Global Cooling: 1895-1932
The world knew all about cold weather in the 1800s. America and Europe had
escaped a 500-year period of cooling, called the Little Ice Age, around
1850. So when the Times warned of new cooling in 1895, it was a serious
prediction.
On Feb. 24, 1895, the Times announced “Geologists Think the World May Be
Frozen Up Again.” The article debated “whether recent and long-continued
observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period.” Those
concerns were brought on by increases in northern glaciers and in the
severity of Scandinavia’s climate.
Fear spread through the print media over the next three decades. A few
months after the sinking of the Titanic, on Oct. 7, 1912, page one of the
Times reported, “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.”
Scientists knew of four ice ages in the past, leading Professor Nathaniel
Schmidt of Cornell University to conclude that one day we will need
scientific knowledge “to combat the perils” of the next one.
The same day the Los Angeles Times ran an article about Schmidt as well,
entitled “Fifth ice age is on the way.” It was subtitled “Human race will
have to fight for its existence against cold.”
That end-of-the-world tone wasn’t unusual. “Scientist says Arctic ice will
wipe out Canada,” declared a front-page Chicago Tribune headline on Aug. 9,
1923. “Professor Gregory” of Yale University stated that “another world
ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific
Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south
as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.”
Gregory’s predictions went on and on. Switzerland would be “entirely
obliterated,” and parts of South America would be “overrun.” The good news –
“Australia has nothing to fear.” The Washington Post picked up on the story
the following day, announcing “Ice Age Coming Here.”
Talk of the ice age threat even reached France. In a New York Times article
from Sept. 20, 1922, a penguin found in France was viewed as an “ice-age
harbinger.”
Even though the penguin probably escaped from the Antarctic explorer Sir
Ernest Shackleton’s ship, it “caused considerable consternation in the
country.”
Some of the sound of the Roaring ’20s was the noise of a coming ice age –
prominently covered by The New York Times. Capt. Donald MacMillan began his
Arctic expeditions in 1908 with Robert Peary. He was going to Greenland to
test the “Menace of a new ice age,” as the Times reported on June 10, 1923.
The menace was coming from “indications in Arctic that have caused some
apprehension.” Two weeks later the Times reported that MacMillan would get
data to help determine “whether there is any foundation for the theory which
has been advanced in some quarters that another ice age is impending.”
On July 4, 1923, the paper announced that the “Explorer Hopes to
Determine Whether new ‘Ice Age’ is Coming.”
The Atlanta Constitution also had commented on the impending ice age on
July 21, 1923. MacMillan found the “biggest glacier” and reported on the
great increase of glaciers in the Arctic as compared to earlier measures.
Even allowing for “the provisional nature of the earlier surveys,”
glacial activity had greatly augmented, “according to the men of science.”
Not only was “the world of science” following MacMillan, so too were the
“radio fans.”
The Christian Science Monitor reported on the potential ice age as
well, on July 3, 1923. “Captain MacMillan left Wicasset, Me., two weeks ago
for Sydney, the jumping-off point for the north seas, announcing that one of
the purposes of his cruise was to determine whether there is beginning
another ‘ice age,’ as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would
seem to indicate.”
Then on Sept. 18, 1924, The New York Times declared the threat was
real, saying “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age.”
Concerns about global
cooling continued. Swedish scientist Rutger Sernander also forecasted a new
ice age. He headed a Swedish committee of scientists studying “climatic
development” in the Scandinavian country.
According to the LA Times on April 6, 1924, he claimed there was
“scientific ground for believing” that the conditions “when all winds will
bring snow, the sun cannot prevail against the clouds, and three winters
will come in one, with no summer between,” had already begun.
That ice age talk cooled in the early 1930s. But The Atlantic in 1932
puffed the last blast of Arctic air in the article “This Cold, Cold World.”
Author W. J. Humphries compared the state of the earth to the state of the
world before other ice ages. He wrote “If these things be true, it is
evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age.”
Concluding the article he noted the uncertainty of such things, but
closed with “we do know that the climatic gait of this our world is insecure
and unsteady, teetering, indeed, on an ice age, however near or distant the
inevitable fall.”
Cooling and Warming Both Threats to Food
Just like today, the news media were certain about the threat that an
ice age posed.
In the 1970s, as the world cooled down, the fear was that mankind
couldn’t grow enough food with a longer winter. “Climate Changes Endanger
World’s Food Output,” declared a New York Times headline on Aug. 8, 1974,
right in the heat of summer.
“Bad weather this summer and the threat of more of it to come hang
ominously over every estimate of the world food situation,” the article
began.
It continued saying the dire consequences of the cooling climate
created a deadly risk of suffering and mass starvation.
Various climatologists issued a statement that “the facts of the
present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would
assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,” reported the Dec.
29, 1974, New York Times. If policy makers did not account for this oncoming
doom, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would
result.
Time magazine delivered its own gloomy outlook on the “World Food
Crisis” on June 24 of that same year and followed with the article “Weather
Change: Poorer Harvests” on November 11.
According to the November story, the mean global surface temperature
had fallen just 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1940s. Yet this small drop
“trimmed a week to ten days from the growing season” in the earth’s
breadbasket regions.
The prior advances of the Green Revolution that bolstered world
agriculture would be vulnerable to the lower temperatures and lead to
“agricultural disasters.”
Newsweek was equally downbeat in its article “The Cooling World.” “There are
ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change
dramatically,” which would lead to drastically decreased food production, it
said.
“The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years
from now,” the magazine told readers on April 28 the following year.
