MSM Inertia: What We Can Learn from 120 Years of Climate Catastrophe Reporting
The annual Climate Catastrophe Party is marching along in Cancun, Mexico, making for a lovely all-expenses-paid vacation.
At this latest doom fest, some 20,000 delegates from around the world are doing their best to keep the scary story of man-made global warming/climate change alive. I’ve been around long enough to remember a time when global warming was a non-issue — in fact, it was the very real threat of another ice age making headlines in the 1970s. With that in mind, I did an investigation into the comings and goings of predicted environmental cataclysm in modern history. What I found is that this has all happened before — the reporting of climate catastrophe has been going on for over 120 years.
What’s fascinating about the reporting is that it has encompassed the full range of temperature: searing heat and bitter cold, both reported as real and potentially deadly.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world is warming at an unprecedented rate. The irrefutable results of this global temperature heat wave will be starvation, drowning of coastal cities, mass extinctions, war, and the death of billions. These warnings come to us from many reliable sources, including all forms of news media. We have been alerted to this climate catastrophe for two decades now.
But when one looks back at the history of climate reporting, you find a remarkably consistent and recurring theme. The global temperature has cycled from cold to warm to cold to warm again over the last 120 years. The media cycles of impending climatic doom mirror the climate cycles themselves, but with a roughly ten- to fifteen-year lag. It seems whenever the world warms, the volume of global warming stories increases to match the trend. Conversely, when the climate cools the major media outlets pull on their long johns and warn us of the next ice age. However, it takes many years for the media to catch up to what the climate is actually doing.
On February 24, 1895, the New York Times reported: “Geologists think the world may be frozen up again.” The story wondered “whether recent and long continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period.”
In 1912, shortly after the sinking of the Titanic by an iceberg, the New York Times reported on a professor from a Cornell University: “Professor Schmidt warns us of an encroaching ice age.” On the very same day, the Los Angles Times reported: “Fifth ice age is on the way. … Human race will have to fight for its existence against the cold.”
Was what they were reporting true? The temperature records from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia say yes. The Earth was cooling from about 1875 to 1910, about 35 years of downward temperature. During this time there would have been more ice in the Arctic, and glaciers would have advanced. The stories were based upon what scientists of the day were observing. From there, the media drew their own conclusions as to what this meant for the future climate and its effects on humanity. Many times, they chose disaster.
The oceans contain more than one thousand times more heat than the atmosphere, and the vast majority of that heat is in tropical waters. When the oceans warm, so does the atmosphere. When they cool, global temperature follows. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the Earth’s surface and exhibits a dominant impact on the global temperature. Around 1920, the tropical Pacific Ocean began to warm. The impacts of such a warming are not always readily apparent — it takes years for glaciers and sea ice to react to the gradual ocean warming.
The huge social inertia generated by the ice age scare prior to 1910 continued to drive media fear stories of coming cold into the 1920s. On July 3, 1923, the Christian Science Monitor reported: “Captain MacMillan left Wiscasset, Maine, announcing that one of the purposes of his cruise was to determine whether there was the beginning of another ice age as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would seem to indicate.” On September 18, 1924, the New York Times declared the threat was real, saying: “MacMillan reports signs of new ice age.” Earlier that year, on April 6, the LA Times reported that Swedish scientist Rutger Sernander claimed there were “scientific grounds for believing” that “when all winds will bring snow, the Sun cannot prevail against the clouds and three winters will come in one, with no summer between.”
Unknown to anyone during this time was the fact that the Pacific was beginning to warm, and would continue to do so until the mid-1940s.
Whatever it is that is driving the Earth’s climate we know it must be enormous; at least as big as the Sun.
What a great comment. I’ll bet it went over a lot of peoples heads. You my friend have a good sense of humor!
Thanks, but it’s not my joke; it has been on the Net for a while.
LOL.
The modern AGW movement likely emerged when global cooling and “nuclear winter” didn’t fly as a KGB psyop to stop American nuclear weapon production and deployment–but cap and trade is almost as effective for weakening this country. Of course, the movement got completely taken up by the maggots of the Left who are unified in only one thing — hatred of America, hatred of capitalism, hatred of human life, hatred of reason, hatred of any kind of human happiness. The real hot air crisis was the post-modernism in the academic world that fueled the fire of the movement.
“He who hates America hates mankind.” – Brendan Behan, Irish poet, humorist and playwright.
