(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: The alarmists were predicting the onset of an ice age in the '70s. Now it's too much warming! Why should we believe them this time?
Answer: It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.
Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.
In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.
Quite simply, there is no comparison.
If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.
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Comments
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Zarkov Posted 9:01 am
24 Nov 2006
One must throw the bones many times over a long period of time to find the meaning of the perceived trends.. Even today the picture is still very very confused, and to actually pick what will happen on some time line is still impossible.
For all that, the process is slow, and no doubt it will oscillate for our good and our bad...... the only real problem will be the survival reaction by various badly affected groups of people, and how they are treated by the "well, we are OK mob".
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Coby Beck Posted 2:24 pm
24 Nov 2006
Two problems: not all opinions are equal and reality is not a matter of opinion.
Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever!
-- Anonymous
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SMLowry Posted 12:53 am
25 Nov 2006
I also remember during that same time frame having arguments with some extreme new age folks about creatiing your own reality. They actually did believe that reality was a matter of opinion and had all kinds of "reasons" why that was the case. Unfortunately they fell short on helping me to understand how that could be true when all of our realities intersect in the "real world" and most people seem to agree on what theat "real world" looks like. I kind of thought all those folks were debunked. Oh well . . .
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Deborah Byrd Posted 11:00 pm
25 Nov 2006
So ... yes ... in the 1970s, scientists were predicting a coming ice age. That was a big deal back then, to be able to predict that. But the ice age was predicted to come in about 10,000 years. Not immediately.
At the same time, in the 1970s, some scientists were already discussing global warming as a real possibility for the immediate future.
So there's been no shift in scientists' opinions. Those who suggest such a shift are distorting history. There's been only increasing understanding - a steady progression of understanding - about the seriousness of global warming in 21st century and beyond.
Deborah Byrd
Earth & Sky
"A Clear Voice for Science"
Deborah Byrd
Earth & Sky Radio Series
"A clear voice for science."
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Zarkov Posted 9:59 am
26 Nov 2006
Let us compress that to 100 years... and lasting for 10,000 years.
mmmh, cool
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fatboye Posted 7:02 am
07 Dec 2006
In the 1970's there was no internet. TIME and Newsweek, who both ran stories on the global cooling myth, were the major source of (written) news for much of America outside of the local paper.
To this day, the masses do not read scientific journals, they read what the popular press writes about those journals.
There can be no "avalanche" if there is no snow.
Also in the 1970's there was no talk radio, and it did not occur to many Americans that the media had a left leaning agenda. Now there is another side to listen to. That's why the pace has been stepped up by the left. They are turning up the volume to drown out the other side.
The United Nations was busy actually sending forces places in the 1970's, namely the Middle East. Now they worry about myths and lies like global warming instead of sending EFFECTIVE forces to Africa to stop the slaughter. Kofi is a race-traitor, a criminal and an anti-semite.
The G8 started in 1975, with France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US only. They were not coming together to start talking about the enviorment, they were coming together to talk about macroeconomic management and international trade. That's a more recent topic for them to be taking on.
That's why there were no "summits" or "teaties" or "commissions".......
Now that everyone is so hell-bent on destroying Isreal or the United States or both, the global warming farce is a nice distraction. It demoralizes Americans who buy into it, and it's easier to control a demoralized person. It sets people up to tear down the American economy, thinking they are doing "good". It gives useless, spineless people like Al Gore an income. It breeds hate and discontent.
Most importantly, and what is the saddest thing, it removes people from WANTING to help with REAL and local enviormental problems. Rational and intelligent people who would be most "green" can't
stomach the thought of working with people who lie for a living.
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awareness Posted 11:23 am
30 Jan 2007
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Bruupo Posted 6:30 am
08 Feb 2007
We cleaned the soot out of the air in relatively short order because it was so relatively simple to do, one of those things industry could have been doing all along without dire consequences. Of course, they didn't, because there were pennies to be saved and capitalism's short term goals are always opposed to long term environmental goals without Gov't intervention.
Now that there is less particulate matter in the air, the CO2 greenhouse phenomenon is accelerated and more noticeable, and there are scientists who believe reflecting sunlight through high altitude emission of sulfur dioxide may be the only way to reverse the process.
