PJ Media

Back in the mid 1970s I was in high school. Our English Lit teacher assigned us an essay on “current events” as our mid-semester essay. I picked the hottest scientific story going on at that time.

Global Cooling.

I looked up Global Cooling in textbooks, in scientific journals and in popular science magazines. I even used news magazines as source material.

At that time the “scientific consensus” was that the earth was heading into a dangerous period of Global Cooling that could well presage a “new Ice Age.” NewsWeek ran a cover story on the issue, with lurid graphics of New York City being overrun with glaciers. Congress held hearings on the issue, and the most prominent scientists of the day were called to Washington DC to testify and to suggest means to avoid the coming Cooling Catastrophe.

Many of the very same institutions that are today bleating about “Global Warming” were bleating then about “Global Cooling.” Nobel prize winning scientists were offering potential solutions which included painting rooftops black, spreading soot on arctic and antarctic glaciers, even potentially dropping atomic bombs into volcanoes to vent some of the earth’s heat to replenish the heat being lost inexplicably during the Cooling Crisis.

That was 30 years ago. In 30 years our “brilliant scientists” have gone from scaring our children with tales of crushing glaciers destroying cities, to tales of rising oceans destroying cities.

Forgive me if I take this generation’s doomsday predictions less seriously than the do-gooders and anti-capitalists would like me too.

By the way, the conclusion of my essay back then was that the science was being overshadowed by the politics, and that people were using the supposed “crisis” to furhter their ideological goals.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…