The great global cooling myth and the politics of science.(COMMENTARY)

Those who follow the political debates over climate change may have heard about a March 1975 article in the venerable Science News that predicted the coming of "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Douglas 1975). Over the years, the quote has taken on a starring role in arguments against those who believe humans are causing global warming. If scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age, the argument goes, how can their forecasts of greenhouse warming today be trusted?

The "full-blown 10,000-year ice age" quote made its most recent appearance in February 2009 in a Washington Post column by George Will (Will 2009), but it is only the latest of many occurrences, in various forms, since at least the early 1990s.

It is a rhetorically effective argument, widely deployed by global warming skeptics: "Before we are stampeded into growth-inhibiting actions to combat global warming, we should recall that less than twenty years ago, not long in a planet's life, the politically correct panic concerned global cooling," Will wrote in one of the quote's first incarnations (Will 1992). …