Back & Forth

The following list of dire warnings on the climate is posted on Mark Simone’s WOR radio page. I tweaked it:
1895 — Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again — New York Times
1902 — “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistence that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” — Los Angeles Times
1912 — Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age — New York Times
1923 — “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” — Professor Gregory of Yale University, Chicago Tribune
1923 — “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” — Washington Post
1924 — MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age — New York Times
1929 — “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” — Los Angeles Times
1932 — “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” — The Atlantic magazine
1933 — America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise — New York Times
1933 — “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather… Is our climate changing?” — Federal Weather Bureau Monthly Weather Review
1938 — Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.” — Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
1938 — “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise… Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities throughout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” — Chicago Tribune
1939 — “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weathermen have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” — Washington Post
1952 — “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” — New York Times
1954 — “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” — U.S. News and World Report
1954 — Climate — the Heat May Be Off — Fortune Magazine
1959 — “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” — New York Times
1969 — “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” — New York Times
1969 — “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich
1970 — “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters — the worst may be yet to come… there’s no relief in sight” — Washington Post
1974 — Global cooling for the past forty years — Time Magazine
1974 — “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” — Washington Post
1974 — “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” — Fortune magazine, which won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
1974 — “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” — New York Times
1975 — Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable — New York Times
1975 — “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” — Nigel Calder, International Wildlife Magazine
1976 — “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” — U.S. News and World Report
1981 — Global Warming — “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” — New York Times
1988 — I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. — Jim Hansen testimony before Congress.
1989 — “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” — Stephen Schneider, Discover magazine
1990 — “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” — Senator Timothy Wirth
1993 — “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” — U.S. News and World Report
1998 — No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” — Christine Stewart, Calgary Herald
2001 — “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” — Time Magazine
2006 — “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine
2006 — “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” — Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology MIT.
2006 — “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” — Philip Stott, University of London.
2006 — “Since 1895 the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” — Senator James Inhofe
2007- “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” — Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast
2008 — “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” — Dr. John S. Theon, NASA.

It’s almost always about the benjamins. In an op-ed piece at nypost.com, Michael Goodwin makes this astute observation: “Recall he (NBA comissioner Adam Silver) refused to hold the league’s All-Star game in Charlotte until North Carolina changed a bill on bathroom genders… By that standard, the NBA wouldn’t set foot in China.” Kudos, sir.

Rain put the kibosh on the floating book shop’s winning streak. An amusing consequence of the recent surge is that the number of excess plastic bags in my apartment has been halved.

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