Last week, Craig Rucker, a climate-change skeptic and the executive director of a nonprofit organization called the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), tweeted a quotation supposedly taken from a 1922 edition of the Washington Post: “Within a few years it is predicted due to ice melt the sea will rise & make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” The intent, of course, was to poke fun at current headlines about climate change.
... Rucker himself is part of a network of bloggers, op-ed writers, and policy-shop executives who argue that climate change is either a hoax or an example of left-wing hysteria. Surfacing old newspaper clips is one of their favorite games....But why did Rucker bother to flack the Post piece,when this1932 New York Times lede reads like a disaster movie trailer:
‘Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace...palms and alligators would flourish at the poles... races of men... wiped out because the climate changed... inedible vermin took the place of the animals that were hunted'
Wherever the Times got the architecturally dubious idea of deep sixing Buckingham Palace, the meme has proved durable:
