Inventing media reality

Here comes global cooling

May 10, 2011

I offer this piece, not to dig into the science, but to show how strong the media effect is. Thirty-five years ago, newspapers and magazines were drumming up support for a global cooling scare.

Notice the language in this April 28, 1975, Newsweek article, "The Cooling World," by Peter Gwynne. It has the same rhythms today's warming pieces display, the same transitions, the same reliance, of course, on experts.

It's all about INVENTING REALITY, because the 1975 Newsweek reporter—or today's highly confident journalists and smirking pundits—have no idea what they're talking about. They're simply taking their cues from people they accept as experts. And then fabricating the whole business. Cooling, warming—none of them [journalists] has ever really thought about the state of the science. None of them has even turned a layman's mind, armed with some degree of logic, to the statements and methods of the climate researchers. They're personally clueless.