Posted on 10/23/2006 10:18:03 PM PDT by TheEaglehasLanded
By Jerry Adler Updated: 4:41 p.m. CT Oct 23, 2006
Oct. 23, 2006 - In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.
More than 30 years later, that little story is still being quoted regularly—as recently as last month on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the self-proclaimed scourge of climate alarmists. The article's appeal to Inhofe, of course, is not its prescience, but the fact that it was so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future. Even by the time it appeared, a decades-long trend toward slightly cooler temperatures in the Northern hemisphere had already begun to reverse itself—although that wouldn't be apparent in the data for a few years yet—leading to today's widespread consensus among scientists that the real threat is actually human-caused global warming. In fact, as Inhofe pointed out, for more than 100 years journalists have quoted scientists predicting the destruction of civilization by, in alternation, either runaway heat or a new Ice Age.
Story continues below
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Warming, cooling. All the same thing to liberals.
What did Bush know in 75?
What Rove told him.
Warming, cooling? How am I supposed to know how to dress?
We did such a good job preventing global cooling that we overshot and caused global warming!
When I was in 5th or 6th grade we had to write an essay on global cooling and my prediction was that a glacier would level Chicago and that they would carve Walter Cronkite's head in the face of the glacier.
Were just oh so much smarter then we were then, and now we have Algore to show us the way.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
- Robert Frost -
Well Inhofe should know about these things when we are paying $1.97 for gas in his state.
Figures can be manipulated to show whatever you want them to show and fools will believe anything they are inclined to believe.
It is cold as a mo fo in Tulsa and we are still paying $1.97 for a gallon of gas.
Did I mention that we have the lowest price gas in the nation and it is only $1.97?
Yep.
But they do point out that the Clean Air actions that were taken have had the effect of impeding cooling.
"The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism."
And yet, they still seem incapable of recognizing how infinitely more complicated the world's climate is than even today's computers are able to model.
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Wow, beautiful!
Looks like Gore has made it to the 'nether regions'!
Thanks!
Good for a "Light My Fire" webpage?
I would think so, it's a great combo graphic.
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