SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: 50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh.

If it all sounds slightly familiar, consider this news story from 1972:

“We have ten years to stop the catastrophe,” said the UN’s environmental protection boss. That’s one of the headlines collected by Bjorn Lomberg, author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Lomberg notes that, for more than 50 years, the United Nations and the media have regularly predicted we’re on the verge of calamity. And they always seem to forget about the last warning.

In 1982, after the catastrophe failed to materialize, the New York Times covered the second UN conference on the environment, which opened “amid gloom”:

The piece quotes Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, as saying that if things aren’t fixed by the turn of the century — the year 2000 — the world would face “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.’’

In 1989, a senior UN environmental official shaved a year off that dire prediction, saying that if we didn’t fix climate change by 1999, we would have “Global disaster, nations wiped off the face of the earth, crop failures”:

Related: Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2022].

51 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:

(Classical reference in headline.)