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Peter Gwynne, author of the 'The Cooling World', Newsweek 1975
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Peter Gwynne, author of 1975 Newsweek article, "The Cooling World"
One of the main pillars of global warming denial rests on the shoulders of “The Cooling World” by Peter Gwynne in the April 28, 1975 issueof Newsweek. Interest in the 34 year old story prompted the editor to call it “the most-cited single-page story in our history.” The editor then noted, “Global warming soon led scientists to put such concerns aside, but those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 NEWSWEEK piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.”
George Will has invoked the story at least five times in his columns; it has been used by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to The Economist, and Dennis Miller even brought a copy of the magazine on the Tonight Show. And, according to Gwynne, I am the second person in the last 34 years to ask the author specifically about the piece. He responded by email:
Thank you for your note. You've hit on a point that has bugged me for a few years now, ever since I learned that the deniers of global warming were using my Newsweek piece to support their position. As you correctly point out, the article summarized the science of the time. Since then, numerous climate-sensing satellites have gone into orbit and theoretical understanding of atmospheric chemistry has improved considerably. I have occasionally thought of publishing an update to the article, but I’ve always decided that such an action would garner unwanted notoriety without changing any minds.
So, we decided it was about time to take another look at this article, and ask where Gwynne might have gone wrong, if at all.
Gwynne, who got his BA and MA in metallurgy from Oxford, was the Associate Editor and then Science Editor for Newsweek from 1968-1981, and contributed to their television and radio programs. He was Managing Editor of Technology Review, Senior Editor of High Technology, and Editor of The Scientist, Asia Technology, European Computer Sources and Photonics Spectra. He is currently the North American correspondent for Physics World, and he has won awards for his science reporting from the American Chemical Society and Aviation/Space Writers Association.
He is most proud of a cover story on Albert Einstein in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the physicist’s birth that he “had to go down to the mat against a cover on disco dancing to get that into the magazine.”
Yet, it is the “Cooling” story that has gotten the most attention. “I think it was brought to my attention maybe five years ago,” Gwynne says. “I don’t know how long it was going on.”
“As I recall, there were a few people around and general announcements in the journals,” Gwynne said. “It followed a complicated winter, where temperature in Anchorage was above that in Miami, and that sort of set us thinking, so I started looking at the literature and talking to some of the people in the field.” From that, he says, he says he did indeed find that at least the majority in the climatology business did think the world was cooling, so he got the bureau in Newsweek to talk to people involved which was a typical way of doing things at the time. Bureau reporters did some of the longer interviews.
Gwynne doesn’t have a problem with Newsweek’s revisit the article that declared, “the story wasn't ‘wrong’ in the journalistic sense of ‘inaccurate.’" Indeed, at the time, not only were there some papers suggesting cooling, but the Earth had been cooling from the 40s through the 70s.
Gwynne says, “It was at the time an accurate representation of what was going on in the field. It was an accurate representation of what climatologists believed, and what was actually happening.”
William Connolley at RealClimate.org found the correction “self serving”: “Whilst the article does manage to reference the NAS report [which states climate at the current understanding is unpredictable], it does so in a minor paragraph - the headline and most text implies cooling and severe problems with the food supply.”
Gwynne remembers there were studies that demonstrated concern about the food supply. “Again, it was not any sort of immediate concern the way global warming is now,” he says.
In grand scheme of things, the cooling was just an interesting little weather story that quickly disappeared. “I don’t think at the time anybody took all that much notice of it because it didn’t portend all the impending disaster the way global warming now does,” Gwynne says.
If Gwynne had it to do over again, is there anything he would have changed?
“I think possibly the only thing would be to add, ‘These things are never fixed in stone, the fact that there has been cooling in the early part of the century doesn’t mean that will continue,’ but I could have written that on the end of any science story I ever wrote. That’s kind of the nature of science and that’s why I ultimately decided not to do it.”
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