Since we recently had some assistance from an old 1976 copy of National Geographic which showed us some differences between temperature data then and now, it seems an opportune time to announce that Popular Science magazine archives are now online and totally free.
Check out the “one armed monster” on the right panel. Looks like a wind turbine nobody ever built.
Popular Science, in partnership with Google, just put its 137-year archive online, for free. Unfortunately, you can’t yet browse by issue. [Yes you can, I missed this on the first pass.] The interface is a keyword search box.
I need help from WUWT readers in locating something that may be found in the pages of Popular Science.
The entire magazine content is available, including ads. One specific ad I’ve been looking for for years (and I’m hoping someone will find it here) is from the late 60’s to early 70’s. It is an ad for nuclear energy, sponsored I think, by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ad has a picture of a lump of coal, and says something like “Nuclear Energy – the clean fuel” and it speaks of the pollution problems (and Co2 if I recall) associated with coal. If anyone finds it, please let me know, there’s an interesting historical backstory to it that I’ve been itching to write for years, but I have to have this ad as proof.
It may also be in other magazines of the era.
Also, maybe our readers can find some relevant things about climate in this newly available resource. If not, maybe somebody can tell me how many times we’ve been promised flying cars and basement nuclear reactors.
Link: Search the PopSci Archives
h/t to BoingBoing blog
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I just love the Arctic history to repeat itself:
http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=diEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=254&query=ice+melting+in+the+arctic
One thing that makes me wonder is why you would want to look at popular magazines to find out about scientific research. Wouldn’t it make more sense to read actual scientific research papers from the 1970s and 1980s?
This author argues, quite relevantly in this context, that there was a discrepancy between the actual science and the media reports (some things never change, it seems):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
I did a search on ‘Climate’ and found a very interesting 1906 article on Climate Change by Robert DeC Ward of Harvard University
A cautionary tale for anybody who assumes that there was ever an era when there were no problems with the temperature record.
A few excerpts:
“Belief in the change of a climate of one’s place of residence, within a few generations, and even within the memory of living men, is widespread. It is confined to no special region or people. It finds support among the most intelligent as well as among the uneducated.”
“Human memories are very unreliable things, and there are many reasons for their being particularly untrustworthy in matters of this kind.”
“Accurate instruments, properly exposed, and carefully read, do not lie; do not forget; are not prejudiced. When such instrumental records, scattered though they are, and difficult as it is to draw general conclusions from, are carefully examined, from the time when they were first kept, which in a few cases goes back about one hundred and fifty years, there is found no evidence of any progressive change in temperature, or in the amount of rain and snow.”
“Apparent signs of a permanent increase or decrease in one or another element have been fairly easy to explain as due to the method of exposing the thermometer or of setting up the rain gauge. Little care was formerly taken in the construction and location of meteorological instruments. They were usually in cities, and as these cities grew, the temperature of the air was somewhat affected. The rain-gauges were poorly exposed on roofs or in court-yards. The building of a fence or a wall near the thermometer, or the growth of a tree over a rain-gauge, was enough, in many cases, to explain any observed change in the mean temperature or rainfall.”
If you’re looking for a better/different way to scan the magazines, try http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:01617370?rview=1&rview=1&source=gbs_navlinks_s – it’s a bit easier to read, and you can look at the covers en masse.
Anthony,
I am not sure what you mean exactly about not being able to browse PopSci by issue. If you go to Google Books..magazines, pick PopSci and then choose Cover View from the left, you can see each magazine in the archive by cover. Pick the one you want and browse through it like you did with a physical copy.
I did a search on AEC, Atomic Energy Commission, Coal, Nuclear Energy and opened the issues from 1965-1975. Couldn’t find it the ad you mention. I don’t think I got everything though. March 1974 was really interesting for energy issues by the way.
Very good article on our atmosphere is split into 3 cirtculation zones of heat and distribution of moisture (1875).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_7/August_1875/Distribution_of_Atmospheric_Moisture
I’m with Boudu. Today, I am 46, and I work an average of 9 to 10 hours a day, just to make what I did 3 years ago.
I have 4 issues of PS from the 30’s right beside me on my magazine rack (I’ve got to clean up that rack one of these days.)
Yup. Flying cars are in one of the issues, and we’re all STILL waiting for them to show up on the dealers’ lots.
TerrySkinner (03:48:01)
Nice find! The more things change, the more they remain the same, eh?
BTW, are you sure the author of that article wasn’t Anthony’s grandfather?
From the Economist:
‘……..Three questions arise from this. How bad is the science? Should policy be changed? And what can be done to ensure such confusion does not happen again? Behind all three lies a common story. The problem lies not with the science itself, but with the way the science has been used by politicians to imply certainty when, as often with science, no certainty exists…..’
