An interesting little nugget

Drudge links to a cool Newsweek story debuning its famous "New Ice Age" article from 1975. It back peddles the issue by trying make it sound like the article slipped in on a lark and wasn't widely believed, and even it it was it wasn't technically "wrong":

But is that the right lesson to draw? How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen—even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov—saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production. After all, Ice Ages were common in Earth's history; if anything, the warm "interglacial" period in which human civilization evolved, and still exists, is the exception.

That's got to be one of the greatest weasel sentences I've read in awhile.

But the best portion comes at the end:

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.

Anyone want to wager on the percentage of the people who made the first prediction also made the second? And want to double down on the percentage of those who are making the prediction today about global warming also pining for the latter outcome?