Terrifying new book about climate change

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Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented.

The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era?

Guest post by “Zombie”

I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.

• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;

– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;

– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;

– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;

– In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

The Solution Remains the Same

As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive “climate change scare” that was the exact opposite of the one we’re enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.

The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:

The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.

In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.

I realized: The solution (commit civilizational suicide) always remains the same; all that differs are the wildly divergent purported “crises” proffered up to justify the imposition of the solution.

Seen from this angle, the entire Climate Change field should be more properly reframed thus:

In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological “crisis” so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn’t materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.

I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me. The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality. The goal remains constant; the supposed imminent catastrophes justifying it come and go as needed.

Below, I’ll present scanned pages from the book so you can see for yourself.

The scenario we’re in reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun”: At first we see the characters sweltering in increasingly unbearable heat as the Earth, knocked out of its orbit, slowly plummets into the sun. Just as they are all about to burn to death, in typical Twilight Zone fashion, the lead character wakes up — she had in fact merely been having a fever dream about the world getting hotter; in reality, the Earth had been knocked away from the sun, and they’re all going to freeze to death. Ha ha — gotcha! Just as in the narratives spun by the climate change catastrophists, the Earth is doomed either way, even though the disaster scenario flips from one extreme to its exact opposite. Hot, cold, whatever; one way or the other, Mother Nature will wreak revenge on us for our hubris!

Ice Ages Are Making a Comeback

Turns out my choice of reading material (discovered recently at a rummage sale for 25¢, in case you’re curious) was fortuitous, as climate change — and ice ages — are suddenly back in the headlines this past week. And the news is not good for the crisis-mongers.

First we learned that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is actually helping us stave off the next inevitable ice age by a few years. Yes, you read that right: the “runaway global warming” scenario is now off the table; a new ice age is coming for sure, and whatever human warming effects there may be will only make our descent into the deep freeze a little more comfy.

Then, in a different breakthrough, leading scientists announced the discovery of a heretofore undetected type of molecule in the atmosphere which spurs cloud formation and negates global warming effects. Thanks to something called “Criegee biradicals,” the more we pollute, the more clouds form, and the cooler the planet becomes. Thus, the cumulative effect on the climate due to mankind’s activity: zilch. So for the second time in a week, the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming theory was fatally undermined.

But wait! We’re not done. Next up: A study out of Harvard proving that warming and cooling cycles are caused by orbital wobble and precession of the poles; and that the only reason the next ice age hasn’t arrived quite on schedule yet is due to our beneficial increase in carbon dioxide. Yes, that’s right: more data showing that another ice age is inevitable sooner or later.

A third nail in AGW’s coffin in less than a week? Why wasn’t this front page news?

But brace yourself — because those nails in the coffin were just the opening act. The next bit of news was the real blockbuster, a stake through AGW’s heart:

Now we learn that the world has not warmed at all for the last 15 years, and that the entire recent “global warming” hubbub was totally imaginary. Furthermore, the recent cooling is so significant that we may be headed for — you guessed it — a “mini ice age.”

Still not enough for you? The coup de grace came from our own USDA, which released a new “Plant Hardiness Zone Map” indicating that the mild global warming spike of a few years ago was actually good for plant growth and biodiversity. In other words: Even if we do experience warming, it makes the world a nicer place.

And that was just one week’s news. I wonder what next week will bring?

Now, you’d think that this devastating barrage of body blows would basically bring an end to the whole Global Warming “controversy.”

But no. Because, you see, true believers are nearly impervious to facts. In the midst of all this, the AGW activists and bullies continued their relentless quest to reshape the world’s economic landscape, as if they still had the upper hand. They even launched a witch hunt against “denier” weathermen, threatening to get any TV meteorologists fired unless they present global warming propaganda during their forecasts. Meanwhile, Al Gore continued on his decade-long tirade, declaring that “civilization is at risk” if the presidential candidates don’t cave into his demands immediately. And if you check the Web sites of any number of climate change nonprofits and organizations, they’re all still in hysterical crisis mode about the coming calamity. To them, you see, news stories like the ones we saw this week may come and go, but Global Warming is forever!

