Birthday blunders: Four times 80-year-old John Kerry’s climate warnings have fallen flat

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry turns 80 on Monday, and throughout his decades in politics, he has made many predictions about climate change that have not panned out.

The former secretary of state and senator has made several predictions and claims about the climate that have been criticized as outlandish and have never come to fruition. Here is a look at some of those claims.

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“The Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013” (2009)

Kerry claimed scientists were projecting there would be no ice in the Arctic by the summer of 2013 in an op-ed for HuffPost in 2009.

“The truth is that the threat we face is not an abstract concern for the future. It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now,” he wrote. “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.”

There is still ice in the Arctic in December 2023, and there was ice in the Arctic this past summer.

Nine years to avert “worst consequences” of climate change (2021)

In an interview with CBS News’s CBS This Morning in February 2021, Kerry said the world only has until 2030 to avert the worst consequences of rising global temperatures due to climate change, citing an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2018.

“The scientists told us three years ago that we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” he said.

The claim is a misreading of the United Nations report, which claimed that Earth would warm 1.5 degrees Celsius from 2030 to 2052, but the report actually marks 2050 as the pivotal year for countries to prevent the “worst consequences.”

15 million people will die annually due to greenhouse gas emissions (2023)

Kerry said millions would die due to greenhouse gas emissions, a claim that “disregarded” scientific evidence, according to an ethics complaint filed by a government watchdog.

“[Fifteen] million people are dying every single year around this planet as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, in the air which travels around and drops in the form of pollution and is warming the ocean at record rates, changing the chemistry of the ocean itself,” Kerry said. “Without action, millions of lives and the livelihood of the planet is at risk.”

U.S. will not have coal by 2030 (2021)

Kerry predicted in an interview with Bloomberg at the COP26 climate conference in 2021 that the United States will not have coal by 2030 as part of the transition to green energy sources.

“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said. “We will not have coal plants.”

Considering pushes from politicians on both sides of the aisle from coal-rich states, such as West Virginia, coal being eliminated by the end of the decade appears extremely unlikely.

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Another prediction about climate change made alongside Kerry but not by the then-secretary of state was that there would be only 500 days “to avoid the climate chaos” in 2014. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius made the claim before a meeting in Washington, D.C., nine years ago.

“As I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos. And I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success on this very important matter,” Fabius said.