Newsweek's Prophetess of Doom Wonders 'Why We Were So Stupid'

Some journalists are so confident that we're already cooked by global warming that they're scolding ignorant Americans in advance for all the now-unpreventable doom that's coming our way. Newsweek's Sharon Begley rings in the new year by shaking her head at the Stupid, Soon to Be Overheated Majority and how we'll have to adapt to being cooked:

As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating....

It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt." The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.

I'd love to see Begley face the idea that news magazines and other scientific sages saw the opposite weather threat in the 1970s. As R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor laid out in the Business and Media Institute report Fire and Ice:

Weather warnings in the ’70s from “reputable researchers” worried policy-makers so much that scientists at a National Academy of Sciences meeting “proposed the evacuation of some six million people” from parts of Africa, reported the Times on Dec. 29, 1974. 

That article went on to tell of the costly and unnecessary plans of the old Soviet Union. It diverted time from Cold War activities to scheme about diverting the coming cold front. 

It had plans to reroute “large Siberian rivers, melting Arctic ice and damming the Bering Strait” to help warm the “frigid fringes of the Soviet Union.” 

Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” noted climatologists’ admission that “solutions” to global cooling “such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,” could result in more problems than they would solve.