So? Which Is It?

1975 Newsweek article

An April 28, 1975 article in Newsweek magazine. Titled "The Cooling World," it pointed to "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change" and pointed to "a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968." However, the Newsweek article did not make "environmentalist" claims regarding the cause of that drop. To the contrary, it stated that "what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery" and cited the NAS conclusion that "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions." Rather than proposing environmentalist solutions, the Newsweek article suggested that "simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies" would be appropriate

In the late 1970s there were several popular (and melodramatic) books on the topic, including The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age (review in Nature by Stephen Schneider).

However, on October 23, 2006, Newsweek issued a correction, over 31 years after the original article, stating that it had been "so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future" (although editor Jerry Adler claimed that the article was not "inaccurate" in a journalistic sense)

I'd write a "Karen says" item here, but frankly, it occurs to me that my lifetime is such a micro-drop of water in the Universe of time oceans, I can't draw any conclusions at all. I've seen so little of eternity, how am I to make predictions?