million km2, in 2025.
At no point was the Arctic free of ice in the summer after 2008.
Excerpt from The Argus Press – NASA scientist: ‘We’re toast’
Source: The Argus Press
(2) Eastern Australia will be in a state of permanent drought
Australian environmentalist, Professor Tim Flannery, stated in 2005, that eastern Australia was set to be in a state of ‘permanent drought’. As quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald on 25 April:
Climate change is working against Sydney. “There’s only two years’ water supply in Warragamba Dam,” says Flannery, … “If the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia.”
Five years later, the same masthead documented that Brisbane’s wettest December in 150 years led to the devastating 2010-2011 flooding of Brisbane.
On 10 March 2025, it reported Brisbane experiencing the highest amount of rain in any one day on record.
And on 21 August 2025, it reported: “Sydney smashes rainfall record [with even] more forecast”.
Eastern Australia is not and has never been in a state of permanent drought. Moreover, there is no indication it will be in a state of permanent drought.
Excerpt from The Sydney Morning Herald – ‘Running out of water – and time’
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
(3) Snowfalls will disappear
On 20 March 2000, an article featured in The Independent declared: “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”.
The article quoted Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia, saying that within a few years, winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event … Children just aren’t going to know what snow is” in Britain.
Both the author of the article, journalist Charles Onians, and Dr Viner concluded that global warming was to blame.
But snow has not disappeared from Britain. On 20 November 2025, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported: “Hundreds of schools close as snow falls over the United Kingdom”. It went on:
The snow has also caused issues with transport, meaning people might find it harder to get around the UK today. In Pembrokeshire in Wales, people are being told not to travel unless they really have to. BBC Wales’ Aled Scourfield says: “This is certainly the heaviest snowfall I’ve seen in this part of Pembrokeshire since I moved here almost 20 years ago.”
Excerpt from The Independent – ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’
Source: The Independent, Scribd
Alarmist predictions, such as one declaring that snow will disappear, risk jeopardising national and community preparedness for actual extreme weather events such as heavy snowfalls and other natural phenomena which are part and parcel of daily life on earth.
(4) Washington D.C. will reach 32°C eighty-five days a year; sea levels will rise six feet
A 12 December 1988 article in the Lansing State Journal quoted climatologist Professor James Hansen projecting that Washington D.C. “would go from its current 35 days a year over 90 degrees [Fahrenheit, in 1988] to 85 days a year”.
This is the equivalent to 85 days per year of temperatures higher than 32°C in Washington D.C.
Excerpt from the Lansing State Journal – ‘Prepare for long, hot summers’
Source: The Lansing State Journal, Real Climate Science
As of the time of writing, in December 2025, there have been 36 days where high temperatures reached at least 90°F in Washington D.C.
The record number of days in Washington D.C., in a given year, where temperatures reached 90°F was set fifteen years prior, in 2010, with 67 days.
In the same article, Professor Hansen also claimed that sea levels will rise by “anywhere from one to six feet”. That is the equivalent to roughly between 30cm and 1.8m. According to a report produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, between December 1988 and December 2024, it is estimated that the average global sea level had risen by approximately 12cm.
(5) England will not exist in the year 2000
In 1969, Biologist Paul Ehrlich stated:
By the year 2000, the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … England will not exist in the year 2000.
Both the United Kingdom and England, as a constituent part, existed in the year 2000 and continue to exist today.
Great Britain remains one of the largest islands in the world—ranked 9th by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In the year 2000, the United Kingdom was the fourth largest economy in the world. Its population at the time was roughly 60 million.
The United Kingdom’s population is only now reaching 70 million, an increase which has not been due to sharp increases in climate and environmental refugees, but—especially in recent years—to policies which welcomed economic migrants from all across the globe.
Notably, many of the migrants came from places with some of the most fertile soil on earth, such as around the Bay of Bengal, the Indus River System, and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. They are not climate and environmental refugees.
Excerpt from Nature – ‘The biggest wager’
Source: Nature
(6) Polar bears are dying out
NBC News reported on 8 September 2007:
Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be killed off by 2050—and the entire population gone from Alaska—because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic …
In the article, it was estimated that the global polar bear population was 16,000.
As reported in the IPA’s publication Climate Change The Facts (2020), by 2015 the polar bear population had grown to 26,000.
Subsequent surveys brought the estimate up even further to 28,500. The 2023 State of the Polar Bear Report by evolutionary biologist Dr Susan Crockford updated that estimate, for 2023—to more than 32,000 bears. She observed:
There were no reports from the Arctic in 2023 indicating polar bears were being harmed due to a lack of suitable habitat, in part because Arctic sea ice in the summer has not declined since 2007.
Polar bears did not die out and are not at risk of dying out from anthropogenic climate change.
