In preparing for a talk I’m giving Monday to a couple of classes at the University of New Mexico, I went looking for examples from the BlogoWorld of people citing the old “’70’s global cooling consensus” canard.

It’s a version of my usual talk on the science->media->public brain interface, but I wanted to add the story of our BAMS paper debunking the whole global cooling myth. It’s a great example of what happens when science, all pretty and innocent, wanders out into the scary world where zombies wander the vast plains of politics.

In the past, it was a trivial google exercise, to find someone who believes the myth and quotes it. What I found this morning instead was a whole bunch of people quoting our paper. There were a few half-hearted attempts to debunk it (see here for my favorite definitive explanation of why black really is white), but my temporally selected sample seems to suggest that our meme seems largely to be sticking.

Could this really be true? In invite your counter-examples.