The difference this time around are the great numbers of scientists who have a vested financial interest in promoting the hysteria — the climatologists — and a host of governments willing to pump billions into their research. Throw a charlatan like Al Gore into the mix and add the prospect of conventions at tropical luxury resorts for Green fanatics and media dupes and you’ve got all the ingredients you need for a proper scare. And this does not even count the opportunity for centralizing and expanding government control over lives. It’s all win-win for the left.
Actually, relatively few actual, honest-to-C.T.R. Wilson climatologists can be found in the “global warming/climate change” camp. The majority of real climatologists tend to side with Dr. Fred Singer, a real climatologist, who has looked at the data, and concluded that it not only doesn’t prove the hypothesis, but that much of it was distorted or outright falsified to boot.
No, the majority of “scientists” backing this are a mixed bag of “social scientists”, “political scientists”, and other “soft science” types whose main interest is remaking the world in their own Utopian image. They generally try strenuously to avoid getting in a debate with actual climatologists, meteorologists, and especially geophysicists (who specialize in studying the Earth over very long timespans).
This is because the usual result is that once the actual experts get done pointing out the contradictions, distortions, and plain mistakes in their “settled science”*, it becomes obvious to all but the most scientifically-challenged onlookers that the “climate change true believers” not only don’t have the facts on their side, they are also so ignorant of actual geophysical and atmospheric physics principles that they probably can’t tell a precipitation level from a panty raid.
*An oxymoron if there ever was one.
clear ether
eon
The first rule of journalism, and science, is: Thou shalt not lie.
The second rule is: Thous shalt not steal.
Cancun is the result if the rules are violated. It is a foul stew of science and politics, a drive for power. Millions are out of work because of this environmental, “We know better than you” mind set. Millions more are hungry because corn is converted to fuel, and thus, costs too much to be eaten.
Green is an bitterly ugly color.
Hah. “Rules” of journalism and science. Again I say, “Hah.”
There is only one rule of both journalism and science and the author named it: “does it sell?” or, in the case of scientists, “Can I get a grant…or a trip to Cancun?”
Based on the scam that is “man-caused global warming” I have lost all confidence in both the Journalist and the scientist. Both are revealed to be money-grubbing opportunists.
This yo-yoing panic is not too difficult to understand. It has been going on since man drew pictures on cave walls to torch light. Mankind has absolutely no control over three things in our humble little existence on this spinning molten ball of goo; the weather, the geologic processes, and the finite nature of our pathetic short little lives on the planet.
Therefore, in our massive hubris we will claim effect on all three. Of course, any or all of them will remind us that we are living on the precarious edge of perpetual extinction and can do nothing at all about it.
It all sounds like an old Gary Larson Farside cartoon. Sadly, instead of growing up and realizing that our strength is with coping not manipulating we will continue to chase our divination, alchemy, goat entrails, and weedles in an effort to entreat our favorite gods (they being ourselves at the moment) to save us.
Regards,
The Mighty Fahvaag
Nice, but what is a Fahvaag?
It’s Scandahoovian for “Far Side”.
Excellent report! The continued insistence by scientists and the media that global warming is happening represents a huge systemic failure, comparable to that in the financial sector. Scientists who should have been neutral did research with an ideological bias, and the people who should have been watching over them became advocates instead of watchdogs.
The process for reporting scientific results, peer review, is a fragile process during the best of times, but when ideology is mixed in, it goes haywire.
Now is the time for Congress to do two things: (1) investigate the process, and (2) set up an independent watchdog agency over peer review. This watchdog agency needs to consist of people OUTSIDE of academia, because people within academia can get too chummy. There needs to be outsiders checking these people constantly.
Yeah! More government agencies to referee the differences of opinion between non-productive members of society (a.k.a. academic parasites) who are obviously making things up!
More federal administrations until we are all public employees. Praise the Feds and pass the (federal) employment applications!
OK, then “encourage the establishment of an independent watchdog agency.” It doesn’t need to be part of the government, but it should be part of the process, at least potentially. It would be like an appeals court. Plus, it should have a few non-academics on it.
If you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it. Otherwise, we’re going to be at the mercy of these people forever. If they’re shown to be wrong on global warming, it will be something else soon enough.
I think that “cloud intelligence” (us) is doing a pretty good job on the subject without the need of any official agencies.
What keeps the con men at bay is an educated populace. Only the ignorant will buy the snake oil elixir; the intelligent/educated people will run the fraud out of town (probably in November 2012).
Thanks for a great history lesson! The latest scare was snagged by Al Gore and Kenneth Lay of Enron as a way to make trillions off scaring everyone….Now that the world is cooling again (you know this if you read climate website news outlets like WUWT), many of the rats/scientists are trying to exit the sinking ship. It’s funny and predictable that the media will always dream up drama; it’s not funny that politicians turn it into tools for more power.
