The problem with making predictions about the future is that sooner or later, the future becomes the present, and that can be awkward.

I’m not going to say much in this video. This is yet another video where I have to be careful not to upset our digital algorithmic overlords with some inconvenient truths. But actually, I really don’t need to say very much at all because, well, if a picture says a thousand words, I’ve got over a dozen pictures for you that I’ve collected over just the last 2 months since winter began. Plus, I have a few minutes of video, some from just in the last few days and some from 16 years ago. Videos including some predictions from Al Gore, Mr. Winter himself. And well, it all kind of speaks for itself.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project. And well, this is what I do. I find ways to say things that need to be said in a world that is hostile to the inconvenient truth. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you see value in what I do here, then I really appreciate you buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you’ll love my books, DVDs, and merch. All available from goodpeoplebreaklaws.com. All right, let’s start back in 2009 with Al Gore giving us some predictions at the COP 15 conference.

[From video]

There is a 75% chance that the entire North Pole ice cap during summer during some of the summer months could be completely ice free within the next 5 to seven years. You have sea ice which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed. In 5 years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic. [End video]

Yeah. Okay. You get the idea. That was former Vice President Al Gore, followed by Senator John Kerry. Now, they were saying a 75% chance of an ice free period of time at the height of summer by 2016. And okay, 75% isn’t 100%. But still, you’d expect it to have gotten close by now, but even now, nearly 10 years after the deadline for their prediction, it still hasn’t happened. And it’s not even close. And that’s not according to me. That’s according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center from the University of Colorado Boulder, who provide a wonderful interactive graph. Let’s take a bit of a look.

The darkest gray line that you see here is the median from 1981 to 2010.

And all the colored lines are the specific years from 2009 where those videos were recorded until today. Now, firstly, let’s acknowledge that the sea ice extent for the Arctic over the last decade has been well below the average of the decades before. The planet is warming and Arctic sea ice extent is reducing. But they said ice free by about 2016.

Well, it turns out that 2017 rather was so far the record low, but it bottomed out at about 3.4 million square km of sea ice remaining. Now ice free is a bit of a misnomer. It’s generally agreed that ice free for the Arctic is anything under 1 million square km of sea ice. But then again, Al Gore did say completely ice free in his prediction with emphasis on the word completely. So I’m being a little bit charitable here and saying that what he meant wasn’t completely ice free, but it was the more common definition of 1 million km of ice.

But even if I allow that concession, 3.4 million km of ice isn’t even close to ice free. Now, that low in 2017, visible in the red dotted line, hasn’t been repeated in the eight years since and remains an outlier by a considerable margin as well. But that hasn’t stopped the predictions of doom from continuing. Far from it. The latest prediction that I’ve personally seen is for the first ice-free day to happen in 2027, which is only 2 years away. And again, even if we allow ice free to mean 1 million square km of sea ice, we’ve got a long way to go to get down to that level.

And let’s not forget that as we speak, Antarctic ice mass is rebounding. And they don’t know why. And this is by no means an isolated problem or unique to Al Gore and John Kerry. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again because I enjoy saying it that our own homegrown guru Tim Flannery famously predicted in 2007 that even the rain that falls won’t be enough to fill our dams anymore. And incredibly, he is still considered an expert to this day despite the fact that dams around Australia have filled many times over since 2007. And as I write this, the dams that Flannery specifically was referring to, that’s the ones that supply Sydney with its drinking water, they’re 99% full.

And I don’t need to remind you that particularly on the Queensland and Northern New South Wales coasts, but also in large areas inland, major floods have been frequent and devastating this year. The problem is that we spend billions of dollars on the say so of people like Professor Flannery and Al Gore. And likewise, many businesses and especially farmers are relying on the likes of the Bureau of Meteorology to keep them informed as they are faced with make or break decisions about which crops to plant, what stock level to maintain, whether to buy fertilizer or to buy feed, and a host of other critical decisions that directly affect our food security.

