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Newsweek Revisits Climate Change — Cooling or Warming?

Newsweek’s Earth Day issue features a cover story — The Campaign & the Environment — about the increasing purchase global warming has on mainstream politics. In 2007, more than three voters in 10 said they would take a candidate’s green credentials into account, according to pollster John Zogby, up from just 11 percent in 2005. The rising awareness of global warming sounds odd coming from Newsweek, which helped raise awareness of another existential threat to humanity three decades ago.

Newsweek published a story on “global cooling” in 1975. The story discussed the trend toward global cooling. Ironically, temperatures had in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels.One has to wonder whether McCain is as environment friendly as Newsweek makes him out to be:

“So, ironically, McCain-with a voting record that would put him at the bottom of the heap among Democrats-is sometimes perceived as more passionate about the environment than his Democratic opponents, whose objectively much stronger rec-ords are viewed as a matter of party orthodoxy.”

That seems to go a bit too far, but on verra.