Faithful reader, you know by now that I've been around for a while. Old as dirt you know.

That means that I can remember many of the science fads of recent history. (Maybe, not as old as dirt after all, I can at least remember, and old as dirt can't do that - can it?)

Way back before everything was searchable by the Google crawlers, oh back in 1975, the NYT, Time Magazine, Newsweek and the like published dire warnings about - heavens! - Global Cooling. (And, if you are willing to go look through some 'fische the NYT published dire warnings about cooling in 1924, warming in 1935, before settling on cooling again in 1975.)

Newsweek, for its part, felt moved to address their 1975 scary stuff with this blurb in 2006 which begins:

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

Newsweek apparently felt compelled to issue this explanation because the article is still being quoted regularly and they must defend themselves - journalistically speaking, of course, they impart: In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate."

Hmmm... sounds almost Ratheresque to me.

Check the link and you'll be treated to a few paragraphs of twisted conjugation about how ice ages might happen, maybe, but the consensus now is that human impacts will swamp [those ice age theories].

And Newsweek concludes:

The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism. Astronomers have been warning for decades that life on Earth could be wiped out by a collision with a giant meteorite; it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that journalists have been dupes or alarmists for reporting this news. Citizens can judge for themselves what constitutes a prudent response-which, indeed, is what occurred 30 years ago. All in all, it's probably just as well that society elected not to follow one of the possible solutions mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article: to pour soot over the Arctic ice cap, to help it melt.

Yes, it's true. Some scientists in 1975 thought it would be a good idea to work on melting the Arctic ice.

But the key point here is that we should understand that we are so much smarter now, we have global consensus, and news magazines like Newsweek aren't alarmist - there's equal value in the public square to presenting data on either side of this particular issue. That's just good journalism. Right?

Well, it's now a scientific fact that the past twelve months have completely wiped out the 'warming' trend of the last one hundred years (OK, three one-hundredths of a degree short of wiped out). So much for the increase in parts-per-million of CO2. Something far more powerful than the increase in CO2, at least one hundred times more powerful, has reversed that trend. Perhaps it's time to consider Global Cooling again.

As of this writing, a brief survey of mainstream media shows no coverage of this incredible scientific finding. Only USA Today has an environmental front page item about a study revealing high toxin levels in National Parks. Deep in CNN today there is an article about Algore warning off Wall Street about 'subprime carbon'.

Just think, they've eschewed a front page item like: Science Determines That Something Far More Powerful Than Carbon Emissions Has Reversed The Effects Of Global Warming In A Single Year. I mean that would just be good journalism wouldn't it?

Perhaps this is the reason that the politically correct speak of the algorologists recently has morphed to Climate Change.

Because, you see, no matter what the effect is now, warming, or cooling, it is the presence of the incipient pestilential human race that causes Climate Change. Nobel clout will be wielded. Actual scientific measurement be damned.

And as time progresses, I suppose, to paraphrase something my friend Jeff Goldstein once said, we'll continue to see the obvious certainty of terrestrial physics, and the global temperature will rise and it will fall, for reasons that we do not know.

And fraudulent charlatans, some even well-meaning, will continue to prey upon the globe, effecting action with politic, public spending and legislation against the very forces of nature as if a single utterance they make could alter the particle stream from the sun or change the law of gravity.

Until, I fear, that the notion of climate and temperature becomes a palimpsest, and is replaced by global suicide.

Some excellent blog coverage: Hot Air, Ace (who wins the best headline award) among them.