Which brings us right up to the present, 2025, and the now infamous advice from the Bureau of Meteorology predicting that we were in for one of the warmest winters on record. Well, once winter had actually started, I kept an eye out. And well, I didn’t have to wait long. I’ve been saving screenshots as they’ve crossed my news feed. And just 4 days into winter, the headlines began to roll in. These screenshots are in no particular order, but they are all from this winter. And they are from a host of different weather events.

The records that we’ve set this winter weren’t for heat, they were for cold, including some places having their coldest night in 40 years.

Remember the predictions that snow would be a thing of the past? Well, it seems nobody told our weather because it’s been a great year for the snow bunnies and that snow has reached far and wide, including Queensland. Now, that’s not unprecedented, but it is rare, and it doesn’t suggest that we’re having a record warm winter.

We’ve had winter storms on top of winter storms, with one storm not even waiting for the first one to pass before barging on in with even more rain and cold. Kind of rude, if you ask me. And the list just goes on. A few of these headlines are from the same weather events, but they’re from different states, illustrating just how widespread the cold has been this winter. Here’s another one. Because why not? I’ve run out of things to say. Here, have another one. Do I really need to say anything?

How about a perceived temperature of -7.1° in Queensland? Anyone? Tell you what, if I was a Victorian and I’d moved to Queensland for the warmer weather, I’d be asking for a refund. Now, this one here is my personal favorite from this winter. Somehow they’ve managed to make cold red. The trick here is that the graph in this image is actually a wind speed graph with red meaning powerful and dangerous winds, which is fair enough. But the headline says brutal cold front. So now they don’t just use apocalyptic red for a heat wave, they’re now using it for a cold front, too.

And it’s still happening. It’s still cold. We are most of the way through winter and there is no sign of the cold letting up. Here’s a Channel 7 report from this weekend where there was snow in almost every state in Australia. Now, I already know what the true believers are going to say. They’re going to say that weather isn’t climate. But actually, that’s a lie. The climate is the weather over a longer period of time. And if our Bureau of Meteorology cannot predict the weather with something as basic as a warmer than average winter turning out to be a skier’s paradise, then I don’t think we should trust them to predict the climate either.

Now, for the sake of clarity, let me make a few unequivocal statements. It seems clear that over the past 50 years since particularly 1970 the world has gotten warmer just as in the 30 years before that from 1940 to 1970 the world got markedly cooler. And for the sake of the sensors let me point out that this video isn’t actually talking about the role of CO2 on the climate at all. It’s about the undeniable fact that we are not very good at predicting what the sea ice extent will be in a few years time nor what the weather will be in a few months time.

So, it’s not unreasonable to question how good our predictions are about what the climate will be in 50 years. The most reliable way to validate a hypothesis is to use that hypothesis to make predictions and then see if the predictions come true. And yes, sometimes the predictions won’t come true because the hypothesis just needs a little bit of a tweak, some refining. You know, it was close, but it wasn’t spot on. But sometimes those predictions don’t come true because the hypothesis is fundamentally flawed and needs to be rejected.

My question for the true believers out there is what would have to happen in order for you to consider the latter possibility?

Because if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, if it cannot be proved wrong in your mind, no matter how much evidence may stack up against it, no matter how often its predictions may fail to come true, then it’s no longer a hypothesis. It’s an article of faith. It’s a belief system and not science at all.

Now, you may wish to debate whether we’ve reached the point where the hypothesis is falsified or not. But you can’t argue that such a point has to exist. Of course, it has to exist. And you’d have to concede that maybe, just maybe, those of us who think maybe we’ve already passed that point, well, it might not be us who were the deniers after all.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported and I make a lot of risky videos like this one. So, I really appreciate everyone who buys me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos and you think I’m pretty blunt and upfront here, then you will love my books about civil disobedience, as well as my DVD documentary titled Battleground Melbourne and my merch with funny and thought-provoking designs and slogans as well. You’ll find all of that at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching to the end and thank you for your support in liking, commenting, sharing, and especially for following my YouTube channel to help me reach 100,000 subscribers.

Why not check out this video of mine that YouTube thinks that you will like while you’re here?

And as always, think free.