1) Journalists have warned of climate change for over 100 years, but can’t decide weather we face an ice age or warming It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland! And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age.
2) The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.” Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature.
3) Following the ice age threats from the late 1800s, fears of an imminent and icy catastrophe were compounded in the 1920s by Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan and an obsession with the news of his polar expedition. As the Times put it on Feb. 24, 1895, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.” Those concerns lasted well into the late 1920s. But when the earth’s surface warmed less than half a degree, newspapers and magazines responded with stories about the new threat. Once again the Times was out in front, cautioning “the earth is steadily growing warmer.”
4) After a while, that second phase of climate cautions began to fade. By 1954, Fortune magazine was warming to another cooling trend and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.” The New York Times ran warming stories into the late 1950s, but it too came around to the new fears. Just three decades ago, in 1975, the paper reported: “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable.” That trend, too, cooled off and was replaced by the current era of reporting on the dangers of global warming. Just six years later, on Aug. 22, 1981, the Times quoted seven government atmospheric scientists who predicted global warming of an “almost unprecedented magnitude.” In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming.
5) Some current warming stories combine the concepts and claim the next ice age will be triggered by rising temperatures – the theme of the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” Recent global warming reports have continued that trend, morphing into a hybrid of both theories. News media that once touted the threat of “global warming” have moved on to the more flexible term “climate change.” As the Times described it, climate change can mean any major shift, making the earth cooler or warmer.
6) The idea of “climate change” means that any major climate event can be blamed on global warming, supposedly driven by mankind. Spring 2006 has been swamped with climate change hype in every type of media – books, newspapers, magazines, online, TV and even movies. Al Gore, THE patron saint of the environmental movement,“An Inconvenient Truth”.
7) Despite all the historical shifting from one position to another, most in the media no longer welcome opposing views on the climate. CBS reporter Scott Pelley went so far as to compare climate change skeptics with Holocaust deniers. He said in an interview on March 23 with CBS News’s PublicEye blog. He added that the whole idea of impartial journalism just didn’t work for climate stories. “There becomes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible,” he said.
8) From 1954-1976 all we heard was "The ice age is coming", The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s. Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend. Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974. ”
9) The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming. “The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.” If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.” There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. . “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said. If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age. Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
10) Today’s global warming advocates probably don’t even realize their claims aren’t original! Before the cooling worries of the ’70s, America went through global warming fever for several decades around World War II. The nation entered the “longest warm spell since 1776,” according to a March 27, 1933, New York Times headline. The Washington Post felt the heat as well and titled an article simply “Hot weather” on August 2, 1930. Meteorologist J. B. Kincer of the federal weather bureau published a scholarly article on the warming world in the September 1933 “Monthly Weather Review.” The article began discussing the “wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather” and asked “Is our climate changing?” Kincer proceeded to document the warming trend.
11) So what can one conclude from all these conflicting stories? That the main stream press will parrot whatever the prevailing ideology is of the day, and more importantly that today's alarmists dooms day folks have NO credibility. The climate is always changing and to make conclusions based on a short snap shot of time(less than 100 yrs) is totally inane, as are the 'remedies' that are being proposed to stop this 'catastrophe'
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