The Navier Stokes equations describe fluid flow in the presence of heating, and are used to develop simplified models of the weather. They are non-linear, meaning that they decribe the flow, and can provide short term prediction, but long term predictions are worthless. There is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, so that an error of a tenth of a degree (or a hundredth of a degree) has the error double in 4 to 5 days. After a few weeks, the ability to predict future temperatures is gone. This was extensively investigated by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s.
If you think that you can use Navier Stokes equations to make a long term prediction, they you might believe in global warming or cooling. If you understand the chaotic nature of nonlinearities, you know that the average temperature is an artifact of the way you collect the data, and does not support a ability to make a long term forcasts.
“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.” Horace Lamb to the British Science Association.
(A similar, but likely apocryphal deathbed quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg switches relativity for QED)
Yep! And anyone claiming knowledge of how “solve” N-S has a million dollars awaiting them: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/
“and the death of billions.”
Nowhere in the link you provided does it mention the death of billions.
However, I would agree that the media is pretty bad at accurately reporting catastrophes and science in general, which is why we should listen to scientific bodies like the National Academies of Science, the AGU, and the Royal Society. I wonder what they think about climate change.
Negative eugenics (forced sterilization of certain people) was once supported by the National Academy of Science, The American Medical Association and National Research Council. The National Academy of Science has endorsed IPCC reports and believes in AGW. Recently the British Royal Society has renounced their original support for AGW and have since came out with the position that the science is still not settled.
” we should listen to scientific bodies like the National Academies of Science, the AGU, and the Royal Society. I wonder what they think about climate change.”
The easy and accurate answer:a very large fraction of the scientific community thinks what it is paid to think. Follow the money!
Well, I can’t argue against conspiracy theories!
Rats! You beat me again!
Me, too, materialist. The NAS, AGU and the Royal Society all have a vested interest in keeping the fear of radical climate change alive and kicking. Without that fear, no one will contribute to finance their little “research” projects to discover how to stop it.
I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that climate scientists are deliberately interpreting data in their own self-interest; it’s enough to note that human beings tend to get caught up in their field of interest and start to see parallels and connections everywhere. Anecdote: my 13-year-old left a draft of a poem for English open on my computer the other day. In it, he explores the idea of death eventually seeing one as an equal – using imagery entirely different from the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1, which we just saw together, but nevertheless subtly (and, I think, unconsciously) exploiting a recent piece of the zeitgeist. I know that when I was a young geologist, my friends and I saw pretty much everything in terms of, oh, plate tectonics, say; when I was a young environmental consultant, it was all groundwater, all the time. Now I’m (weirdly) a preschool director, and if I don’t keep a handle on my brain, I see everything in terms of how young children will react to it or parenting issues that could arise from it.
It’s much more exciting, and perfectly natural, to ascribe disproportionate importance to what you’re doing. Maybe they – the climatologists – are just getting through the day.
Global warming, cooling, or whatever is just a side story. Ignore the specifics of today’s catastrophe-in-the-making-de-jour.
It’s all about finding ways to scare you into submitting to their absolute rule.
God used to work perfectly as the excuse. It still does in Islam. But in the west, some of those freedom nuts persuaded the masses that politicians don’t really have a direct line to God.
So they have had to come up with other stuff to convince you that only they can save you from whatever. And it’s a long long long list, but they are very very very determined to rule over you and live like emperors because you hand over to them every crumb that you can manufacture. Here’s a short list of reasons you must submit:
- Global warming
- Global cooling
- (and if you don’t believe those 2), Climate Change
- Racism, your
- War, threat of
- Peace, need for
- Carbon, bad
- Red-lining mortgages
- Your health, which you and your doctor can’t manage successfully
- Food, which is killing you so you must change it
- Smoking, which is killing others besides you
- Transportation, which you selfishlessy use, even though it destroys the planet
- Homosexualy, your fear of
- Business, evil and greedy
- Abortion, your refusal to celebrate
- Splitting head open, because of no helmet
- Competition, because it makes children cry
- Guns, your
And an infinite number more. They will NEVER stop dreaming up things you can’t do, because unless they are scaring the crap out of you, or controlling every breath you take, they can’t be happy.
They first called it “global warming”. Then “climate change”. Now it’s “climate disruption”. Whatever it takes to scare us.
I will start believing their predictions when one of them can explain to me how SUV’s in the U.S. are contributing to the melting of the polar ice caps on MARS…a phenomenon which has been recorded for over 20 years now.
