This is Part 2 of this article. Part 1 was published on October 13.

The stories of a warming world continued into the late 1950s as the media inertia plowed forward adding to the warming stories of the 1930s and 40s. The Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the mid 1920s. This warming was keeping the arctic milder by pumping warmer water northward trough the Gulf Stream . On February 15, 1959 the New York Times reported “Arctic findings in particular support theory of rising global temperatures.” However the temperature of the earth was not warming, it was falling. The massive and dominant Pacific had been cooler since the mid 1940s and would continue to be so into the mid 1970s. Climate data show that starting in the mid-1940s the earth began a multi-decadal cooling trend. Around 1960 the Atlantic began to cool again. Now both oceans were in their cooler phase. The two oceans were working in tandem to chill the planet. It was not until later in the 1960s that the media began to really notice.

On November 15, 1969 Science News quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilizations.” Where have we heard that before? Mitchell continued “If the cooling continues for another 200 to 300 years the earth could be plunged into an ice age.” On January 11, 1970 the Washington Post ran the headline “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age” The story read “Better get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come.” Fortune Magazine reported in February of 1974 “It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude.” Sound familiar? In the June 24, 1970 edition Time Magazine wrote “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” Newsweek on April 28, 1975 wrote that “The earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” According to Newsweek “meteorologists” were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

So it looked like we were on the precipice of a new ice age with cataclysmic consequences for the world. Then, stealthily to all, the Pacific Ocean began to warm again and so did the earth’s temperature. All the stories of the next ice age, the dramatic drop in food production and all the hardships to come disappeared fast…again.

The warming Pacific Ocean began to nudge the global temperature up in the late 1970s. This warming continued through the 1980s and the ice age stories were gone. By 1993 this story came from U.S. News and World Reports “Global Climate Change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture. Time magazine wrote on November 13, 2000: “27 European climatologists have become worried that the warming trend may be irreversible, at least over most of the coming century.” Newsweek joined the fray with this story in its August 8, 2005 edition “extremely dry weather of recent months has spawned swarms of locusts.” Was global warming the cause? The story concluded that “Evidence is mounting to support just such fears.”

On April 3, 2006 Time magazine’s cover story with a picture of a lonely polar bear on a small piece of ice read “Be Worried, be VERY WORRIED. Climate change isn’t some vague future problem-it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace.” It also states on the cover in bold type “Earth at the tipping point. How it threatens your health. How China and India can help save the world, or destroy it.”

So from all of this what can we learn from 115 years of media reporting on climate change.

• The media are going to publish whatever sells. If someone publishes a story about the world getting colder and people buy it up you can be sure there will be many more stories touting the same headline.
• There is a long lag between what nature is doing and what the media will report. The lag seems to be anywhere from 10 to 15 years after the climate changes. This is caused by the large amount of climate story inertia that make stories about the past trends continue even though the climate trends have changed either to colder or warmer. The media is slow to react to climate changes even though the evidence is clear.
• There will always be scientists, willing to prostitute themselves for research funds or just to bask on the media limelight to lend credence to the alarmism of the day.
• When all the news stories are about warming or cooling it is certain they got it wrong and at least 15 years behind times. By then the climate trends are actually in the other direction.

By 2010 there has been no global warming in a decade. Get a “good grip on your long johns.”

Horn is a meteorologist and Economides is the Editor-in-Chief of the Energy Tribune.