Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

Absolutely this, the fight for climate change was lost 20 years ago when Al Gore made it one of his campaign goals. Things like CO2 climate change or net neutrality that 90% of the population had absolutely no opinion previously on are best resolved in the background because as soon as a politician tells people what opinion they should have, 50% of them are going to take the opposite side simply because of the letter next to their name. Politicizing anything is a guaranteed way to ensure it will be in a substandard limbo forever.

I agree. My issue is the climate predictions that we do have over the last 50 years have been grossly inaccurate. We don't have any mathematical proofs for climate at this point like ideal gas law. But yet that is not how it is presented to the public.

> predictions of climate change have been 100% false

That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?

> For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily

What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years.

> All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen

How? By whom?

> we are more or less exactly flat

This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".

> look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature

You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?

> it was fantastic for life

Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...

> The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived

... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.

I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.

> folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead from overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000

Some of the actual predictions from the CoR's "Limits to Growth", according to the Wikipedia page about that document:

> Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".

(2072 is quite a long time after 2000. I wonder whether it's a typo for 2027, given what follows, but that too is a long time after 2000.)

> Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline

Those are all well after 2020. (The first of them doesn't seem like it's correct, thankfully. I suspect the others are some way off, too. But I'm not arguing that the CoR were right, only that they didn't say what you say they said.)

Part of the problem is that there isn't a centralized Science Propaganda Council issuing these warnings, which could be told to do better. Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).