A 100-year Media History on Climate Change

From: Senators' Perspectives on Global Warming

There are many more examples of the media and scientists flip-flopping between warming and cooling scares.

Here is a quote from the New York Times reporting on fears of an approaching ice age.
*Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again."

That sentence appeared over 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of the New York Times
Let me repeat. 1895, not 1995.

A front page article in the October 7, 1912 New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor "Warns Us of an Encroaching ice Age."

The very same day in 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the "Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold." An August 10, 1923 Washington Post article declared: "Ice Age Coming Here."

By the 1930's, the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice age and instead switched gears to promoting global warming

"America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776, Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise" stated an article in the New York Times on March 27, 1933. The media of yesteryear was also not above injecting large amounts of fear and alarmism into their climate articles

An August 9, 1923 front page article in the Chicago Tribune declared:

"Scientist Says Arctic lee Will Wipe Out Canada." The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out" and Switzerland would be "entirely obliterated."

A December 29, 1974 New York Times article on global cooling reported that climatologists believed "the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade."

The article also warned that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence" would result. In 1975, the New York Times reported that "A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable." These past predictions of doom have a familiar ring, don't they? They sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of former Vice president's brand of climate alarmism.

After more than a century of alternating between global cooling and warming, one would think that this media history would serve a cautionary tale for today's voices in the media and scientific community who are promoting yet another round of eco-doom.

Much of the 100-year media history on climate change that I have documented here today can be found in a publication titled "Fire and ice" from the Business and Media Institute

See also: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

120 years of climate scares