[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 38 (Tuesday, March 6, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H2167-H2168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       FIRST COOLING, NOW WARMING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 4, 2007, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STEARNS. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
  My colleagues, here is a quote from a Newsweek article: ``There are 
ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change 
dramatically, and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in 
food production, with

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serious political implications for about every nation on Earth. The 
drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from 
now.''
  My colleagues, Newsweek published this dire warning in its April 28, 
1975 issue, years before global warming began getting the headlines it 
does today.
  Did Newsweek accurately forecast the coming of global warming more 
than 30 years ago? No. The article entitled ``The Cooling World'' 
warned that the Earth's climate seemed to be cooling to the point that 
populations around the world are in imminent danger because of the 
coming ice age.
  Newsweek was not the only publication to warn about the supposed 
threat of global cooling during the 1970s. In an article entitled 
``Another Ice Age?'' the June 24, 1974 issue of Time reported: ``When 
meteorologists take an average temperature around the globe, they find 
that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past 
three decades.'' And Time's article did not predict a break in this 
decade-long cooling trend.
  The article continued to warn that ``telltale signs were everywhere, 
from the unexpected persistence and thickness of packed ice in the 
waters around Iceland to the southward migration of warm-loving 
creatures like the armadillo from the Midwest.''
  Fortune magazine also gave warning. A February 1974 article entitled 
``Ominous Changes in the World's Weather'' claimed that ``there is a 
fair agreement among researchers that the earth is now heading very 
slowly into another major ice age, such as the one that brought the 
glaciers deep into North America before it retreated some 10,000 years 
ago.''
  This article also pointed to the supposedly unusual weather patterns 
of the day as indication of much worse weather to come: 
``Climatologists now blame those recurring droughts and floods on a 
global cooling trend. It could bring massive tragedies for mankind.''
  These days, of course, we no longer hear much, if anything, about the 
possibility of runaway global cooling triggering another ice age. 
Instead, we hear a lot about the threat of catastrophic global warming. 
Now, what happened? Well, the temperature trend changed. After dropping 
for about 35 years, the temperature started to rise in the mid 
seventies, although the global temperature now is only slightly higher 
than it was in the 1940s when the cooling trend began.
  Over the centuries and millennia, the weather has changed, at times 
radically. During the 10th century, the Vikings established prosperous 
colonies in Greenland, having named the island for its lush pastures. 
By the early 15th century, however, these were wiped out by cold and 
hunger, and now four-fifths of Greenland lies buried under hundreds of 
feet of ice cap. No one blamed human activity for this climate shift or 
the ice age.
  But in the seventies, some experts argued that human impact on the 
environment had grown to the point where their atmospheric pollutants 
were contributing significantly to global cooling, just as some experts 
argue that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are 
causing global warming today.
  Climatologists suggested that dust and other particles released into 
the atmosphere as a result of farming and the burning of fossil fuels 
were blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the 
surface of the Earth. They projected that man's potential to pollute 
would increase six- to eightfold over the next 50 years. And as Reid 
Bryson stated in Fortune in February 1974, ``It is something that, if 
it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the Earth, like 
a billion people starving.''
  Another of the concerned scientists was Dr. Stephen Schneider, the 
co-author of the Science report, who in the seventies was worried about 
the threat of global cooling. Now at Stanford University, Dr. Schneider 
not only sees things differently but is considered one of the leading 
experts now sounding the alarm about global warming. In a recent MSNBC 
report, Dr. Schneider argued that today's warming trend ``has been 
induced by humans using the atmosphere as a free place to dump our 
tailpipe waste.'' However, not everyone sounded the alarm about global 
cooling in the seventies, just like not everyone is sounding the alarm 
about global warming today.
  Madam Speaker, the fact that so many experts were wrong about global 
cooling in the seventies does not necessarily mean that they are wrong 
about global warming today, but it does at least show that experts are 
sometimes incredibly, incredibly wrong.

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