Have you noticed that there are no polar bears on Mars? That is proof that AGW is occurring there!
An interesting and valuable perspective, but it leaves the warming and cooling of the oceans as mysterious givens. Recent studies of El Nino and El Nina also deal with changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures, at least on the surface and their effects on the climate.
Just for my information, when was it that the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere were expanding? All the ones I visit show huge recession during my 65-year lifetime.
Google “Little Ice Age”, a period of planetwide cooling from the 14th to the mid-19th Centuries AD. The cooling was due to a combination of the Sun going into a low cycle, reaching the Maunder Minimum about the time Antonio Stradivari was born (1722), and an upswing in volcanic activity, culminating in the eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Sunda Strait in 1816, resulting in worldwide crop failures, especially in Europe and North America, due to the particulates (ash and dust) that the eruption threw into the upper atmosphere, reducing sunlight reaching the surface for almost a decade. (Krakatau, aka “Krakatoa”, would commit a similar offense in 1883.)
Among the human victims of the cooling (in chronological order) were Viking settlements in Greenland and Nova Scotia in the late 1300s, the Spanish Armada in 1588 (destroyed by unseasonable storms in the Channel, not Drake and Hawkins), Napoleon’s Grand Armee in Russia (600,000 men lost, mainly to exposure and starvation), and roughly 1.5 million men, women, and children in Ireland, who perished in the Potato Famine.
Please note that the Sun entered yet another low cycle in the late 1950s, which is why the International Geophysical Year of 1959-60 was officially named “The Year of the Quiet Sun”. This very likely helped precipitate the fierce winters of the late 1970s in North America and Europe. It takes a while for it to happen, you see.
Also, volcanic and earthquake activity along the Ring of Fire (Pacific Rim/East Indian Ocean) has been on an upward trend for four decades, most noticeably with Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and the Indonesian tsunami of 2004. Meanwhile, Anat Krakatau (literally, “Krakatau’s Child”), in the Sunda Strait is growing up awfully fast.
Actual climate change, as opposed to the fancied sort beloved of command-and-control elitists, has a lot more to do with astrophysics and geophysics than it does with who is burning what where on the surface of the Earth.
clear ether
eon
Wicki (not leaks) contributes the following: “The extent of mountain glaciers had been mapped by the late 19th century. In both the north and the south temperate zones, snowlines (the boundaries separating zones of net accumulation from those of net ablation) were about 100 m lower than they were in 1975.[23] In Glacier National Park, the last episode of glacier advance came in the late 18th and early 19th century.[24] In Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, large temperature excursions during the Little Ice Age (~1400–1900 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (~800–1300 AD) were possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.[25]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
HI CHUCK here in the cave: Just thought you should all know me and the mrs. says its been really warm since the last ice age. Yall remember ice ages- we or you learned about them in 9th or 10th grade general science class? Now ferr you young ones we’re at or between numbers 60 and 61 ice ages since the “Pleistocene Period”
So I’ma guessin you have figred out by now that the GM Tahoe is not responsible, no them cows, nor Pittsburg in the 30′ & 40′s, nope its mostly caused by that permanent Circus we folks put up there off of hiway 95. call it D.C. or other names are more appropriate but not available for this fine publication.
Cheers
Chuck
The MSM is merely competing with the religious “end-of-world”-ers.
… apparently for the same audience
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html
The other thing you should notice, during these repeated naturally occurring warming/cooling cycles, at least since the 60′s, is that the environmentalist/socialist left always blames the climate change strictly on manmade activity, and the manditory solution is always strict world government socialist style controls over industry. There is never a mention of any possibility that is is a naturally occuring cycle.
I predict that in another 10 yrs, once it is obvious to all that we are now entering a global cooling phase, the demands will change to demands to prevent man made global cooling, through worldwide government socialism of course. The left has already laid the groundwork for this by changing the name from global warming to climate change, so they can be prepared, no matter what the direction of natural climate change. This has already occured once, since in the 60′s we were told by the left we have to stop manmade global cooling, then it changed to global warming in the 90′s, after another natural warming trend. The left knows most paople will not remember what they claimed 40 yrs ago, but some of us are both old enough, and smart enough, to remember.
Note that the self-designated “environmentalists,” who mostly know little about biology or ecology, calling themselves “green,” claim that carbon dioxide from human endeavors is causing “global warming.” So the “greens” think that carbon dioxide is a BAD THING – but carbon dioxide is the food for green plants! So how can the “greens” think that carbon dioxide is bad?