This, Newsweek said, was based on the “central fact” that “the earth’s
climate seems to be cooling down.” Despite some disagreement on the cause
and extent of cooling, meteorologists were “almost unanimous in the view
that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the
century.”
Despite Newsweek’s claim, agricultural productivity didn’t drop for the
rest of the century. It actually increased at an “annual rate of 1.76% over
the period 1948 to 2002,” according to the
Department of Agriculture.
That didn’t deter the magazine from warning about declining agriculture
once again 30 years later – this time because the earth was getting warmer.
“Livestock are dying. Crops are withering,” it said in the Aug. 8, 2005,
edition. It added that “extremely dry weather of recent months has spawned
swarms of locusts” and they were destroying crops in France. Was global
warming to blame? “Evidence is mounting to support just such fears,”
determined the piece.
U.S. News & World Report was agriculturally pessimistic as well.
“Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many
scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” That was just
13 years ago, in 1993.
That wasn’t the first time warming was blamed for influencing
agriculture. In 1953 William J. Baxter wrote the book “Today’s Revolution in
Weather!” on the warming climate. His studies showed “that the heat zone is
moving northward and the winters are getting milder with less snowfall.”
Baxter titled a chapter in his book “Make Room For Trees, Grains,
Vegetables and Bugs on the North Express!” The warming world led him to
estimate that within 10 years Canada would produce more wheat than the
United States, though he said America’s corn dominance would remain.
It was more than just crops that were in trouble. Baxter also noted that
fishermen in Maine could catch tropical and semi-tropical fish, which were
just beginning to appear. The green crab, which also migrated north, was
“slowly killing” the profitable industry of steamer clams.
Ice, Ice Baby
Another subject was prominent whether journalists were warning about
global warming or an ice age: glaciers. For 110 years, scientists eyed the
mammoth mountains of ice to determine the nature of the temperature shift.
Reporters treated the glaciers like they were the ultimate predictors of
climate.
In 1895, geologists thought the world was freezing up again due to the
“great masses of ice” that were frequently seen farther south than before.
The New York Times reported that icebergs were so bad, and they
decreased the temperature of Iceland so much, that inhabitants fearing a
famine were “emigrating to North America.”
In 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in a
car, the Los Angeles Times delivered a story that should be familiar to
modern readers. The paper’s story on “Disappearing Glaciers” in the Alps
said the glaciers were not “running away,” but rather “deteriorating slowly,
with a persistency that means their final annihilation.”
The melting led to alpine
hotel owners having trouble keeping patrons. It was established that it was
a “scientific fact” that the glaciers were “surely disappearing.” That
didn’t happen. Instead they grew once more.
More than 100 years after their “final annihilation” was declared, the
LA Times was once again writing the same story. An Associated Press story in
the Aug. 21, 2005, paper showed how glacier stories never really change.
According to the article: “A sign on a sheer cliff wall nearby points to a
mountain hut. It should have been at eye level but is more than 60 feet
above visitors’ heads. That’s how much the glacier has shrunk since the sign
went up 35 years ago.”
But glacier stories didn’t always show them melting away like ice cubes
in a warm drink. The Boston Daily Globe in 1923 reported one purpose of
MacMillan’s Arctic expedition was to determine the beginning of the next ice
age, “as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would indicate.”
When that era of ice-age reports melted away, retreating glaciers were
again highlighted. In 1953’s “Today’s Revolution in Weather!” William Baxter
wrote that “the recession of glaciers over the whole earth affords the best
proof that climate is warming,” despite the fact that the world had been in
its cooling phase for more than a decade when he wrote it. He gave examples
of glaciers melting in Lapland, the Alps, Mr. Rainer and Antarctica.
Time magazine in 1951 noted permafrost in Russia was receding northward
up to 100 yards per year. In 1952, The New York Times kept with the warming
trend. It reported the global warming studies of climatologist Dr. Hans W.
Ahlmann, whose “trump card” “has been the melting glaciers.” The next year
the Times said “nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.”
U.S. News and World Report agreed, noted that “winters are getting
milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” on Jan. 8,
1954.
In the ’70s, glaciers did an about face. Ponte in “The Cooling” warned
that “The rapid advance of some glaciers has threatened human settlements in
Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union.”
Time contradicted its 1951 report and stated that the cooling trend was
here to stay. The June 24, 1974, article was based on those omnipresent
“telltale signs” such as the “unexpected persistence and thickness of pack
ice in the waters around Iceland.”
Even The Christian Science Monitor in the same year noted “glaciers
which had been retreating until 1940 have begun to advance.” The article
continued, “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can
cool.”
The New York Times noted
that in 1972 the “mantle of polar ice increased by 12 percent” and had not
returned to “normal” size.
North Atlantic sea temperatures declined, and shipping routes were
“cluttered with abnormal amounts of ice.”
Furthermore, the permafrost in Russia and Canada was advancing
southward, according to the December 29 article that closed out 1974.
Decades later, the Times seemed confused by melting ice. On Dec. 8,
2002, the paper ran an article titled “Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record
Level, Scientists Say.” The first sentence read “The melting of Greenland
glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen
in decades.”
Was the ice melting at record levels, as the headline stated, or at a
level seen decades ago, as the first line mentioned?
On Sept. 14, 2005, the Times reported the recession of glaciers “seen
from Peru to Tibet to Greenland” could accelerate and become abrupt.
This, in turn, could increase the rise of the sea level and block the
Gulf Stream. Hence “a modern counterpart of the 18,000-year-old
global-warming event could trigger a new ice age.”
Fire and Ice Doomsday Alarmism Then and Now
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Originally published at http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2007/20071004161833.aspx
