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In the 1970s, we were regularly being told to worry about a coming ice age. I can remember reading about it in Weekly Reader. Time magazine ran this story, right, in 1979. Here’s the introduction to a 1978 documentary warning us about it. And here’s a whole boatload of other predictions from the ’70s assuring us that we were facing serious cooling.

Then everything switched. The popular theory was suddenly that we faced global warming. We were told over and over again that the science was settled and decided. The Earth was warming up — and it was the burning of fossil fuels that was responsible. We must change our standard of living and quit using so much energy.

Those who dared to question the “scientific consensus” were labeled “deniers” in order to shame them by lumping them in with Holocaust deniers.

The only problem is that reality hasn’t matched the predictions. Climate scientists — still wedded to their dear theory — are struggling now to explain why warming isn’t happening as their models predicted.

And now Russian scientists are claiming that we could face a cooling period for the next 200 to 250 years.

I don’t have a clue what the climate is going to do. I really don’t. But I do know that the people loudly telling us what’s going to happen have no credibility, as far as I’m concerned. When predictions change this much over a 40-year period, it’s impossible to have confidence in the people making the predictions. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people or that they have poor intentions.

But it does mean that they’re making predictions with a level of certainty that just isn’t possible.

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Only 10 days after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, ugly partisan politics is taking the story over. Some in Congress are starting to openly blame the Obama administration for not keeping the country safe. The head of the CIA quickly fired back, essentially saying, “Hey, don’t blame us.” And there’s NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying we’ll have to give up more individual rights (and add more surveillance cameras) to make everyone safe.

The truth is that perfect security is impossible. Even in a totalitarian society, attacks can happen every now and then. But in a free society, we have to tolerate even more risk. It’s just part of the trade-off of remaining mostly free.

You are going to die one of these days, and I am, too. Every one of us will. I might live to be 120 years old or I might be killed in a car accident later today. We just don’t know. We can take reasonable steps to minimize the dangers we face, but we can’t eliminate risks. It’s literally impossible.

So if perfect security is impossible, why are politicians arguing about it? And why is the media filled with so much news of terror that it scares so many people?

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Five years ago. Barack Obama was running for president for the first time. George W. Bush was president, and Obama was running as the anti-Bush. Everything about his pitch to voters was essentially, “Bush has messed everything up, so I’m going to give you hope and change by doing everything differently.”

Five years later, what’s really different?

Bush supporters would protest that Obama is far worse than their man. They have a visceral hatred for Obama, because he represents everything they hate. They see Bush as tough-minded and patriotic, whereas they see Obama as a weak peacenik who’s giving everything to welfare recipients.

Obama supporters also protest, because they are certain that Bush was far worse than the man they saw as a savior. They saw Bush as stupid and war-like, whereas they see Obama as smart and kind-hearted. They see Bush as hateful to minorities and immigrants, but Obama is generous and is a leader who represents the country’s best values.

When it comes to actual governing and results, both groups are wrong. If you ignore their rhetoric to their own parties’ voters, you find they have much more in common that you’d think. I’ve been saying this for years, but people in the mainstream of the political system are now saying the same thing.

In a new article from the Associated Press this week, there’s a look at how these two men who are so different in ideology, personality and so forth have ended up with such similar policies.

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