“Gored” By the Nobel Prize

Many writers have noted that this present global warming scare is not new. In fact, in the spring of 1975 Newsweek published an article on climate change. The following words were written by sensationalistic journalists:

“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.”

According to many news reports, the Earth was moving into another ice age. Just 30 years later, not only did the ice age not appear, but now we are told the world is on the verge of unprecedented global warming.

In my discussions with scientists, I have once again discovered a difference between the words of the scientific community and the alarmist rhetoric of writers and activists. In fact, scientific journals of the 1970s were saying that there would likely be warming because of greenhouse effects, sooner than the return of an ice age. Unfortunately, the complexity of the real scientific story was not easily reduced to a thirty second sound bite or a catchy headline.

Telling the full story with all of its scientific nuances, would have not produced headlines. For this reason the science was compromised, conclusions were framed in a sensationalistic manner, and the public was entertained – not informed. It would have been better to say that there are big cooling cycles coming, interspersed with smaller warming cycles.

Why the flip-flop in the media? I am not sure. Could they be misleading us again? I certainly hope not. In an interesting study of the media’s coverage of “climate change,” R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor examined how major media outlets covered the issue of climate change over the last 100 plus years . What they discovered was that there have been four climate change scares; a concern over global cooling beginning in 1895, followed by fears of global warming in 1929, only to be replaced by alarm over global cooling; now we are back to global warming. With each succeeding crisis, the call for a government solution has grown louder and louder.