Excerpt from NBC News – ‘Most Polar bears could die out by 2050’
Source: NBC News
(7) It is too late to avoid mass starvation
The founder of Earth Day, Denis Hayes, said in 1970: “[I]t is already too late to prevent mass starvation” in light of “the death of our planet”. And on 29 April 2024 World Food Program USA claimed that climate change is causing world hunger.
Contrary to the aforementioned assertions, humanity is producing and consuming more food than ever before. Our World in Data, a collaborative partnership between Oxford University and Global Change Data Lab, collects and publishes data on world agricultural production since 1961. It reported:
The amount of food we grow has increased rapidly [in recent decades] as a result of two drivers: the amount of land we use for agriculture has expanded, but the largest driver has been a rapid rise in crop yields.
The real, inflation-adjusted value of world agricultural output since 1961 has grown by an average of 2.33 per cent per annum. This has translated to more food becoming available to more people than ever before.
The latest data as of the time of writing suggests that the amount of food available for consumption on earth averages out at about 3,000 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day. For context, an average man needs 2,500 kcal a day; an average woman needs 2,000 kcal per day.
Excerpt from Santa Maria Times, 22 April 1970
Source: Newspapers.com; Santa Maria Times
The increase in global food production has been partly attributable to a phenomenon called global greening, resulting from a process that scientists have termed: ‘carbon dioxide fertilisation’.
In essence, increased carbon dioxide emissions—from whatever source—have resulted in higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. This, in turn, has meant more food for plants, which has made them more productive.
The amount of food available for human consumption per capita, today, exceeds the required intake for the average adult. Rather than food shortages and droughts, increases in carbon dioxide concentration in the air have coincided with a global obesity epidemic—the very opposite of hunger and malnutrition.
(8) The Great Barrier Reef is dead
On 24 October 2016, the Independent reported on Outside magazine’s declaration that the Great Barrier Reef is dead. It noted:
[The Reef] has experienced severe bouts of coral bleaching in recent years because of the warming water temperature. And increasing amounts of carbon in the water—much of it absorbed from fossil fuel
emissions in the atmosphere—has made the sea more acidic, dissolving the coral.
This came two years after The Guardian wrote an obituary for the Reef (26/3/2014). It is noteworthy that when the obituaries were written, coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef was actually increasing.
As geophysicist and IPA Adjunct Fellow Dr Peter Ridd noted in August 2024:
On statistics from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the last three years has had more coral on the Great Barrier Reef in every one of those three years than in every one of the previous 35 years.
In April 2022 and October 2023, then IPA Senior Fellow Dr Jennifer Marohasy led expeditions to the John Brewer Reef, the epicentre of one of the supposed coral bleaching events widely covered in the media. The teams discovered thriving corals, rich in the beneficial algae zooxanthellae, which were meant to have disappeared as a result of rising temperatures.
The Great Barrier Reef is not dead. Its corals are remarkably resilient and have proven themselves capable of recovering from extreme natural events.
(9) The fate of the earth was decided on 25 September 2015
On 13 May 2014, at a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, then French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said: “We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos”, insinuating that climate chaos was to take place on 25 September 2015. At the very least, the fate of the earth was expected to have been sealed by that day.
Among the biggest news of the day on 25 September 2015 were the late Pope Francis’ first papal address to the US Congress, and speculation about the Federal Reserve’s decision on increasing interest rates.
There was no climate chaos or any sign that the fate of the earth was sealed on that day—or if, indeed, the so-called ‘climate chaos’ had somehow been narrowly averted.
Transcript of US Secretary of State’s and French Foreign Minister’s remarks in 2014
Source: US State Department
(10) The earth is boiling
On 27 July 2023, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres (and former President of the Socialist International) declared the arrival of a new era in human history, the era of “global boiling”.
The air is unbreathable. The heat is unbearable … Extreme weather is becoming the new normal … The evidence is everywhere: humanity has unleashed destruction.
His speech called for immediate climate action—specifically, the drastic reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
The United Nations’ claim that the era of ‘global boiling’ has arrived
Source: United Nations
The boiling point of water at sea level is 100° Celsius. The highest recorded temperature on earth was roughly 57°C, at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, in California, which was measured on 10 July 1913. The temperature was nowhere close to the boiling point of water and no higher temperature on earth has been verified in 112 years. The average surface temperature of the earth is roughly 15°C. Notably, there are large parts of the earth which are literally frozen solid.
The earth is not boiling—not even close.
STOP THE SCARE; FOCUS ON THE SCIENCE
Climate education should not be a vehicle for instilling fear or guilt in children. It should be an opportunity, at the appropriate age, to explore evidence, examine competing theories, and learn the scientific method.
Schools need to make an effort to protect children from ideology masquerading as science. They should also ensure that children are not exposed to falsehoods and climate pseudoscience in the classroom. To do otherwise is to compromise both their education and their mental health.
To learn more about this project, visit www.childhoodclimateanxiety.org.au.
This article from the Winter 2026 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Senior Fellow Kevin You.
