Do You Trust the Media to Tell the Truth About Climate Doom?

As the global temperature has cycled from cold to warm to cold to warm again, the media has followed at almost lock step with it. But media cycles of climate doom, which mirror the climate cycles themselves, have roughly a ten to fifteen year time lag. It seems whenever the world warms up the number of global warming stories increases to match the trend; conversely when the climate cools down the media pull up on their long johns and warn of the next ice age. It is forthcoming for certain. _EnergyTribune

Natural climate cycles occur due to vast driving forces which are far more powerful than anything humans are capable of doing. But news media -- ever on the lookout for fantastic stories of impending crises -- will jump on any bandwagon that promises to sell advertising and subscriptions. As we have learned, there are always scientists who are willing to help create a faux catastrophe to make names for themselves -- and to get grants and ever-more publications. In this regard, "science" and the "news" media work hand in hand.

The oceans of the world store more than one thousand times more heat than the atmosphere. The vast majority of that heat is in the tropical waters. When the oceans warm so does the atmosphere; when they cool, global temperatures follow. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the earth’s surface and exhibits a dominant impact on the global temperature. Around 1910 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. Such was the case in the 1910s and into the 1920s.

The huge social inertia generated by the ice age scare prior to 1910 continued to drive media fear stories of upcoming cold into the 1920s. Life was not as fast in those days and social change took place more slowly. 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.” A year later 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 was “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.” Seems it was global cooling that was driving the headlines at that time.

Unknown to anyone during that time was the fact that the Pacific was beginning to warm and would continue to do so until the mid 1940s. Reacting to this ocean warmth the temperature of the earth began to rise as well. Concurrently the ice age stories began to fade from the headlines. Then on March 11, 1929, just five years later from the permanent winter story, the LA Times stunned its readers: “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer and that it will continue to get warmer.” On March 27, 1933 the New York Times headline read “The next ice age, if it is coming…is still a long way off.” In the same year meteorologist J. B. Kincer of the United States Weather Bureau published in the September Monthly Weather Review: “Wide-spread and persistent tendency towards warmer weather.” He noted out of 21 winters from 1912 to 1933 in Washington D. C. 18 were warmer than normal and all of the past 13 were mild.”

During the early 1920s the Atlantic Ocean began its cyclic 25 to 30 year warming trend. This warmer water combined with the warmer Pacific pumped up world temperature to the point where everyone began to take notice. By November 6, 1939 the Chicago Tribune published a story “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise.” The story noted that “Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities throughout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend towards warmer climate in the last two decades.” They knew it was warming but not why.

On August 2, 1952 the New York Times reported that Eskimos were eating cod, a fish not previously in their diet. The following year the Times reported that studies confirmed that summers and winters were getting warmer and it was because the oceans were changing again. _EnergyTribune

Human science is barely learning the truth behind various overlapping natural drivers of climate change -- and the vastly complex terrestrial mechanism for converting the driving forces into climate. The overly-simplified, over-hyped crusade of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming orthodoxy, is an empty shell of pseudo-scientific blather. The deeper you look into politicised science, the nastier and more destructive it looks.