Remembering that the “science is settled,” this is the year that ABC predicted that New York City would be under several feet of water due to rising seas caused by global warming.
That wasn’t all ABC News thought would be going on by 2015 as predicted in its 2008 news special entitled Earth 2100. As Newsbusters’ Scott Witlock reports, the news department also claimed that by 2015 we’d be paying $9 per gallon for gasoline, that milk would cost $13 a gallon, and that many other parts of the US would be under water thanks to that “settled science.”
ABC wasn’t done with the doomsaying, either. Here in the real 2015 researchers estimate that there are about 7.125 billion people on the planet. But in 2008 ABC was sure that by its assumed 2015 the earth’s population would have dwindled to a mere 2.7 billion due to food shortages, clean water shortages, wars, and increased temperatures.
The program, which was produced in 2008 but aired in 2009, was advertised with the fear-inducing claim that we may be “living in the last century of our civilization.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com