Something’s Gotta Give

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats once wrote. This disconnect between reality and hysteria can’t last forever. As impervious as Global Warmists may be to facts, they’re highly sensitive to their social environment. Eventually, as the general public loses interest in humoring the hysterics, whose status is rapidly dropping from “cutting-edge hipsters” to “embarrassing kooks,” the Alarmists will go into a huddle and emerge with a new crisis scenario so horrifying and immediate that something must be done NOW! And that something, as we learned above, will be the exact same something prescribed to solve the previous crisis.

We already saw the first half of this transition just a short time ago. For years, the crisis peddlers threw all their weight behind the phrase “Global Warming” to describe the looming disaster. But in recent years as data crept in casting some doubt on their prognostications, the phrase “Global Warming” was inconspicuously discarded and replaced with the more flexible “Climate Change.” Voilà! No matter what the weather did, it could be chalked up to “climate change,” because hey, change could go either way, right?

Needless to say, however innocuous “climate change” may have sounded, the activists said Trust us, it’s way worse than mere “global warming,” so the drastic solutions we proposed earlier are still required.

But the ever-growing mountain of evidence pointing to an eventual (naturally occurring) ice age phase in the distant future may trigger yet another huddle among the climate change crowd. Perhaps after a suitable wait, banking on everyone’s short memory, they’ll re-emerge from the huddle this time dropping “Climate Change” for something ice-age themed, like “Accelerated Glaciation,” or perhaps “Man-Made Chill Factor.”

And you can guarantee that they’ll have a solution for this new crisis; and it will be the exact same solution they announced for climate change, and for global warming before that, and yes, for the looming ice age they worried about the previous time back in the ’70s: De-industrialize the First World, end civilization as we know it, and cede power to “the global south,” i.e. the Third World.

The Evidence

To prepare you for this eventuality, I hereby present scans from The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, published in 1977 and written by “The Impact Team,” a coalition of authors from various fields.

Each scan below is taken from a page in The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age; click on any image to see the passage in context on the full page.

Under each passage I’ll make a few comments; but in general, the text speaks for itself.

Think of this as a warning from the past. Not a warning about looming ice ages, but rather a warning to ignore politically motivated disaster-mongers.

See the rest of the post and all the scanned pages here

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116 Comments
February 2, 2012 5:59 pm

Scott R says:
February 2, 2012 at 5:07 pm
“I lived through the 1970′s. The consensus at that time in the media and in academia was that we were headed toward an Ice Age due to coal and diesel particulates as well as aircraft-caused clouds. The only way to stop it was said to be elimination of our capitalist consumer economy and its dependency on fossil fuels.”
————————————————————^.^—————————–
Who are you going to believe: people who claim that never happened and was dreamed up by oil executives, or your lying memory?
It seems that it was a misunderstanding. A large number of high-profile publications and publishers decided there was an ice age coming because of free-markets and lack of central government oversight when in reality the scientific consensus was telling them (apparently) that the earth was warming dangerously due to free-markets and lack of central government oversight. Some of these media folk should explain to us how they became “educated” on the issue and when they realized that they were pushing the right cart down the wrong road.

Richard Keen
February 2, 2012 6:00 pm

About ten years ago, the print version of the Weekly World News had an article about an upcoming ice age. There was a sidebar on what “experts” recommend as a proactive response for the reader….
Move south and/or buy lots of sweaters!
I see there’s another ice age article on their online version…
http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/43321/scientists-predict-coming-ice-age/
but no relevant advice!
Oh, what to do?

February 2, 2012 6:06 pm

William Abbott said:
February 2, 2012 at 3:43 pm
My son brought home the book, LIMITS TO GROWTH, from a library sale. Written in 1972 by the
“Club of Rome”
————————————–
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” – Club of Rome
(of which algore is a member)

hotrod (larry L)
February 2, 2012 6:10 pm

Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Stephen Schneider was a contributor to this book.