I feel this is important is make predictions as to how the AGW Govts are going to deal with these questions above.
The obvious answer is: It is certain the Science is so bad the policy issues should be scrapped. To ensure doesn’t happen again—rely on the true science process (and not PNS) and this will NEVER happen again!
But, the Government who sees the bogus AGW as a way to address their pressing national questions over natural resource availability….
B) Determine who leaked the CRU emails and prosecute. Pump money into Big iron projects that land the data collected under Governmental/national security juristiction. Make sure the data sets, etc. are so big that no armchair Skeptic could possibly deal with it. Await the next heat wave. Um…..continue building the carbon exchanges along European lines…..?
What are their options???
Predicting the future political moves will make it alot easier to ride out to meet it head on. Certainly, a parent resource packet should be developed for school teachers, a downloadable PDF that can be printed, that can be given to little johnnny to take to school to give to teacher….
Was it a full page advert?
Popular Misconceptions Concerning the Weather from 1915 is fun read:
Dodgy Geezer (01:06:28) :
I´m with you. We are here, and we can look, Together.
Somebody break the work-load into manageable chunks. That ¨body¨ set up a central location and find another to monitor the site. The worker bees will bring home the bacon. We won´t even have learn the bee dance.
Donna Laframbeau´s Citizen Audit may be a useful model.
Roger Knights (02:53:30) :
“There has long been a controversy about when the first homebrew (JATO strap-on) rocket car was created. ”
Roger, I can tell you that my Uncle Dan, when he was a kid in the late Twenties or Thirties, built some sort of rocket motor, and attached it to his wagon. To this day, he has neither eyebrows nor eyelashes!
Just did a search for ‘global cooling’ and came up with this one
http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=GSoDAAAAMBAJ&pg=74&query=global+cooling
‘Are we changing our weather’
It mentions man-made particulate emissions from cities and motor cars as the cause of global cooling (courtesy of Reid Bryson) and claims that the early 19th century warming to 1940 was caused by CO2 emissions (first time I’ve heard of that!).
It mentions UHI effects and cliams that cities can cause droughts in rural areas.
According to Walter Orr Roberts of NCAR, jet contrails cause the formation of Cirrus clouds which in temperate and tropical regions cause cooling.
And all this back in 1969!!
Tom at 01:21:40 says: “There are, in fact, one-bladed turbines and, though the look strange, they are physically not much different to three-bladed ones. Three-bladed ones just look better.”
True, the one bladed windgenerators actually do a pretty fair job of converting wind to electricity. There is, however, at least one good reason why three bladed turbines are better. Either one or two bladed will work fine if the wind is from a constant direction or only shifts slowly. However, when the wind gusts suddenly from a different direction and the blades have to slew around quickly, the one and two blade turbines experience a violent shuddering which can literally shake them apart. Consequently, turbines with only one or two blades require extra engineering to ensure that they do not slew so suddenly. Three (or more) blades do not have the same imbalance of forces that creates the shudder and will survive wind shifts better.
@James Baldwin Allison
“..yep a kiwi was the first to….. fly an uncontrolled motorized airoplane…”
Actually, I would guess that was Santos-Dumont, or some other dirigible specialist. What you mean is ‘uncontrolled heavier-than-air motorised flying machine’….
While, of course Lilienthal had been flying ‘a controlled heavier than air UN-motorised aircraft’ some time before this. Perhaps we should define an aircraft as an ‘aeroplane with a seat’….
I have always had a bee in my bonnet about the Wright claims (which were made entirely for patent purposes, and primarily succeeded in closing down American aircraft development in the early years – to such an extent that the US had to buy French aircraft for WW1.
The Wrights were important early developers. They pioneered technical development in small steps, and the practical use of aerodynamic controls. Their motor (made by Charles Taylor) was superb and a key reason for their success. But if they had never existed, functioning heavier than air flight would still have been developed in the same way at the same time, and their wing-warping canard designs were neither scaleable nor, ultimately, the right way to go.
It was their patent fighting which led to the claim that they had ‘invented the aeroplane’, and hence the American view that they were in some way unique in the world….
