Newsweek Rewind: Debunking Global Cooling
24th May 2014
Read it.
Here’s a fun fact: In 1975, some people were worried about global cooling. Not only that, there was concern that not enough was being done about it.
“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change,” science journalist Peter Gwynne reported. Statements like that are uttered all the time these days, but for the exact opposite reason. One outlandish suggestion for the perceived crisis involved “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot.”
These quant tidbits come from a short article penned by Gwynne and printed on Page 64 of Newsweek’s April 28, 1975, issue. Titled “The Cooling World,” it argued that global temperatures were falling—and terrible consequences for food production were on the horizon. Meteorologists “are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” Gwynne wrote. “The resulting famines could be catastrophic.”
The story, and others like it, has been cited by people who like to challenge current climate science and global warming. In 2009, for example, George Will referenced it in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, incorrectly describing it as a cover story, and using global cooling as an example of a global disaster that didn’t happen (and implying that global warming is also on that list).
Nearly 40 years later, that brief article is in the news again. In fact, Gwynne has just written a do-over of sorts, correcting the record in an article on Inside Science addressing his 1975 story. The purpose? So that “deniers of human-caused global warming” can’t use his story “as ammunition against the consensus of today’s climate scientists.”
‘Never mind!’