He wrote his own book called the “Genesis strategy”: Climate and Global Survival by Stephen Henry Schneider and Lynne E. Mesirow (Paperback – Mar 1, 1977) It spends a good deal of time discussion famine due to weather etc.
Another similar book of the same genre was:
Climates of Hunger by Reid A. Bryson and Thomas J. Murray (Paperback – Jan 1, 1979)
These sort of books were very popular in the late 1970’s when it seemed every winter were reporting more and more severe winter weather in the north east such as this:
There were two back to back winters with these severe storms, January 28th 1977 and then just 2 days short of a year to the day later in 1978 a similar “storm of the century” blizzard hit.
http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/swio/pages/content/1977_blizzard.htm
then:
http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/swio/pages/content/1978_blizzard.htm

With news reports like these it was easy to sell books that played on severe weather and catastrophe. The storms were so severe and wide spread, that the national GDP dropped significantly from a 6%-7% rate of growth to -1% in the last quarter of 1977, the GDP only struggled to get to 3% in the first quarter of 1978. (source — http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/socasp/weather1/kocin.html)
Similar severe winter weather storms seemed to come every year during the 1970’s, Colorado had a very severe winter in both 1972 and 1973, January 10 – January 12 1975, was also a year to remember in the north east.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1975
Larry

1DandyTroll
February 2, 2012 6:13 pm

“The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.”
OMFG! You haven’t figured it out yet?
Don’t you get it. It’s a bunch of pacifist gone criminally insane, they’re trying to rob us all blind.
They’re not exactly gonna shoulder a rattling gun, going: hand over your money or your life Mister!
No, instead, they go: Don’t deny us all your money, or your children’s children’s leetle ones might be doomed. Alright do you get it! Hey, stop laughing! … Go’damnit, D E N I E R!

morgo
February 2, 2012 6:25 pm

check out sydney temp, middle of summer, heater on, record floods in NSW and Queensland, bring on global warming

Greg
February 2, 2012 6:28 pm

It’s been going on for even longer, as shown in Fire and Ice,
“Journalists have warned of climate change for (over) 100 years, but can’t decide whether we face an ice age or warming…”

February 2, 2012 6:29 pm

Heavy snow has left at least 11,000 villagers cut off in remote areas of Serbia amid a European cold snap that has claimed more than 130 lives.
At least six people have died in Serbia, with emergency services expressing concern for the health of the sick and the elderly in particular.
Temperatures are below -30C (-22F) in parts of Europe and 63 people have died in Ukraine and 29 in Poland.
In Italy, weather experts say it is the coldest week for 27 years.
Emergency services in Serbia have described the situation, close to the country’s south-western borders with Kosovo and Montenegro, as very serious.

Keith Pearson, formerly bikermailman, Anonymous no longer
February 2, 2012 6:30 pm

Carl Bussjaeger says:
February 2, 2012 at 3:08 pm
The fantastic Zombie is (I think) in the Bay Area of San Francisco. He/She/It has done many very well done photo essays exposing the craziness that is SanFran for a number of years, of all varieties. My being a fan of him/her/it goes back to the LittleGreenFootball days, when Charles Johnson was still sane. I heartily recommend scrolling through Zombie’s site for a view of the….people…that inhabit that area.
Many thanks to Zombie, and to Anthony for periodically showing us his/her/its works!

Brian H
February 2, 2012 6:38 pm

Roger;
Where’s Carnac when you need him??
LOL

Brian H
February 2, 2012 6:42 pm

Greg;
Frost:

I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Richard M
February 2, 2012 6:43 pm

Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 5:58 pm
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.”

