You sit down to your morning coffee and open up the paper. The headline reads: “Scientists Agree World Is Colder.”
Impossible, right? With the reality of global warming heavy upon us, nothing could be better than news of a worldwide cooling trend. However, when the New York Times reported this on January 30, 1961, the world did not breathe a sigh of relief. In fact, the headline consolidated what many feared—the threat of another ice age. It is hard to imagine a world where the media is not rife with news of global warming, but the past century shows that journalists have been very fickle about climate change. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the media’s attention has oscillated between global warming and cooling at least four times. What makes us so sure we can believe them now?
Around the turn of the century, “scientific” findings fuelled rumours of an imminent ice age. Memories of the Little Ice Age, the period of global cooling that occurred between 1650 and 1850, were still fresh in the public mind and the media was quick to exploit the fears of its readership. As early as 1895, journalists realized that stories on climate change sold newspapers, regardless of how factually accurate they were.
On February 24, 1895, the Times ran the headline “Geologists Think The World May Be Frozen Up Again.” However, the evidence for such a bold claim was weak, based only on local reports of icebergs drifting further south than usual and “assertions” that Scandinavian winters were becoming more severe. It seems that substance came secondary to sensation—the writer gravely stated that “the Frost King has been known to come down from the heights of Europe and seal the waters of the Adriatic.”
Similar stories ran for the next twenty-five years. On September 20, 1922, the Times ran a similarly spectacular article entitled “Penguin Startles France.” It suggested that “combined with the Arctic weather conditions from which France is suffering, the appearance of the bird [to] some minds suggests that the Ice Age is about to set in again.” In reality, the penguin had probably just escaped from South Pole explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship. A story about the “ice-age harbinger,” however, was just too good to pass up.
As the 1930s began, the media’s attention to the Ice Age began to waver. It was replaced with a newfound fascination for the opposite extreme: fears of global warming. A 1933 Associated Press article ran the headline “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776.” It went on to assert that the “next Ice Age, if one is coming…is still a long way off, if Uncle Sam’s weather charts are any indication.” The evidence cited by the writer was significantly more reliable. According to the article, the American Weather Bureau’s historical data showed that average temperatures had rose steadily since 1908.
In retrospect, it appears that the media was on the right track. Still, climate change was only ever attributed to natural causes. It was amateur meteorologist G.S. Callendar published report in 1938 that suggested that human behaviour might be a contributing factor. The report, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meterological Society, was entitled “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and its Influence on Temperature.” Building on Svante Arrhenius’ original theory that industrial emissions could bring about global warming, Callendar asserted that it could account for the world’s rising temperatures. His claims, unfortunately, were ignored for the next twenty years.
Reports of global cooling resurfaced in the 1950s and, fittingly, lasted well into the Cold War years. An article in Fortune magazine published in 1954 was titled “Climate—The Heat May Be Off.” In 1959, the Times raised concerns that “A Major Cooling [Was] Widely Considered To Be Inevitable.” The media capitalized on the apocalyptic sentiment of the Cold War era: if the world did not end in nuclear winter, perhaps it would result in a permanent ice age.
In addition to newspapers and journals, fears of a coming ice age manifested themselves in literature and the arts. Science fiction embraced the threat of an everlasting winter, as seen in Wilson Tucker’s 1974 novel Ice and Iron. In the late 1970s, post-punk forerunners Joy Division released the single “Living In The Ice Age.” The chorus to The Clash’s classic “London Calling” began with the line “the ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in.”
Though the media latched firmly onto the idea of a deep freeze, the scientific world was plagued with uncertainty. In 1976, Time reported that although climatologists could see that the world’s weather patterns were becoming increasingly variable, they could not decide whether it was due to global warming or cooling. The greenhouse effect was considered one of many possible explanations for the fluctuations in climate, but its effects were largely thought to offset the global cooling trend. It was not until the 1980s that global warming was taken seriously and rumours of an Ice Age were finally laid to rest.
The threat of global warming gained significance because of increased technological accuracy, which led to consensus among scientists. Predictions relied on computer models rather than sparse historical data. In 1981, the Times reported that seven federal atmospheric scientists agreed that the next century would see global warming of “almost unprecedented magnitude.” The scientists debunked rumours that the world was cooling by pointing out that the reports ignored evidence from outside of North America.
In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen brought the threat of global warming to the forefront at the United Nations and the U.S. Senate. It was finally acknowledged that human behaviour, not natural fluctuation, was causing climate change. Coverage of the Kyoto Summit showed that world leaders—and journalists—were finally taking the threat seriously. In 1997, Time reported, “Only a decade ago, the debate over global warming dealt mainly with whether it was a real problem or a Chicken Little scare story…[but] it is clear that this cautious attitude has completely turned around.”
The term “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000 by Nobel-winning chemist Paul Crutzers to refer to the current geological era, which is marked by the human impact on the environment. The impact of carbon emissions may have been responsible for the variations in climate since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, this possibility was only acknowledged in the past twenty years.
Today, it is evident that global warming has, for the most part, been embraced by the media. Still, how can we be assured that journalists will not be as capricious as they were in the past? It is, after all, their business to create sensations.
For one thing, the world’s leading scientists—at least, those who have not been linked to Big Oil or Big Coal—have agreed that global warming is a reality that must be prevented. The earth’s climate has never been as intensely and accurately examined as it is today.
At present, it is less likely that the media is simply trying to tie in stories of climate change to capitalize on the excitement aroused by concurrent world events. The threat of global warming is itself a sensational story.
Professor Janis Langins of U of T’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology summed up the issue concisely: “The question is not whether journalists are or have been right or wrong about global warming or cooling, but whether global warming or cooling is going on.”
The melting Arctic ice sheets and the rising ocean levels have drowned any remaining notions of an imminent Ice Age. Today, more than ever, the answer is obvious.