Was the theory all the rage in the 1970's, was it on every channel like global warming is now? Who cares, they were right then and they are right now. The thing no one here seems to remember is that in between 1970 and now there has been a whole lot of ACTION, not just idle theorizing. Namely, the Clean Air Act, and you can visibly trace back the date it was passed in the layers of antartic ice cores.
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GreggC Posted 12:18 pm
15 Feb 2007
On the negative side, it fails to transfer vast quantities of wealth from industrial nations to the third world, fails to demonize the US, and it forces the ecologists to fabricate another crisis that will doom the world unless we act now.
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actorkent Posted 7:18 am
15 Mar 2007
the quote above "Of course, they didn't, because there were pennies to be saved and capitalism's short term goals are always opposed to long term environmental goals without Gov't intervention" is especially egregious. What you are saying sir is that you want people like George bush in CHARGE of controling pollution.. yet you HATE the guy. The only answer government can provide to pollution is honoring laws regarding private property. Government is inherently evil and the governments of the USSR and CHINA show the disdain they have for the environment. People who OWN things care about them and will protect them.
Take your socialist ideas and show me how it will produce honest, trustworthy politicians. THAT has not been produced anywhere on the planet YET.
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David Roberts Posted 7:28 am
15 Mar 2007
www.grist.org
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Dirck the Noorman Posted 7:47 am
11 Apr 2007
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
"A minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century."
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies -- often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival."
Dr. Paul Ehrlich is alive and well today, preaching in climate change hysteria. He still hates capitalism, America, and people in general. Climate change has given him a perfect new platform.
http://tinyurl.com/2wae7j
The impact of that hysteria was very real. In 1979 China imposed the 'One-Child' policy. This was an enormous curtailment of the most basic human rights, yet it was (and still is) generally applauded by overpopulation hysteria enthusiasts in the West - including many scientists. In practice the policy was enforced almost exclusively on non-Han peasants - a sort of preemptive ethnic cleansing.
One more point - the portion of society now most excited by climate hysteria was busy doing other things pre-1990 to be worried about the latest scientific catastrophe theory. Many trustifarians, celebrities, grasping bureaucrats, anti-capitalists, et cetera were ranting, marching, screeching in favor of bringing the blessings of communism to the world at large. By the fall of the Berlin Wall it became clear that their ideas had lead to the deaths of 100s of millions, and their dream of government control over everyone's lives was not such a good one. Along came climate change, and they changed some of their signs but kept the same core message.
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Mmimika Posted 8:05 am
11 Apr 2007
Don't tell me y'all didn't get snowed with the marketing on this one in other parts of the country... I swear, there was one week this spring the whole stupid city was abuzz about 'the Secret' and 'the Law of Attraction' and how they were going to use their thoughts to attract a new, mostly wealthier, reality to themselves.
Dummies...
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Alastair Posted 7:49 am
18 May 2007
Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.
The problem with that is that you are talking about the concensus of many people who may be self proclaimed "experts" but the reality is that they are not really experts at all. The real definition of an expert in such an enormously complex subject such as global climate is in fact very narrow and is strictly limited to climatologists only and possibly even narrower than that, climatologists that are specialised in certain area of climatology. You see all sorts of non-climatologists in the media talking about "global warming". These people might specialise in fields like geology, oceanography or cosmology. Such people should not be considered true "experts" in this complex subject yet these are the very people that are considered amongst the 2500 leading scientists. I'm not a climatologist myself however I do have a Masters degree in engineering and have published articles in scientific journals. I am therefore well aware that people specialise in very narrow fields and that it only takes a small deviation from this narrow field to no longer be an expert.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:55 am
18 May 2007
Meanwhile, the ammount of evidence that points towards the opposite is largely disproven, or unverified.
It's not so much the number of scientists as it is the overwhelming weight of credible evidence.
And the overwhelming lack of credible evidence from skeptics.
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Coby Beck Posted 9:59 am
19 May 2007
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html
American Meteorological Society (AMS): http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/jointacademies.html
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS): http://www.cmos.ca/climatechangepole.html
Every major scientific institution dealing with climate, ocean, and/or atmosphere agrees that the climate is warming rapidly and the primary cause is human CO2 emissions.
