Tornadoes Absolutely Caused by Global Warming. Or Cooling. Or Something.

Earlier this week, buried in all of the hoopla over dead terrorist related news, Jeff Dunetz stumbled across one of the more amusing stories to be seen recently on a not very amusing subject. Both Time Magazine and Newsweek have apparently attributed the huge outbreak of tornadoes this Spring to global warming. That part isn’t a surprise. But the publications have something else in common. As Jeff explains, there was a time when they blamed similar outbreaks on something slightly different. (Original link from Thomas Nelson.)

Inevitably the devastating tornadoes that killed more than 300 people in the US prompted Newsweek to ask: “Is global warming responsible for wild weather?” The answer, it found, is “yes”.

Another Newsweek article cited “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded”, killing “more than 300 people”, as among “the ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically”. But that article was published on April 28, 1975, when Newsweek listed the US tornado disaster of 1974 as one of the harbingers of disastrous global cooling, heralding the approach of a new ice age.

From there we move to the pages of the other well known periodical.

But on the other side of NY City, lives the dean of newsweeklies, Time who has has been owned by the same company since it began publishing almost 90 years ago.

In a story about the coming ice age on June 24, 1974 the magazine reported:

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds — the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.

There’s plenty more after that. For those with a darker sense of humor, stop by and check out the rest of this remarkable scientific study.

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