Newsweek: Forget about our past climate change mistakes – this time we’re right

Jeff Jacoby highlights Newsweek’s absurdity on the climate change front:

INTRODUCING Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on global warming “denial,” editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine’s past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that “those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.” But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham dismisses it.

“On global cooling,” he writes, “there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were “almost unanimous” in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Moreover, it said, “the evidence in support of these predictions” — everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover — had “begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as “alarmist” and “discredited.” Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek’s climate-change anxieties rest “on the safest of scientific ground.”

Jacoby goes on to talk about the cult of global warming alarmism and how low some of its most vocal alarmists have sank when it comes to attempts at silencing the opposition, most of which I’ve blogged about here:

Newsweek is hardly the only offender. At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as “corporate toadies” for “villainous” enemies of America and the human race. “This is treason,” he shouted, “and we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming “denial” be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

A few weeks ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis published an article opposing mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that Congress should not impose caps until the technology exists to produce energy that doesn’t depend on carbon dioxide. In response to Lewis’s reasonable piece, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, Michael Eckhart, issued a threat:

“Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America.”

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-fé. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn’t a closed book. Smearing those who buck the “scientific consensus” as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.

Nope, and in fact, it suggests a strong fear of the realization that the more skeptics speak out against the Accepted Truth of so-called ‘man-made global warming,’ the more people will start to question whether or not the claims of the likes of the Goracle, and other ‘experts’ on global warming are true, and the more likelihood that the agw crowd will have to explain the inconsistencies and discrepancies in their methodology, their threats against skeptics, and, if ‘man made global warming’ gets discredited like the whole ‘global cooling’ myth did, perhaps at some point be forced to find another issue with which to scare people into submitting over.

Extreme Mortman has a scan of the original Newsweek article. Priceless. Remember, this is the same story that Newsweek declared back in October wasn’t “Γ’β‚¬Λœwrong’ in the journalistic sense of Γ’β‚¬Λœinaccurate.’ :o

Related: Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., science analyist for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, has another must-read piece up on global warming fanaticism called “Twisted Silence: Bullies of the Beltway” (h/t: ST reader Sev)

More: ST reader Karl blogs about global warming alarmism as well.

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Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on mainstream media bias and the culture wars.

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