London Daily Mail Falls for Photoshop Hoax

As Tim Blair notes, “Britain’s Daily Mail once ran with the warmies, but no longer.” Today, the Daily Mail reports:

The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets …

Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.

But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower. Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.

While I appreciate the sentiment, and the change of heart, in the process, the Daily Mail fell victim to an Internet hoax. Note the Time magazine cover dated April of 1977 in the middle of its article:

I’m not sure of its origins, but that cover is a Photoshopped fake, based on this April 9th, 2007 Time cover, with the headline “The Global Warming Survival Guide,” and the smaller headlines above the masthead revised to fit the mid-’70s. (Somehow, I don’t think Larry Linville departing TV’s M*A*S*H would warrant a Time cover mention.) Additionally, Time’s logo was slightly different in the 1970s, and the clunky looking Arial font on the above the masthead stories in the fake is also a giveaway. (Something I ran into when I made my own Time parody cover in late 2011.)

It’s too bad, as Time actually ran a few real covers in the 1970s on global cooling, and there are plenty of additional articles, books, and TV shows from the same era filled with global cooling scare stories to be found on the Internet. Including at least one instance of the same would-be scientist busted for first predicting doom from global cooling, and decades later, predicting doom from global warming:

[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”61189″]

No wonder even Al Gore has signaled the global warming era concluded, by cashing out of the racket and learning to love Big Oil.

Update (3/18/13): The Daily Mail has wisely pulled the image, replacing it with a sidebar on the popularity of global cooling doomsday theories in the 1970s.)