The history of climate deadline predictions is long and consistently wrong. Examining them is important because it reveals how political urgency has been substituted for scientific accuracy.

In 1989, a senior UN environmental official said entire nations would be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000. In 2006, Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' predicted that within 10 years, the world would reach a 'point of no return.' In 2009, then-Prince Charles said we had 96 months to save the world. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said 'The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.'

Every single one of these deadlines has passed without the predicted catastrophe. The Maldives, predicted to be underwater by 2018, are building new airports. Arctic summer ice, predicted to be gone by 2013 by some models, is still present. Global famine from climate change, predicted for the 1990s, never happened — agricultural output has increased.

The actual IPCC projections don't support these dramatic timelines. The IPCC describes gradual warming of 1.5-4.5 degrees Celsius over the coming century under various scenarios, with increasing but manageable impacts. These are serious projections worth planning for, but they're not extinction events.

The boy-who-cried-wolf effect is real. When every prediction is apocalyptic and none come true, public trust erodes. A 2023 Gallup poll found that only 35% of Americans worry 'a great deal' about climate change, partly because decades of doomsday predictions have desensitized people.

Good climate policy should be based on the best available science, not on political slogans designed to create panic. Invest in nuclear, natural gas, carbon capture, and adaptation. These are serious approaches to a serious problem — no arbitrary deadlines required.