This and that: Hogan's record, ND musical, climate alarmists

Congratulations to Mark Hogan, Southeast Missouri State University baseball coach, upon becoming the winningest baseball coach in the school's history.

His mentor and coach (a few years earlier) was also my high school baseball and basketball coach and mentor. Coach "Tiger" Uhls also taught me how to play the harmonica and deal with normal teen issues of leadership.

One of the great recruiting tools at SEMO is the Joe Uhls classy locker facilities for the baseball team. Coach Hogan's team this year is off to a great conference start tied for first with a 7-2 record after a great 2-1 series split with then-leading Jacksonville State on Friday and Saturday.

Likability is one of Coach Hogan's personal characteristics to go along with his baseball knowledge.

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"My Fair Lady," one of my favorite stage musicals, starts Thursday at Notre Dame Regional High School, home of many outstanding productions in the past.

Today's youths, being exposed to television performances, are much better than the thespians of my high school years. Then all college and high school productions had prompters sitting in the wings to pass forgotten lines to many an amateur, with noticeable audience awareness.

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Old habits die hard: The Senate Democrats writing their first budget resolution since winning control in Congress last fall, have produced a budget blueprint that raises taxes by $900 billion over five years and a projected $3.3 trillion over 10 years, [which] translates into a tax increase of $2,641 per household annually over the next decade. -- Heritage Foundation

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The record-breaking cold weather last weekend was an inconvenient truth to those global-warming advocates who have used current weather to support their premise, something which neither side should do.

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What is it with climate alarmists? The New York Times' headline read: "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise."

Well, what's so new about that? The Times has been having a historic fit about global warming for years, hasn't it? Yes, but that particular headline ran in the good gray Times on March 27, 1933 -- 73 years ago. What's more, the Times changed its mind dramatically on the subject 42 years later, in 1975, when it startled its readers May 21 with "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable."

Nor has the Times been the only major periodical to blow hot and cold (if you will forgive me) on the subject of the global climate. On Jan. 2, 1939, Time magazine announced that "Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right. ... Weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer."

Yet Time scooped the New York Times by nearly a year when, reversing itself, it warned readers on June 24, 1974, "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."

Today, of course, Time has changed its mind again and joined the global-warming hysteria. On April 3 this year, it announced that "By Any Measure, Earth is At ... The Tipping Point. The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame."

The last major attack of hysteria, in the mid-1970s, focused on the peril of global cooling, and was especially severe. Fortune magazine declared in February 1974: "As for the present cooling trend, a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed. It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world, and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude." Fortune's analysis was so impressive that it actually won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics.

But the prize for sheer terrorizing surely belonged to Lowell Ponte, whose 1976 book "The Cooling" (a predecessor of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," though from the opposite point of view) asserted that "[t]he cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations."

If countermeasures weren't taken, Ponte warned, it would lead to "world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000."

All of the above quotations, and many more, can be found in a wonderful new booklet by R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor of the Business & Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va. Entitled "Fire and Ice," it quotes alarmist predictions of both global warming and a new ice age dating back to 1895. The authors identify no fewer than four swings of scientific opinion, with considerable overlapping, from global cooling (1895-1931) to global warming (1929-1969) to global cooling (1954-1976) and now back to global warming (1981 to the present). The booklet can also be read for its sheer entertainment value.

(I particularly liked the anecdote about the penguin found in France in 1922, which was widely viewed as an "ice-age harbinger," though wiser heads concluded it had probably escaped from the ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.)

The booklet notes sensibly: "Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn't mean scientists concur that mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear."

And in its wisest paragraph it concludes: "This isn't a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science." But if you're looking for a new career, here's a hint: "Global warming is a good business to be in for government funding. More than 99.5 percent of American climate change funding comes from the government, which spends $4 billion per year on climate change research." -- William Rusher

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.