Even better … isn’t it interesting that all the publicity was about the imminent ice age. Why was that? Put on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.
Now, it makes sense now why Gore and others started claiming a consensus almost immediately. Also makes sense why there was an effort to control peer review. Could it be that they learned from their mistakes?

pouncer
February 2, 2012 6:54 pm

Let’s not forget Carl Sagan’s ongoing worries over “Nuclear Winter”. That was in the ’80’s, I think.
From my perspective the prospect of setting off a few nukes to raise some dust is a interesting feature to be modeled in the various IPCC general radiative and circulation ensembles. If it DOES start to get bad, do we have tools to tweak things back?

nofreewind
February 2, 2012 6:58 pm

Climate Change Alarmism Timeline 1895-2009
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/climate-change-alarmism-timelin/
150 Years of Global Warming and Cooling at the New York Times
http://newsbusters.org/node/11640

Editor
February 2, 2012 7:04 pm

Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:55 pm

I started reading this post about a “Terrifying new book” and thought … Really??? Being skeptical, I googled it myself and the first thing that came up was this 1977 book review by Steve Schneider, an actual climate scientist who thought The Climate Conspiracy was a mess.

Ah, Dr. Schneider. We knew him well, especially for his note on managing hype, e.g. at http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html :

Quote by Stephen Schneider, Stanford Univ., environmentalist: “That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

Apparently Schneider didn’t like Ross McKitrick, as documented in a Climategate Email, see http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/25/a-somewhat-late-response-to-schneider/
Scheider addresses the controversy – quite unconvincingly to my mind – in his book Science as a Contact Sport, page 214. Basically he defends exaggeration by noting that scientists are human beings who want to see the world become a better place.

Gneiss
February 2, 2012 7:07 pm

Richard M writes,
“Put on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.”
I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneider’s 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Peterson’s 2008 BAMS study and read that too.

HankH
February 2, 2012 7:12 pm

Scott R says:
February 2, 2012 at 5:07 pm

+1
I too lived in the 1970’s, graduating high school in the mid 70’s, and distinctly remember that the talk was a possible impending ice age. While there was literature that discussed the warming effects of CO2, it was seen mostly as academic because 1) it wasn’t happening and 2) it was test tube science in the day and hardly a mainstream scientific concern. Cold winters were happening and that reinforced the concern that an ice age was possible – like today, only opposite.
Those who claim the ice age scare was made up after the fact to cover up global warming are themselves making it up. They can spin what they want and fool younger readers but they’re not fooling those who lived through the 70’s.

Editor
February 2, 2012 7:20 pm

[Mods – last post fell in the spam bin.]
More on Schneider from googling |schneider climate quote exaggerate site:wattsupwiththat.com|:
“I have cited many examples of recent climatic variability and repeated the warnings of several well-known climatologists that a cooling trend has set in-perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age-and that climatic variability, which is the bane of reliable food production, can be expected to increase along with the cooling.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 90 http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/07/creating-an-agw-quotation-collection/#comment-675328
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/20/mcintyre-on-stephen-schneider/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/24/global-warmings-stephen-schneider-the-light-that-failed/
In 1981 Hansen was already telling the New York Times of 6 – 9F temp rises and 15-20 feet sea level rise in next century. As soon as the 1970s cooling was over, Schneider and Hansen pushed hard with the alarmism, against a background of disapproval from climate scientists still debating the net effect of human caused cooling (aerosol) and warming and all the complex uncertainties surrounding the assessment of these effects. In 1988 Hansen told congress he was 99% certain. These scientist alarmists only slowly won over the support of the environment movement during the course of the 1990s with alarmist rhetoric.
It was these scientists who used their apocalyptic scenarios to capture the attention of the environmentalists, not the other way around. And it was these scientists who first characterize all resistance as corrupt (Big Oil), anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/29/yale-to-greens-abandon-climate-change-focus-on-energy/#comment-355765

Editor
February 2, 2012 7:33 pm

Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm

I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneider’s 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Peterson’s 2008 BAMS study and read that too.