"What if this weren't a hypothetical question?"
-- unknown
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Delay And Deny Posted 11:35 am
19 May 2007
As the book "Where's My Jetpack?" illustrates, taking a current trend and extrapolating it linearly forever is usually a bad idea.
In the 1970s they extrapolated the cooling curve when it had started heating again. Now the climate modelers are doing the same, extrapolating a heating curve ad infinitum and creating false linkages to CO2 to justify those projections.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 11:37 am
19 May 2007
Really? I don't think so...I have yet to see many, in fact none really, individual scientists willing to stake their names and their tenure on the Global Warming Scam.
The IPCC is an umbrella that can conveniently hide responsibility and fudge data so that they can get funding.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 11:38 am
19 May 2007
Ever since the Club of Rome these same people have been mau-mau'ing for supper by presenting one crises after another.
That's why I call them Crypto-Malthusians. The Global Warmers are anti-human, anti-progress and pro-tree frog.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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carboncat Posted 10:38 am
03 Sep 2007
Yet you, and others, dismiss it so quickly that it seems like more of an inconvenience to be smoothed over. You're in too much of a rush to despatch the global cooling annoyance, and not ready to really sit back and take a neutral, disinterested look at what's going on here.
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:53 pm
03 Sep 2007
http://greyfalcon.net/lindzencooling.png
http://greyfalcon.net/cooling
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Jones Posted 11:32 pm
03 Sep 2007
It's a very good thing when scientists make strange or controversial predictions, or hypotheses, then lay them out to inspection by others. Because in science, all possibilities must be accounted for. Occasionally, these crazy ideas turn out to be revolutionary. More often they don't. Good science neither accepts nor rejects hypotheses uncritically, unlike the people who speak in its name.
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carboncat Posted 12:19 am
04 Sep 2007
I would add that in reality, big scientific ideas and research programs - "paradigms" - gain momentum, and are carried forward by their own methodology and assumptions, even when they begin to fail.
In reality, most scientists are so deeply embedded in their own network of knowledge, theories, instruments, and methodologies, it is hard to see when their chosen paradigm is heading in the wrong direction.
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Jones Posted 1:56 am
04 Sep 2007
But I have reasons for thinking that this is not the case for AGW. One is that there's absolutely no evidence. This despite the fact that there are many people who would wish it to be true, including me. The faulty paradigm hypothesis, while plausible, doesn't have a lick of real evidence to support it.
Another is that I believe that 'science' is in quite a good state now. With the internet, there are more possibilities than ever for scientists to talk to one another, and test each others work. This enables scientists to perform the checks and balances integral to the scientific method to an unprecedented degree. Make a mistake, and someone will find it, as happened two seeks ago. Also, scepticism, and "thinking outside the box" is as well-ingrained into our academic culture as it ever has been.
While I hold out hope that the present state of climate science will indeed prove to be a scientific wrong turn, I'm not holding my breath. Given the stakes involved, I see no choice but to act on my thorouhgly thought-out position.
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eriqa Posted 4:27 am
04 Sep 2007
So sure, scientific paradigms sometimes prove inadequate - but they're proven so by evidence, not just by yelling, "You're the Scientific Establishment, man! Being a contrarian is so much groovier!"
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carboncat Posted 1:27 pm
04 Sep 2007
I agree with you that most science is pretty boring, and that's how it should be. That whole "against the establishment" thing was fun when I was a hot-headed undergraduate some time ago, but I'm way past the age of wanting to rebel.
In the case of global warming, I think it's much "groovier" to toe the line.
Global warming means you get to oppose big business, oil companies, hummers, people who drive hummers, various wars (especially those involving oil, and which result in large amounts of fuel burning), conspicuous consumption, and George Bush. That sounds pretty sexy to me.
Trust me, if I could believe it, I would.
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barry schwarz Posted 4:38 pm
15 Jun 2008
The '70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/200 ...
A has been eloquently expressed above, it doesn't follow that because science includes hypotheses that turn out to be invalid, science is therefore unreliable.
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barry schwarz Posted 4:41 pm
15 Jun 2008
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serena Posted 3:52 pm
17 Aug 2008
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