Global Whining
August 15, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Jeff Jacoby has this fascinating opening in today’s Boston Globe:
Introducing Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on global warming “denial,” editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine’s past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that “those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.” But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham dismisses it.
You’ll want to click here to read the whole piece. It’s worth it.
Turns out, that April 1975 Newsweek is getting passed around more than a cheap metaphor at the end of a sentence. Newsbusters captured Dennis Miller parading it on Jay Leno last year:
“Now this whole article is about the cooling world and you can see over here where they’ve got a chart where the temperature of the planet is dropping off and down here at the bottom is my favorite part. I’ve starred it. It says the solution to the global cooling problem is to deliberately melt the polar ice caps. Now this is like 30 years ago, this what we believed. Now we’ve changed — and I’m not saying that maybe in the year 2036 it doesn’t go back in the other way — I just don’t think we control it like we think we do.”
Personally, I like Miller’s interpretation of the article better than Meacham’s.
Dogwood said,
August 15, 2007 @ 6:07 pm
We don’t control the temperature or climate, but a lot of folks want to use temperature and climate to control us.
Glenn said,
August 15, 2007 @ 6:14 pm
Have you seen the recent story out of NASA on global warming?
http://davidharsanyi.com/blog/2007/08/10/whoops/
William Graves said,
August 15, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
Read “Does a Global Temperature Exist?”, Andresen et. al., Jounal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, June 2006 (?). This debate is largely expressed in terms which are undefined, and cannot be adequately defined.
Diggs said,
August 15, 2007 @ 6:31 pm
You can tie yourself in knots trying to make sense of global warming if you never get around to realizing that this is Al Gore’s attempt at a presidential campaign via the eco-ignorance of liberals.
john jim said,
August 15, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
HOW MUCH MONEY HAS AL GORE MADE ON THIS GLOBAL WARMING FARCE?
cv said,
August 15, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Has the UN officially put out it’s results?
Howard Hirsch said,
August 15, 2007 @ 7:17 pm
Back in 1978 I taught a class in energy and environmental policy at Metro State University in St. Paul, MN. In my constant search for controversial reading material for the class I came across both “Hothouse Earth” by Howard A. Wilcox (1975) and “The Cooling” by Lowell Ponte (1976).
While I didn’t assign either, I did mention them to my class as items of interest. I figured between both of them we’d break even.
Junk Science Skeptic said,
August 15, 2007 @ 7:21 pm
“Average Global Temperature” is a concept that is about as mathematically relevant as the average phone number in the NYC White Pages phone book. It means absolutely nothing.
As anybody who has made it through fourth-grade science knows, climate is a highly local concept. It can be pouring rain at my house and bone dry three blocks away. The temperature at the airport (about 20 minutes away) is frequently 10-15 degrees F higher or lower than at my house.
The so-called “average global temperature” is derived from a scant few thousand metering stations spread quite irregularly about the globe. Most are installed in conditions that can’t provide anywhere near the level of accuracy claimed by all of the Gore-Bull Warming alarmists.
Much of the proxy data used to make claims regarding ancient temperature is worthless. The temperature “record” prior to the advent of satellite measurement in the late sixties is too inaccurate to make determinations of anything closer than + or - 5 degrees F. On top of that, the so-called calculations of these “averages” are so flawed and faked that they would make Enron’s bookkeepers blush.
Yes, it’s getting warmer, has been since the end of the last ice age, will continue to do so with or without us until such time as we head into the next ice age.
Daniel said,
August 15, 2007 @ 7:50 pm
Not all scientists are trustworthy in their work, data, analyses.
Remember the Cold Fusion story that hit the papers years back?
And the falsehood that was claimed?
Why should we give any stock against what’s being claimed now?
How can we trust them?
Are they more truthful now than 30 years ago? 150 years ago? Last week?
John said,
August 15, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
Have you seen Britain’s Channel 4 documentary (2007) called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”?
Here is the link on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
It’s 74 minutes long.
Very interesting and very controversial. I hear almost a third of Australians watched this when it aired there in March.
Robert said,
August 15, 2007 @ 8:11 pm
Well I subscribed to Newsweek, Time, and U.S. news and world report back in the 70’s, and to the best of my recollection it was not just one article but several over a period of the year or years where global cooling was the accepted probability, so to narrow it down to just one article seems a bit disengenuous on the part of the “warming” crowd.
Rich said,
August 15, 2007 @ 8:16 pm
“As anybody who has made it through fourth-grade science knows…”
Well there’s your problem right there…
Neal J. King said,
August 15, 2007 @ 8:51 pm
William Graves: Andresen’s paper is mathematical nonsense. He argues that: a) there is no one temperature that is the average of global temperature (nobody ever said there was); and b) there are lots of ways of defining averages. Neither of these change the fact that the arithmetic average of temperatures taken at lots of places around the globe tells us something.
