Peter Dykstra reports that Senator Ted Cruz matter-of-factly told an interviewer that he just happened to glance at a four-decade-old article from Newsweek that very morning. He took a piece by veteran science reporter Peter Gwynne on the then-topical prospect of a cooling Earth and wove a conspiratorial tale that climate science is a Trojan horse for government control of the energy sector. Cruz, a declared 2016 Presidential contender, also compared himself to Galileo.
So rack up another score for the infamous global cooling piece, which celebrates its 40th birthday today. Surely no brief, and by all rights obscure, work of magazine journalism has given such durable service to the distortion of science.
Newsweek was not the only organization that reported the uptick in scientific interest in the potential cooling of the Earth. Among others, Time, Science Digest, The New York Times and even Walter Cronkite, The Most Trusted Man in America, ran with the story. But the coverage was fleeting, and when advancing science failed to back up the cooling speculation, the theory melted away, everywhere except in the echo chamber of conservative media, where the global cooling story still resides.
It is more of an article of faith than a science article, and Cruz is far from alone in citing it as if it were state-of-the-art analysis. Rush Limbaugh is a frequent flyer on the Newsweek story, making the common error of promoting it to a cover story while it was actually a single-page, nine-paragraph piece on page 64. Apparently, Newsweek editors regarded the imminent collapse of South Vietnam as a bigger deal.
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