Instagram fact-checks climate change post showing the movement's inconsistencies: British anti-radical political commentator Maajid Nawaz posted a meme graphic depicting Time Magazine covers that showed the 1970s climate change activists' concerns for global cooling alongside late 1980s and early 2000s covers with headlines about "global warming." Instagram slapped an interstitial over the post and labeled it "false information," citing a Climate Feedback fact-check that was published to debunk a completely different post. The fact-check pointed out that one of the four global cooling covers had been photoshopped with a new headline. Instead of reading "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" (April 1977), the actual cover read "The Global Warming Survival Guide" (April 2007). While it's true that one of the four 1970s Time Magazine covers was inaccurately represented, the actual cover only supports the point that the meme was trying to make. The fact-checker also omitted the fact that Time published the three real 1970s global cooling cover stories depicted in the meme, in Dec. 1973, Jan. 1977 and Dec. 1979. A blog called Patriot Post supported the post's claim in its documentation of 71 similar global cooling articles published by many different outlets and covering every year of the 1970s. At the very end of the fact-check, Climate Feedback admitted that "from the 1940s to the 1970s, the global surface temperature decreased very slightly" and that "a minority of scientists predicted that the cooling effect from increasing aerosols would continue to outweigh the warming effect from increasing greenhouse gasses and that the climate would continue to cool."
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