By Jack Hellner, AMERICAN THINKER
In light of the new, much-hyped “official” report on global warming that is being pushed by almost all the media and the record cold that is occurring now in many parts of the U.S., it would be helpful if some enterprising journalist actually reported how often the people have been scared by previous warnings of global warming or cooling.
An article in Wattsupwiththat.com from 2014 encapsulates the multiple intentional scares from 1895 on. Throughout the entire 120 year period fossil fuel use was growing exponentially, population growth was exploding, and CO2 concentration was increasing. The fact that temperatures both rose and fell during this period shows that there is no correlation between temperature, fossil fuels, CO2 and the human population. Storm activity, floods, droughts, and sea levels have also fluctuated throughout billions of years.
There are a huge number of bullet points in this article. I have left in some to highlight the difference in scare tactics at various points in time by the media who seem to just repeat whatever they are told and don’t care how far off previous predictions have been:
A brief history of climate panic and crisis… both warming and cooling
For at least 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.
(A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)
- 1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
- 1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
- 1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
- 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
- 1923 – “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” – Washington Post
- 1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
- 1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
- 1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
- 1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise– New York Times, March 27th, 1933
- 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
- 1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
- 1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
- 1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
- 1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
- 1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
- 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000? — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
- 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
- 1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
- 1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
- 1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
- 1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times
- 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
- 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
- 1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
- 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
- 1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
- 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
- 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
- 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
- 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA, see above for Hansen quotes
- 2011 – Where Did Global Warming Go? “In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development. – New York Times, Oct 15, 2011.
- 2013 – Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating. The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way. New York Post, Dec 5, 2013
Indoctrination is truly a dangerous thing to society and our freedom. The fact is, fossil fuels have greatly improved the length and quality of life for everyone the last 150 years. When scientists, bureaucrats and politicians predict the number of deaths from fossil fuels years out, why don’t they point out the number of lives saved each year because we have fossil fuels?
I think that people are absolutely nuts if they believe politicians and bureaucrats can control temperatures, sea levels and storm activity forever if we just hand over our freedom and trillions of dollars. I have seen nothing in government that indicates they can control much, yet alone the climate.
Facts should be important but they haven’t been for a long time to most journalists who mostly just push the Democrat agenda with few questions asked.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Jefferson’s actual records early in the 19th century showed that no climate changes were taking place. And not for 100 years hence.
Only in the first half of the 20th century, did we see a 0.45 C° increase, followed by a moderate cooling off at the turn into the 21st century.
Due to the starting conquest of the forests and the taming of the West, Jefferson in 1810 thought the climate was changing. If anything, it shows when grand transformations take place, people have a propensity to invoke natural or supernatural forces must be at work.
But unlike present day alarm makers, Jefferson was a thoughtful man and suggested the climate ought to be studied first. He did not reach the popular conclusions of modern climate fraudsters. Jefferson’s approach was entirely inconsistent with the junk science of today.
@ Hugo Schmidt-Fischer: Jefferson’s observations suggest that global warming was already taking place in his lifetime, and for the resons he gave–the clearing of the forests in Virginia and elsewhere. That is completely consistent with present day climate change observations.
Of course the press has published varying and contradictory reports on climate-related matters of the past 100 years. There were a lot of newspapers throughout this period, and all of them have thrived on sensationalistic reports. So what?
Hoever, the claim of this author that there has been no significant change in average global temperatures over the past 120 years is flatly contradicted by over 1,000 peeer-reviowed articles in scientific journals published over the past twenty years. It is also flatly contradicted by the recent USG multivolume studies, which is crammed with statistical data and was worked on by about 300 scientists. Attempts to flatly deny that average temperatures throughout the world have risen over the past 120 years are contradicted by overwhelming and concl usive evidence that this increase in average temperatures (not all temperatures in every spot on the earths surface at every time of the year) has occurred.
Just to clarify my position: I am not at all certain that this global warming trend will have truly catastrophic effects. In fact, the recent government study suggests only that global warming is likely to cause widespread catastrophic impacts are likely only between 2100 and 2150, which is a long way off.Human beings are likely to exterminate themselves in wars with nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, some of them not even dreamed of yet , long before 2150.
Global warming is only one of many changes in our physical environment that may cause harm to human health, and probably not the one likely to do the most damage. Other effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, such as smog and the asthma and emphizima it causes, have already done far more damage to human health and are likely to continue to do so. Smoke from power plants and industrial plants has caused a dramatic drop in fish populations in many fresh water lakes, and there is a realistic danger that it may kill off salt water fish as well. If this occurs, it will limit the availability of a major source of protein, omega 3 and vitamins to tens of millions of people. These health risks have direct connection to global warming, although they do have some connection to fossil fuels.
What bothers me about climate change denial is not that it will have catastrophic effects–if evidence begins to accumulate that global warming is causing widespread health problems, the public will compel governments to take strong measures against it, whatever the nay-sayers say–but the way in which this emotional , irrational response to scientific data is likely to discredit conservatives politically. Conservatives have already handed the the left a softball with their irrational response to this scientific data, and the left will hit it out of the ballpark. The deniers make it easy for the left to depict conservatives as looney conspiracy theorists and/ or catspaws of private industry. And that is a disaster for other, reason-based conservative positions, which I support.
worries about climate are even older. Thomas Jefferson took temperature measurements and prepared rainfall records around 1810 and suggested it would be interesting to study nature in further detail. He was concerned as he wrote:
“A change in our climate, however, is taking place very, sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory of even the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me, the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year …. The eastern and southeastern breezes come on generally in the afternoon. They formerly did not penetrate far above Williamsburg. They are now more frequent at Richmond and every now and then reach the mountains …. As the land becomes more cleared, it is probable they will extend still further westward.
Thomas Jefferson, written from Monticello, sometime between 1870 – 1785, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Quoted by Michaels, Patrick J., Sound and fury : the science and politics of global warming, 1992, CATO INSTITUTE.
Michaels points out that while at Monticello, Jefferson took the temperature twice a day for seven years (1810-1816). His recorded mean temperature was approximately 1.0°F (0.6°C) colder than it is today, or about the same temperature as was recorded when official records began about a hundred years ago.