Common Folk Using Common Sense

From the Business & Media Institute, which aims to help the media do their essential job as well as possible and to monitor their performance:

Climate Change: Unpredictable Results
Date	Publication	Prediction (All exact quotes)	Outcome
Oct. 7, 1912	New York Times	Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age	Still encroaching…
June 28, 1923	Los Angeles Times	The possibility of another Ice Age already having started… is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.	Must be a slow starter.
Aug. 9, 1923	Chicago Tribune	Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada	Still there last time we checked.
December 1932	The Atlantic	We must be just teetering on an ice age which some relatively mild geologic action would be sufficient to start going.	Still teetering.
Feb. 20, 1969	New York Times from Col. Bernt Bachen	The Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.	Santa still is safe.
February 1974	Fortune magazine from Reid Bryson	There is very important climatic change going on right now… It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving.	World population increased by 2.5 billion.
March 1, 1975	Science News	The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the "very extraordinary period of warmth" that preceded it.	If "not soon be reversed" means "reversed by the next decade," then yes.
March 1, 1975	Science News	The temperature has already fallen back some 0.6 degrees, and shows no sign of reversal.	So much for climatologists reading the signs correctly.
July-August 1975	International Wildlife	But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetimes.	There’s still time.
1992	Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance"	About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level, due to global warming, in the next few decades.	While periodic monsoons still cause flooding, rising seas have not been a problem.
Feb. 2, 2006	The Daily Telegraph	"Billions will die," says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a "broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords", and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.	Even Malthus must be turning over in his grave over this one.

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