Well, keep reading. We’re not too impressed with Peterson either.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/ncdc-mr-watts-gave-a-well-reasoned-position/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/24/ncdc-writes-ghost-talking-points-rebuttal-to-surfacestations-project/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/29/mcintyre-on-the-ncdc-talking-points-memo/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/01/ncdc-changes-from-national-record-keeper-to-advocacy-group/
REPLY: I refer to Petersen as “patient zero”, since all surface temperature data in every database gets touched personally by him. – Anthony

Richard Keen
February 2, 2012 7:33 pm

J Fischer says:
– the myth of a “global cooling scare” has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.
OK, so what was in the journals of the time?
In 1971, Schneider and Rasool, who were then at NASA GISS, and with the help of their esteemed colleague James Hansen, published a paper in Science titled: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.abstract (you gotta pay to read the whole thing)
Their conclusion? Human aerosols (dust, soot) will outweigh the carbon dioxide, and “If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
The last five words are worth repeating…
…. sufficient to trigger an ice age.

cromagnum
February 2, 2012 8:25 pm

Zombie had a great self-comment on his/her blog page.
“26. Zombie My prediction:
The next crisis will be called “Climate Stagnation,” characterized by weather patterns that (gasp!) stay the same. Horrors!
With Climate Stagnation, ecosystems never change, so evolution can’t proceed, leading to “genetic cul-de-sacs”; weather never varies over time, so you can never plant new types of vegetables in your garden and never take vacations in formerly inhospitable climes; and most distressingly of all, it’s really boring.
In order to combat Climate Stagnation, everybody must hand all their cash to someone with a darker skin tone than themselves, and beg for absolution by not bathing, living in a cave, and only eating kelp and algae.”
LOL

Rob R
February 2, 2012 8:34 pm

So it seems from the 1971 article in the journal Nature that Schneider was not always so certain about the inevitability of AGW. The abstract does not indicate whether he thinks it is warming or cooling that is most likely though.

February 2, 2012 9:06 pm

I would like to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels because I think they are as much a mug’s game as alarmism.
Cleaner air is of course a by-product of this, but whether burning oil defers the next ice age or speeds the Big Melt is not of immediate concern to me. A failure to develop a diversified energy economy is.

Richard Keen
February 2, 2012 9:09 pm

Rob R says:
So it seems from the 1971 article in the journal Nature that Schneider was not always so certain about the inevitability of AGW. The abstract does not indicate whether he thinks it is warming or cooling that is most likely though.
The conclusion… “sufficient to trigger an ice age” … gives a strong hint of what he thought was most likely. Essentailly, Schneider and Rasool figure that CO2 has a logarithmic effect, i.e, going from 400 ppm to 500 has a smaller incremental effect than going from 300 to 400. Or, to say, the CO2 effect levels off. There’s a chart in the full paper that has a 0.5C rise due to doubling CO2 to 600 ppm, and a small H2O feedback will raise that to 0.6C. Frankly, I find these numbers much more reasonable that later values cranked out by super computers programmed by warmers.
But a doubling of dust/soot in the atmosphere would COOL the planet by 2 degrees, and tripling the dust cools by 4 degrees, so aerosol cooling is exponential.
So he says if we double both CO2 and dust/soot, there’s a net COOLING of 1.5 degrees.
Here’s the final paragraph from the full article…
“However, it is projected that man’s potential to pollute will increase six- to eightfold in the next 50 years. If this increased rate of injection of particulate matter in the atmosphere should raise the present global background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5°K. Such a large decrease in the average surface temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
The very last sentence is the most reasonable, but sadly quite wrong….
“However, by that time (2021), nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.”
So, these guys made more sense 40 years ago than they do now.

TRM
February 2, 2012 9:33 pm

Anyone else old enough to remember “Galloping Glaciers” and other climate alarmism from the 1970s? Maybe they think we all went senile and can’t remember that far back. What’s old is new again.
Stay warm / cool depending on your situation and healthy in all cases.