J. Berg
Thanks for the find in the November, 1951 magazine. Some interesting quotes are:
“Activities in the nonhuman world also reflect the warming of the Arctic … Many new birds are appearing in the far northern lands for the first time in our records.” (page 254)
“The recession of the northern glaciers is going on at such a rate that many smaller ones have already disappeared.” (page 254)
“The glaciologist Hans Ahlmann reports that most Norwegian glaciers ‘are living only on their own mass without receiving any annual fresh supply of snow’: that in the Alps there has been a general retreat and shrinkage of glaciers during the last decades which have become ‘catastrophic’ in the summer of 1947, and that all glaciers around the North Atlantic coasts are shrinking. The most rapid recession of all is occurring in Alaska, where the Muir Glacier has receded about 10 1/2 kilometers in 12 years” (page 256)
Note: as I cannot copy/paste from the article please forgive any transcription or spelling errors.
Gary
Larus (03:45:48) :
You have missed the very, very important point.
You say;
“One thing that makes me wonder is why you would want to look at popular magazines to find out about scientific research. Wouldn’t it make more sense to read actual scientific research papers from the 1970s and 1980s?”
Say what!?
Please read what is being requested; i.e.
“The entire magazine content is available, including ads. One specific ad I’ve been looking for for years (and I’m hoping someone will find it here) is from the late 60’s to early 70’s. It is an ad for nuclear energy, sponsored I think, by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ad has a picture of a lump of coal, and says something like “Nuclear Energy – the clean fuel” and it speaks of the pollution problems (and Co2 if I recall) associated with coal. If anyone finds it, please let me know, there’s an interesting historical backstory to it that I’ve been itching to write for years, but I have to have this ad as proof.”
Clearly, such an advertisement costs money. And the suggested advertisement was placed in a magazine that provided scientific information to the public so would have been bought and read by non-scientists with an interest in ‘scientific’ matters.
Assuming the suggested advertisement does exist, says what is partially remembered, and is found, then it is undeniable proof that in “the late 60’s to early 70’s” a lobby was promoting nuclear power by opposing coal on the basis of CO2 emissions from coal usage. And the promotion was aimed at non-scientists with an interest in science.
The “late 60’s to early 70’s” was when the global cooling scare was raging. The globe cooled from ~1940 to ~1970. So, the existence of such an advertisement could only have had the intention of ‘conditioning’ its readers as the global cooling scare was starting to be disproved by the global climate.
The global cooling scare was that emissions from power generation (notably SO2) were causing the cooling and this could ‘run away’ such that global catastrophe (i.e. a new Ice Age) could result.
Then around 1970 the globe started to warm. So, the global cooling scare was morphed into the global warming scare.
The global warming scare is that emissions from power generation (notably CO2) are causing the warming and this could ‘run away’ such that global catastrophe (i.e. floods, droughts, etc.) could result.
The existence of the suggested advertisement would be clear evidence of the identities of some who conducted the morphing.
Richard
Irrespective of the climate I think they should be applauded for making these fascinating old issues so freely and easily avaiable.
TerrySkinner (03:48:01) : (1906 ) They were usually in cities, and as these cities grew, the temperature of the air was somewhat affected.
Hush, Terry… folks think they’ve just discovered such facts in the past couple years. You risk spoiling reputations based on brilliant research. (I certainly will not be letting you into my new development of something I have code-named for now, “the wheel”)
I’ve looked through the entire issue:
Jun ’65
Feb ’68
Sep ’68
Dec ’72
Feb ’73
Sep ’73
and did not see the advert. I see someone else did Apr ’73. I’ll scan more later.
Anthony, I think that late 50’s early 60’s might be more of the correct time frame. It seems to me that there was a big flap along about the time of the Nuc Sub Thresher when it sank that put an end to lots of the ads about nuc power for some time. Raising 4 grand kids and keeping up with the difference in education processes since I graduated high school some 40+ years ago keep me pretty busy. But I will try to contribute to the effort. could there possibly be a link maybe on the side bar where we can list the issues that we have scanned over so that hopefully we will not duplicate the initial work and that will provide a place for us to go to get up dates and maybe replicate some of the relevant articles.
Thanks,
Bill Derryberry
All you guys complaining of no robots. Sure, there’s no human-shaped maid in your kitchen, but as I type, I have a robot washing my dishes, a robot vacuuming my floor, and a robot vacuuming my pool. I have a machine that can cook my dinner in 2 minutes flat and one that can brew coffee for me so it’s ready when I wake up. I can drive my car to a car-washing robot, and I have a magical device that watches television for me and records only the good bits. You’ll all agree that these are time-saving devices. I have a small electronic device smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and in a couple of pushes of a button, I can talk to a friend on the other side of the world who might be walking through some woods, sitting on a beach or driving along the road.
You’re all working extra hours because we tend to fill up freed-up time with more work to make more money, rather than taking it off as leisure.
My big complaint is the loss of civilian supersonic air travel. We had it, then we lost it. Now that’s not progress.