In 2004, the Observer, then owned by the Guardian, reported that a “secret report” on climate change had been produced by the Pentagon. The Observer journalists claimed that the report had been “suppressed by US defence chiefs”, because if its findings were released they would be “humiliating to the Bush administration”, which seemed to be resistant to global climate policy agendas. The report claimed “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020”, and that “Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world”.
The facts need to be restated here, to point out that, if a prediction is made which fails to materialise, then there’s something wrong with the hypothesis that produced the prediction.
At the time of writing, 22 and half years on, in late September 2026, I can report that, six years later than the Pentagon’s predictions, European cities remain above the waves, Britain has enjoyed two fine summers in a row and its winters do not even slightly resemble Siberia’s deep freezes. And we have not seen any nukes deployed yet, though there is talk about the escalation of the wars in Ukraine and Iran – but neither of these has anything to do with climate change. The warm summer of 2026 was quite dry for some of Britain and Europe. But overall, nothing resembled a “megadrought”, and the world’s bigger agricultural problem is high energy prices caused by conflicts and green policy, not water scarcity.
However, the failure of prognostications does not seem to trouble greens. Recently, I reported on the re-emergence of Extinction Rebellion. The group had crawled out of its burrows to demand that another ‘secret report’, which had seemingly again been supressed by the UK government, be published.
