The Dog Ate my Data

Over the last century scientists, researchers and journalists have been alarming the public with predictions of disaster caused by climate change. The well known Newsweek article as recently as 1975 predicted global cooling and a coming ice age. It seems the soothsayers all agree that climate does indeed change but it is shown that historically they cannot make up their minds whether it is warming or cooling. Of particular concern is the call from some scientists quoted inthe Newsweek article that the Arctic be melted by us (geoengineering) in order to halt the disasterous global cooling! Fortunately such insane ideas were not followed through with possibly in part due to man's inability to actually carry them out at least at the time. To put the current crop of climate alarmist's fears into perspective lets a take a quick look at some of the predictions made in the last 100 years. This is necessary as it is very easy from a human perspective to think that this current panic is new and urgent.

New York Times article (1975): “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable.”

Of course the question now isn’t whether the global climate changes, it obviously does, but whether the data shows warming trends and whether those trends are attributable to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere caused mostly by the activities of man. Despite the so called IPCC consensus this has not been established.


A link to a PDF of the original article is located here.
Newsweek 1975 - A Cooling World

Here are some claims made over the last century. I have added “cold” and “warm” to highlight the way the opinions swing throughout history:

- The Times (24 Feb 1895) COLD "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again"

- Time (10 Sep 1923) COLD “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age”

- New York Times (NYT) (18 Sep 1934) COLD “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age”

- NYT (27 Mar 1933) WARM “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise”

- Time (2 Jan 1939) WARM “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”

- Time (24 Jun 1974) COLD “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”

- NYT (21 May 1975) COLD “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”

- Time (9 Apr 2001) WARM “[S]cientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.”

- NYT (27 Dec 2005) WARM “Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming”

It can be seen that that the print news media have warned of four seperate climate changes in just over 100 years - cooling, warming, cooling and warming once more. A PDF is available on line of the article, Fire and Ice here which discusses this topic in more detail. I found their analysis of predictions made by modern day climate alarmists on page 12 of their article particularly interesting and dare I say it, amusing.