As recent events have proven, nothing gets out the vote like good ol' fashioned scaremongering. If only we could go back to that grand era when men were men, voting was exclusively for men, and every politician was an honest man. Or, failing that, only a small-time crook. But it turns out that nostalgia isn't always trustworthy ...

5 "Global Cooling" Is Based On Shoddy Reporting From The 1970s

If you haven't heard of "global cooling" by now, congratulate yourself on avoiding some of the dumbest corners of the internet. Global cooling is the idea that not only is climate change wrong, it's so wrong that the world is going in the opposite direction. As in, humans destroying the environment is the only thing saving us from another ice age. It's the pseudoscientific equivalent of a Jaden Smith tweet: "How can global warming be real if it's cold outside in winter?"

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Donald Trump said: "You look back and they were calling it global cooling and global warming and global everything," because he has the best words. According to Politico (citing four White House sources), deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland recently printed out a Time magazine cover about global cooling from 1977, and served it as part of Trump's daily cocktail of reassuring news. Before the president could tweet about it, however, staffers found out that it was in fact a shitty meme using a fake cover (Time covers didn't even look like that in the '70s).

Not Time Magazine, Time Maagazine

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And because nothing makes sense anymore, global coolists(?) also include folks on the United States House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The official Twitter account of the Committee linked to a Breitbart article promoting the cooling "theory," which was essentially rephrased from another article by The Daily Mail. You know, a tabloid. That piece itself riffed on a "consensus" of scientists from the 1970s that the world was definitely getting colder. As you've probably guessed if you're even passably familiar with The Daily Mail's idea of journalism, said consensus didn't exist, and it was actually the opposite.

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The supposed consensus boiled down to "only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming," which whiz kids at home will recognize as an "anti-consensus." Plus, most of those articles didn't even make long-term predictions. One of the most frequently lauded articles by the global cooling crowd is a 1975 Newsweek cover story by Peter Gwynne titled "Cooling World." But according to Gwynne himself, "My 1975 'Cooling World' story doesn't make today's climate scientists wrong ... It's time for deniers of human-caused global warming to stop using an old magazine story against climate scientists." Well, someone earned himself a ban from the president's daily news pile.