Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I think we've made some progress on the global warming debate recently as both sides seem to have made some small concessions to reality.

One the anti-global warming side, it's always struck us as deliberately argumentative when people attempted to call into question whether there was some planetary warming going on. Whether you take atmospheric measures or attribute some of the warming to the urban heat island effect, it seems to me that disputing the fact the planetary temperatures have been trending warmer is not the place where you want to build your climate change Maginot line.

On the pro-global warming side, Newsweek acknowledged this week that the track record of forecasting climate change is not anything that is going to make the highlight film of Greatest Scientific Predictions of the Last 100 Years. Well, at least, they kind of tried. Sort of.

Newsweek described a 1975 article they published like this: "Citing 'ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,' the magazine warned of an impending 'drastic decline in food production.' Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect 'just about every nation on earth.' Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action ..." Some people might have considered this as a sincere, if somewhat belated, retraction by Newsweek.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. In the very next paragraph Newsweek asserts "the story wasn't 'wrong' in the journalistic sense of 'inaccurate.'"

I didn't major in journalism, so I can't profess to knowing what constitutes being "wrong" in a "journalistic sense," but it seems to me that if something you predicted "didn't happen" then you were pretty much "wrong" in whatever sense you want to use that word.

Clearer than anything, this illustrates the chasm between science and crisis journalism.

In science, if you predict that when you drop a rock it will float in the air and it subsequently doesn't, you are pronounced "wrong."

In journalism, this was simply a case where you had a good theory but the theory is being falsely maligned by special interests beholden to powerful corporations that have vested agenda in promoting the continual belief in gravity.

Okay, you're right. I was being too optimistic....

Link to the story is here: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15391426/site/newsweek