Climate “skeptics” have latched on to a myth that scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s. However, as even a Fox News anchor pointed out in 2006, there was never a consensus on cooling in the 1970s the same way there currently is on global warming -- in fact, the majority of the scientific literature at the time was predicting warming. Yet that hasn't stopped Fox from regurgitating this myth ad nauseum:

While some on Fox News have claimed that “global cooling was the consensus” in the 1970s to dismiss the current climate science consensus in its entirety, a realistic examination of the scientific literature shows the opposite is true. In 2006, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) took a look at published papers from the 1970s and found that a consensus around global warming -- not cooling -- was beginning to emerge. Of 71 peer reviewed studies on climate change from 1965 to 1979, only seven articles predicted global cooling -- less than ten percent -- while well over half (44 studies) predicted global warming. Even 40 years ago, predictions of global cooling were only on the fringe of climate science.

There were indeed a couple of magazine articles published in that era that overhyped theories of “global cooling,” but they were cherry-picking the science. For instance, Newsweek ran a nine-paragraph, back-page article titled “The Cooling World” in 1975 and Time magazine ran an article titled “Another Ice Age?” in 1974. Despite these magazine articles' infamy among climate “skeptics,” they never made the cover as Fox News or internet hoaxes would have you believe.

If there was a global cooling “scare,” it was more of a media wrongdoing than a failure of scientists.

Time's Bryan Walsh accurately summarized the situation:

The reality is that scientists in the 1970s were just beginning to understand how climate change and aerosol pollution might impact global temperatures. Add in the media-hype cycle -- which was true then as it is now -- and you have some coverage that turned out to be wrong. But thanks to the Internet, those stories stay undead, recycled by notorious climate skeptics like George Will. Pay no attention to the Photoshop. It's the science we should heed -- and the science says man-made climate change is real and very, very worrying.

The video in this report was created by Coleman Lowndes and John Kerr with voiceover by Todd Gregory.