It was five years before the turn of the century and
major media were warning of disastrous climate change.
Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the
serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president
at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover
Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global
warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers
of a new ice age.    
  
     The year was 1895, and it was just one of four
different time periods in the last 100 years when
major print media predicted an impending climate
crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of
doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop
yields would mean “billions will die.” 

     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. Some current warming
stories combine the concepts and claim the next ice
age will be triggered by rising temperatures – the
theme of the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” 

     Recent global warming reports have continued that
trend, morphing into a hybrid of both theories. News
media that once touted the threat of “global warming”
have moved on to the more flexible term “climate
change.” As the Times described it, climate change can
mean any major shift, making the earth cooler or
warmer. In a March 30, 2006, piece on ExxonMobil’s
approach to the environment, a reporter argued the
firm’s chairman “has gone out of his way to soften
Exxon’s public stance on climate change.” 

     The effect of the idea of “climate change” means
that any major climate event can be blamed on global
warming, supposedly driven by mankind. 

     Spring 2006 has been swamped with climate change
hype in every type of media – books, newspapers,
magazines, online, TV and even movies. 

     One-time presidential candidate Al Gore, a patron
saint of the environmental movement, is releasing “An
Inconvenient Truth” in book and movie form, warning,
“Our ability to live is what is at stake.” 

     Despite all the historical shifting from one
position to another, many in the media no longer
welcome opposing views on the climate. CBS reporter
Scott Pelley went so far as to compare climate change
skeptics with Holocaust deniers. 

     “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor]
Elie Wiesel,” Pelley asked, “am I required as a
journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” he said in an
interview on March 23 with CBS News’s PublicEye blog.

     He added that the whole idea of impartial
journalism just didn’t work for climate stories.
“There becomes a point in journalism where striving
for balance becomes irresponsible,” he said. 

     Pelley’s comments ignored an essential point:
that 30 years ago, the media were certain about the
prospect of a new ice age. And that is only the most
recent example of how much journalists have changed
their minds on this essential debate.

     Some in the media would probably argue that they
merely report what scientists tell them, but that
would be only half true. 

     Journalists decide not only what they cover; they
also decide whether to include opposing viewpoints.
That’s a balance lacking in the current “debate.” 

     This isn’t a question of science. It’s a question
of whether Americans can trust what the media tell
them about science.




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