OH NO...Global Cooling...no wait...Warming...Cooling...Warming

If the title of this post is a little confusing, then you must be younger than 100 years old or have no long term memory. The reason I say that is if you have been reading the major newspapers and magazines for the last 100 years, that title would make total sense.

A very informative research report entitled, Fire and Ice, chronicles the back and forth reporting of impending climate disasters by major news outlets. Here is a brief summary that is further detailed in the report:

Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature.

Following the ice age threats from the late 1800s, fears of an imminent and icy catastrophe were compounded in the 1920s by Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan and an obsession with the news of his polar expedition. As the Times put it on Feb. 24, 1895, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.”

Those concerns lasted well into the late 1920s. But when the earth’s surface warmed less than half a degree, newspapers and magazines responded with stories about the new threat. Once again the Times was out in front, cautioning “the earth is steadily growing warmer.”

After a while, that second phase of climate cautions began to fade. By 1954, Fortune magazine was warming to another cooling trend and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.” As the United States and the old Soviet Union faced off, the media joined them with reports of a more dangerous Cold War of Man vs. Nature.

The New York Times ran warming stories into the late 1950s, but it too came around to the new fears. Just three decades ago, in 1975, the paper reported: “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable.” That trend, too, cooled off and was replaced by the current era of reporting on the dangers of global warming. Just six years later, on Aug. 22, 1981, the Times quoted seven government atmospheric scientists who predicted global warming of an “almost unprecedented magnitude.”

In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming.

To tap into this current end of the world scenario, it is humans that are causing it, so we need government to come in and save the day with massive regulations with no concern for the what they will cost because the fate of the whole world is at stake!

One thing that always strikes me as hilarious in this whole "debate" is the fact that we barely trust meteorologists to get tomorrow's weather right, yet when they predict the weather 30-100 years from now, it is bought hook, line and sinker despite having been wrong at least three times in the last 100 years as this report shows.

Maybe it's just me...but do you think they may be wrong again? Maybe the earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles all on its own. Nah...it can't be that simple of an answer!