Weekly Standard:
The Prince of Wales did not mince words in warning about the ravages of global warming. No piddling nonsense about a few inches of sea-rise; nothing so trivial as coastal erosion; no focus on the plight of the polar bear. No, the prince had a louder alarm he was sounding, one about the Future of Mankind: The “threat of catastrophic climate change,” he said, “calls into question humanity’s continued survival on the planet.”
These strong words, The Scrapbook hastens to point out, come from March 2009, when Prince Charles was visiting Brazil. That date is significant because the prince was convinced that time was, even then, running out. And not in some vague, way-off-in-the-distant-future kind of running out: The reckoning was to be upon us on a very specific timeline. “The best projections tell us that we have less than one hundred months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change, and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.”
This was not an offhand bit of scaremongering. The ticking doomsday clock was so central to HRH’s remarks that the speech was titled “Less Than 100 Months to Act.”
Of course, 100 months from March 2009 just happens to be right about now. So where is the irrevocable catastrophe? Where are the unimaginable horrors?
There are reasons to think that the prince’s predictive powers are not infallible. For example, he also declared in Brazil that we “will soon see prices for oil rocket again.” Well, he wasn’t alone in missing the shale oil revolution. But how could he have been expected to divine the technological future? One might ask, in the same spirit, how Charles could claim to have a crystal ball on the climate.