The Ghost of Chicken Littles Past

The next time somebody comes to you with a dire prediction about the effects of global warming, remember this.

"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 serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
- "The Cooling World": From Newsweek, April 28, 1975, as reprinted in this morning's Washington Times.

We all should do what we can to protect the environement, but not in the name of alarmist, reactionary environmental concerns. Clean air and clean water is good, as we have seen with the air that is cleaner than it has ever been in modern times. But as we can see from this Newsweek story, scientists are sometimes wrong, and doing something for the sake of doing something often can take us in the wrong direction.