On this day, April 28 1975, Newsweek ran a story ”The Cooling World” (pdf here) based on the idea that an ice age was imminent because of the amount of particulates thrown up into the atmosphere.
It wasn’t alone in this – The previous year (June 24, 1974) Time had an article titled “Another Ice Age?” which said “the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades” but noted that “Some scientists… think that the cooling trend may be only temporary.”
These articles have been used ever since, as the part of the myth that, in the 1970s, “all scientists were convinced that an ice age was coming. And therefore, carbon dioxide build-up is just the latest iteration of a scare that we need to pay no attention to.” This idea has faded somewhat in mainstream culture, but it still persists in the nuttier corners of the internet.
What we learn is that journalism around climate is very difficult because the issues are very complex, and that people choose not to accept the journalists and scientists can get it wrong and change their mind because they are looking to have a gotcha moment.
Why this matters.
Denialists have kept using it.
What happened next?
Denialists kept using it
See also:
The original author, Peter Gwynne, writing in 2014
Scientific American in 2015 – For Its 40th Birthday, Let’s Retire Newsweek’s Global Cooling Story
Wikipedia on Global Cooling.