The media, nevertheless, love reporting unsupported scare scenarios. Last April (2007), the cover of Time magazine declared, "Be worried, be very worried." Amid lots of scary pictures of deserts, floods, and hurricanes, it said, "Global warming is already disrupting the biological world, pushing many species to the brink of extinction and turning others into runaway pests. But the worst is yet to come." On July 24, 1974, Time published an article titled "Another Ice Age?" that read, "... the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." It's not just Time magazine that's unreliable on global warming. The popular press features possible crises on their front pages all the time, because bad news sells and they are in the business of selling copies of their publications and generating ad revenue, not reporting the truth about complicated subjects. As they say in the business, "if it bleeds, it leads." These are the same guys who told us Alar, saccharin, Red Dye #2, dioxin, a hole in the ozone layer, electric power lines, and cell phones were all causing cancer epidemics, and that Y2K would shut down the nation's electric grid and banks. They were wrong on every one of these issues. Cancer rates in the United States for the non-elderly population have been falling since 1970, and more recently for the total population including the elderly, and more recently still, even the absolute number of cancer deaths is now falling. Somehow, the false predictions always appear in banner headlines on page 1, but the retractions appear on page 37, next to ads for septic tank pumps. The major media will wake up eventually, and in 2010 or 2020 they will once again be trying to sell newspapers and magazines by predicting global cooling. The point is, nobody should trust the mainstream media to tell us what's going on in the global warming debate.  |