“The mainstream media outlets are going to publish whatever sells.” And there’s nothing like sensation.
I am reminded of a scene from the 2001 movie “The Shipping News” in which an experienced newspaperman is mentoring a young, aspiring reporter. Paraphrasing, the newsman tells his young friend that a headline has to be short, dramatic and “punchy”. Turning to a stormy horizon, he asks the neophyte what headline he sees. “Dark clouds on the horizon?”, the young man asks.
“Approaching storm threatens town”, beams the older fellow. But the would-be reporter isn’t convinced that such a headline is justified, and asks, “But what if the storm bypasses the town?”
“Village spared from killer storm!”, thunders the newspaperman triumphantly.
On another note, we should remember too that climate change by the late 1960s and 1970s was relegated to relative obscurity by still greater cataclysm. Infallible and learned scientists of THAT era, like Paul R. Ehrlich, were assuring us that an exploding population would mean an apocalyptic end of the human race by the 1980s. So what’s new under the sun?
Compare the temperatures mentioned in the article with the high and lows of the sunspot cycle on this link.
http://spaceweather.com/glossary/sunspotnumber.html
Very soon the press will be reporting about a new ice age.
The earth is a tiny speck of dust spinning and spinning in space the last zillion eons since the Big Bang explosion created the Universe and blew us into motion. Our Earth has continued rotating on its axis and travelling around the Sun. Just a tiny speck spinning and spinning as it voyages through space. And every 365 days or so, the temperature for a given spot on this speck is roughly similar to what it was 365 days before. There is a band within which the temperature moves, yeah, but there is a band. Pretty amazing, no? Why should there be no variation over the decades and centuries? What is remarkable (to me) is that temperatures on the surface of this little spinning mote are so regular.
Chicken Little tactics are a favorite of the liberal. Liberals never pass a chance to do the wrong thing and scare people into a tax increase. They know they are dishonest but the end justifies the means in their religion.
This article showed warming in 1922: http://www.nctimes.com/app/blogs/wp/?p=6485
That seems to disagree with what this article reports, but I do agree that the MSM is out of sync.
Everything bad can be blamed on global warming. What a joke.
http://www.hootervillegazette.com/causedby.html
The interesting thing about #25′s link was the fact that the island mentioned, Spitzbergern, did not have ice reaching it’s shores at all the previous winter in 1922. As of today, the ice has covered it’s eastern shoreline, and approaching the northern part of the coast, and it’s not even winter!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
The real problem in the reporting of Global warming/climate change/disruption is that all the “facts” conflict making it all but impossible to make a rational decision. As examples: The world is warming, the world is cooling; the ice caps are melting, the ice caps are growing, this year is the warmest on record, any more global warming and I’m gonna freeze my ass off. For either side of the argument there are a host of “facts” to draw upon. It is no wonder that the average person paying his electric bill is totally confused. I tend to be a denier only because when I did the math (literally) it did not conform to the global warming theory.
Having noted this I make a modest suggestion. I submit what is needed is a televised debate, Phill Jones, Al Gore on one side, Lord Mocton and Marino on the other. The debate would be by college rules, no bias from reporters in the way. Let the debate last say two hours. Let’s hear from the best of both sides (Al Gore the best? Well perhaps, maybe, OK that stacks the deck for the other team). Let’s clear the air with real debate.
I suspect that all of us can agree on one point and that is FAT CHANCE. Too many people have too great a vested interest in their side of the argument to risk it all in a debate. Still it is a really nice pipe dream.
This sounds very much like the committees which have already tried to whitewash the crimes of the gang at East Anglia.
Another bureaucracy or committee of amateurs is not sufficient to beat bad science. Only good science can beat bad science.
No, it ain’t easy. My own reasons for believing that that alarmists are full of it are based on my own observations of the relevant phenomena, and I’ve been making those since the 1960s. It just happens to have been a subject I was interested in back in those days. In other words, science as practiced by me tells me that the warm-mongers are simply wrong.
But anyone who is not in a position to make such observations themselves, or hasn’t the specialized skills needed to do so, would be puzzled by the whole thing – they have to believe somebody, but who?
The glib answer is to improve science teaching in public schools, but that hasn’t worked out too well so far.
It seems that the “reply” function here is not terribly reliable.
“Maybe a trip to Cancun is not such a bad idea after all, but I’ll wait until the delegates have gone home”
I would advise against that move as there is record cold down there !!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/08/gore-effect-strikes-cancun-climate-conference-3-days-in-a-row/