John: The “Swindle” movie has been extensively analyzed here: http://inthegreen.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/deconstructing_.html
Other problems with it: All the graphs presented in it were proven to be deliberately falsified; and the biggest-name scientist in the film threatened to sue afterwards, for having his words twisted out of context to imply the opposite of what he meant.
Robert: William Connolley has been collecting articles and references on the topic of “global cooling”. His clear conclusion is that there was no consensus among climate scientists at that time on that topic, in contrast to the consensus today on man’s impact on global warming: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
Neal J. King said,
August 15, 2007 @ 9:17 pm
William Graves: Andresen’s paper is mathematical nonsense: a) He claims that there is no specific temperature which is the average global temperature (nobody claimed there was); and b) there are lots of ways of defining averages (so what else is new?). Neither point affects the fact that an average of temperatures from around the globe gives us some useful information - specifically when it’s showing a trend.
cv: The IPCC report can be found here at: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/
John: The “Swindle” movie has been extensively debunked at: http://inthegreen.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/deconstructing_.html
Two specifics: Every graph used in the film has been proven to have been deliberately falsified; Carl Wunsch, who was featured in the film, has threatened to sue because they twisted his words out of context to imply the opposite of what he meant.
Robert: William Connolley has been keeping track of articles on “global cooling”. He points out that there was never a consensus among climate scientists on this idea; in contrast to today’s consensus on man’s impact on global warming: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
Ron Hardin said,
August 15, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
News magazines print whatever sells news magazines. Scientists say whatever funds scientists. Politicians close that gap.
If you want to find actual science, look for curiosity. Curiosity is notably absent from the global warming debate.
dicentra said,
August 15, 2007 @ 11:27 pm
The main difference between Cold Fusion and Global Warming is that Pons and Fleischman released their data and methodology to the scientific community at large, and no one was able to repeat their alleged results. Cold Fusion was therefore debunked in a New York minute.
However, Hansen and Mann have refused to release their data and algorithms to the general community. McIntyre managed to find the Y2K problem in the GISS data only through reverse engineering.
You absolutely cannot say that something is a scientific fact if you keep all the facts to yourself, releasing only the conclusions. Why Hansen at NASA refuses to release his research is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.
The guy who just got screwed said,
August 16, 2007 @ 2:43 am
You need to do something about your “security” policy. I just tried to post a message, and your website told be that it had an “invalid security code”, and that I shoud press the “Back” button to try again, but when I got back, my message had been wiped out. I won’t bother to type it in again, in fact in all probability I’ll never visit your site again, but you might consider implementing something less thoughtless for your future correspondents.
Otis P. Driftwood said,
August 16, 2007 @ 8:22 am
Maybe all the stuff we did back in 1975 to fix the global cooling problem is responsible for all the global warming problems we’re having right now?
Anybody ever think of that?
Thingumbobesq said,
August 16, 2007 @ 11:35 am
Maybe, just maybe, the left wing anti industry crowd are proto fascists?
Harold Fishbein PhD said,
August 16, 2007 @ 11:53 am
Global Warming is good for getting grants for climatologists and anyone else who can tie their research into Global Warming. It’s a huge and wealthy movement that appears unstoppable–particularly if the US Government ever gets fully behind it.
Global Warming is also an excellent object lesson on the corruptibility of science by selective grant approvals, and by big attention from Big Media. Scientists are human like anyone else, and will often sell a great deal for money and attention.
The salient and unavoidable fact about Global Warming, is that the science behind it is incredibly unsettled. The superstars of climatology such as Hansen and Mann want to hold back data and algorithms from independent analysts, and the data archiving responsibility of science journals and government agencies is being criminally neglected. Science and Nature, particularly, have thrown editorial responsibility and objectivity out the window.
Global Warming is an excellent lesson on how science, science publications, and science journalism can be co-opted by powerful political and financial interests.
It bears watching closely.
Shannon Love said,
August 16, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
The lesson we should draw from the global cooling episode is that the very same group of people who now compare those who question the hypothesis of catastrophic anthrogenic global warming to those who deny the Holocaust ever happened are the same group of people who in 1976 claimed just a certainly that Global Cooling was happening.
I think it is important to note that the Global Cooling hysteria ended only when the very brief cooling trend of the 70’s ended. Had we been in a natural long term cooling trend like that of the little Ice Age does anyone doubt the concept of Catastrophic Anthrogenic Global Cooling would still be going strong?
Shannon Love said,
August 16, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
Extreme Mortman,
Would you happen to have a copy of the article in PDF?
Margaret said,
August 16, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
In the 80’s the academic circles were worried about “nuclear winter.”