Ten years ago former Vice President Al Gore was promoting his film “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Sundance Film Festival when he was credited with predicting the earth would be in “a true planetary emergency” within ten years. On top of that, Larry David, a close partner and promoter for Gore, said, “Al is a funny guy. But he is also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.”

That was ten years ago. But instead of the planet being “a total frying pan” as predicted, Pennsylvania and other states have seen record snowfalls (some blaming it on the el nino), but there are no signs of Armageddon. Life continues as it has for millennia. The sun still rises and falls. People go about their business as usual.

Going back to 2006, the Washington Post reported on Al Gore arguing “that global warming may soon lead to catastrophic sea level rises, which could inundate cities such as New York (flooding the former site of the World Trade Center), producing scary nonlinear runaway spasms of extreme weather (bigger, badder hurricanes and typhoons), global pandemics and, depending on where you live, torrential rains or decade-long drought.”

Fortunately for humanity, Gore’s doomsday predictions haven’t materialized. Now that’s not to say we haven’t experienced any severe weather conditions; indeed we have, but we haven’t seen anything unnatural or uncommon, and nothing that can be blamed squarely on the existence of human beings. California, for example, is experiencing a four-year drought, but droughts have occurred long before mankind had any noticeable “carbon footprint,” and will continue to happen into the distant future, regardless of one’s beliefs on climate change.

The important lesson we can take away from this is that every time an alarmist makes catastrophic predictions about climate change, we can expect those to fail. But instead of gracefully acknowledging there’s nothing to be alarmed about, their doomsday warnings are pushed further into the future, as if time is a rescue agent.

Now this isn’t even the first time Gore has been wrong. Back in December of 2008 he predicted the entire North Polar ice cap would be gone in five years. And in 2007 he predicted that all the arctic ice would be gone by 2014. Some other notable failed predictions include Daniel Patrick Moynihan who warned Nixon in 1969 that sea levels would rise 10 feet and obliterate New York and Washington, D.C. Then there’s Harvard Biologist George Wald in 1970 who promised that civilization would end within 15 or 30 years.

Personally, I think those who believe in anthropomorphic climate change should be grateful they’re wrong and stop the alarmism. We should be able to address genuine pollution concerns, health risks and true environmental disasters without political schemes meant to demonize human activity and profit from it. When there are true natural disasters, we should be able to act without blaming mankind for actually using the resources God created for us to use (without waste or abuse). I think the hysteria is ridiculous and needs to stop, but this has become such a politically charged topic that no amount of evidence or failed predictions are enough to end it. Instead I fully expect the alarmists to push even harder. That’s what they do.

But for now I’m happy to report that another global warming prediction has bit the dust. The earth is not a total frying pan.