In 1895, the New York Times (it wouldn't earn the monicker New Duranty Times until it inked a deal to cover up for "Uncle Joe" Stalin in the 1930s) reported on the imminent demise of humankind due to -- a new ice age. Then, as Jacoby puts it regarding imaginary climate catastrophes:
In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing "their final annihilation" due to rising temperatures. But by 1923, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada," the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.
So it was curtains for the Canadians? Uh, not quite. In 1953, The
New York Times announced that "nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat." Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren't off the hook after all: "The rapid advance of some glaciers," wrote Lowell Ponte in "The Cooling," his 1976 bestseller, "has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union." And now? "Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the Times reported in 2002.Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are.
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. Shifting climate gears from ice to heat, the Associated Press article began “That next ice age, if one is coming … is still a long way off.”The Media Research Center's article is long and thoroughly documented. It recounts the long histories of both the global warming and global cooling manias that have been used to sell newspapers for 100 years. Read it and you'll realize how (if not why) fears about the weather and the climate are one of the most persistent "extraordinary delusions of the crowd".
One year earlier, the paper reported that “the earth is steadily growing warmer” in its May 15 edition. The Washington Post felt the heat as well and titled an article simply “Hot weather” on August 2, 1930. That article, reminiscent of a stand-up comedy routine, told readers that the heat was so bad, people were going to be saying, “Ah, do you remember that torrid summer of 1930. It was so hot that ***.”
The Los Angeles Times beat both papers to the heat with the headline: “Is another ice age coming?” on March 11, 1929. Its answer to that question: “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.”
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. Out of 21 winters examined from 1912-33 in Washington, D.C., 18 were warmer than normal and all of the past 13 were mild.
New Haven, Conn., experienced warmer temperatures, with evidence from records that went “back to near the close of the Revolutionary War,” claimed the analysis. Using records from various other cities, Kincer showed that the world was warming.
British amateur meteorologist G. S. Callendar made a bold claim five years later that many would recognize now. He argued that man was responsible for heating up the planet with carbon dioxide emissions – in 1938.
This is truly silly and shallow stuff.
ReplyDeleteMight as well document all the times that hawkish people have raised the alarm that our nation is threatened by foreign forces. Would a list of those claims thereby debunk any fears of radical Islam?
Obviously people have been trying to track trends in climate for a long time, and making predicitions from short term trends has led to lots of disparate scenarios. But climate science has progressed immensly - an obvious fact that you seem to totally ignore. We now have an enormous number of data sources for current climate, and for inferences to past climate, and incredibly complex models of climate change - models that have been going through endless rounds of testing and refinement - and of course an absolutely astronomical increase in computing power to allow us to track the influence of all these factors.
To return to the national security analogy:
You are pointing to the claims made by people who had Paul Revere level technology and asserting that the failure of so many of those predictions has implications for how we should now judge the warnings coming from those with NSA level technology.
I dont think you are thinking through this very well.
tano - why google monckton at this site. and read the posts on his comments and them google the perhaps 20 other posts i have put up which all SCIENTIFICALLY debunk man-made global warming.
ReplyDeletejihadoterrorists have made over 7000 DEADLY attacks since 9/11 - over 2000 killed in Thailand where even Leftie eco-nutsie-types have a hard time blaming JOOOZE and GwBushitlerburtmcchimp.
man-made global warming is a bogeyman - a phony hysteria cooked up by the left in order to raise taxes and destroy free markets and shackle industrialism.
this has been the left's long-term goal and they are now using this tactic.
punditarian has three degrees from higher education - the finest universities in the USA, and i have two.
he - like me and many other neo-cons- was raised by card-carrying leftists. we know the left from the inside out.
i suggest you do a little reading outside your normal left-wing dominated MSM crap and open your eyes and see the light.
hayek and reagan and thatcher were right. marx and all other socialists were wrong.
ecological hysteria is a last ditch effort by the left to limit human liberty.
the bloggers at this blog will do whatever we can to make sure that never happens.
Tano,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, to document your assertion, you'd only have to compile a list of newspaper articles from different time periods, warning of foreign threats, and then you'd have to show me that those threats weren't real.
Or are you going to argue that the Soviets were not a threat to the West, as the anti-anti-communists did?
Secondly, what you are saying is basically that all the other times they were wrong, but this time, we have new machines, and this time we are right. I don't think the evidence supports that. In fact, I think the evidence suggests that the more we know, the less extraordinary the current apparent warming in the climate appears to be.
And there is nothing, in my opinion, to support the hysterical views of those who argue that even moderate climactic warming would lead to catastrophic horrors.