Guest Post by David Middleton
You can always count in TIME magazine’s Bryan Walsh for a good laugh…
Well, I suppose that Mr. Walsh is correct that a 1977 TIME magazine cover did not predict “another ice age.” The prediction (sort of a prediction) was from a 1974 TIME magazine article…
The full text of the article can be accessed through Steve Goddard’s Real Science.
TIME, like most of the mainstream-ish media, has acted like a climate weathervane over the years…
Dan Gainor compiled a great timeline of media alarmism (both warming and cooling) in his Fire and Ice essay.
While the 1977 TIME cover was a fake, this 1975 magazine cover and article were very real…
Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics was a 1977 National Academies publication. It featured what appears to be the same temperature graph, clearly demonstrating a mid-20th century cooling trend…
The mid-20th Century cooling trend is clearly present in the instrumental record, at least in the northern hemisphere…
So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?
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Correction…
Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics was a 1977 National Academies publication. It featured what appears to be essentially the same temperature graph, clearly demonstrating a mid-20th century cooling trend…
Just had a long and fruitful discussion at a warmist site on the topic. I hope we all came to the conclusion that ice age predictions were hype but a global cooling consensus existed, at least at the beginning of the 1960s and then 10 years later, until 1975.
“Hype” is the common denominator.
There are a few on-line references here, including links to Newsweek and Science Magazine pdf files.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
There were Time articles in both 1977 (a cover story entitled “The Big Freeze”) and 1974 (or here). There was also a 1975 Newsweek article on climate change, a 1972 Windsor Star article on climate change (or here), 1974 CIA Report on climate change (or here), 1978 documentary on The Coming Ice Age (narrated by Leonard Nimoy), and many, many, other similar stories (discussed on WUWT here).
PopTech has a http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
list of about 100 similar articles from the 1970s in various publications, including these two Time articles.
I believe the cover that most people think of is this one
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19770131,00.html
The article from 31 Jan 1977 was about the unusual cold winter
Previous examples of climate hype, of course, were relatively harmless. The climate hype, misinformation, and lies the MSM have spewed for the past couple of decades however has been monsterously destructive. It has been an all-out war on actual science and truth, a la Orwell’s 1984. I wonder if, with the coming cooling they will ever say “we’re sorry; we were wrong. It turns out there are climate cycles, and the warming was just part of one such cycle, just as the cooling is now”? Well, I can dream, can’t I?
This is a pretty good sample of why this issue will not go away. The actual temps do not matter much to the Statist meddlers and modelers. It’s an excuse to redesign society and take control over the direction of the economy. And I say that as someone who has read Club of Rome document after document. This excerpt is actually from the Brookings Metropolitanism initiative from yesterday.
“Finally, the environment, climate change, and global solidarity will be defining themes of the twenty-first century. Acting on their own, nation-states can successfully address neither tax avoidance nor carbon emissions. The renewed patriotism seen in many places – a response to the unfairness and dislocation that globalization can generate – must be reconciled with human solidarity, respect for diversity, and the ability to work across national borders. The success of Germany’s Green Party reflects the focus that it has placed on many of these issues.”
A massive environmental threat is the excuse for a State-directed Social Welfare state everywhere. It’s being called the Regenerative Society, the Support Economy, the Cooperative Commonwealth, Capitalism 3.0, the Foundational State just to name a few. All are focused on a “needs” economy.
If there is no actual threat, the UN, the OECD, and the World Bank have lost their justification for international redistribution as well as regional distribution. Part of this vision is also to transfer the prosperity of the SE or Texas to Cleveland and Detroit and the Twin Cities. Same is true in other countries. Equity means equity. It’s not just among people but geographically as well.
That’s why they are so obsessed. If the extent of the fraud were better understood, the public sector would be in disrepute globally. We would be back to the kind of first-hand knowledge of the horrors of consolidated political and economic power that the US Founding Fathers remembered from 17th and 18th century Europe’s wars.
They were not idealogues. They knew their history and they had experienced tyranny and they wrote accordingly. We are experiencing tyranny today but it is financial and regulatory and delivered invisibly through education this time.
I’m sure the author is familiar (even if the posters are not) with the fact that 1970s scientific literature was actually predicting, by a 6-to-1 margin, global warming rather than global cooling, to the extent such articles made a prediction one way or the other. Scientists knew in the 1970s and before that aerosols reflected incoming solar radiation (causing cooling), and that GHGs trapped reflected solar energy (causing warming), but there was some discussion as to which would be the dominant forcing going forward. The great majority of scientists engaged in that debate correctly concluded that the warming of GHGs would trump the cooling of aerosols. See the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (September 2008) and the NOAA (2009), both of which surveyed all the peer reviewed literature from the decade of the 70s:
https://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/18/now-out-in-bams-the-myth-of-th/
https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2009-December/007836.html
An interesting timeline of Time’s pendulum swings. By my reckoning the next tick of the pendulum will be an ice age story in about 2027, but it may come as soon as 2016 or as late as 2036.
Ecocentric’s stated interest is “All things green”, yet their logo is red. hmm
So, Hansen announces man made global warming in 1988.
If the ice age scare stopped by 1979, how many years of observation and experiment did Hansen do to arrive at his conclusion by 1988?
How robust is that, and why does it take triple the time to conclude it is wrong?
We are being swindled.
One would think that the embarrassing comedown after the “imminent ice age” debacle of the 60s and 70s would have put some perspective into the topic of climate, i.e. taking a longer view. However zealots like Ehrlich and the late Dr. Schneider of ” Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.” notoriety, (quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth,” Discover Magazine, October 1989, p. 47.) are the same players from the “ice age cometh” to now be pushing CAGW, both arising from taking first down then up slopes from the zig-zaggy temperature record that extends back for hundreds of years at least (Central England Temperatures).
Thanks for featuring the Science News article, which was relatively hype free. I remember it well and talking about it and other articles with my father. One, I think from Science News, suggested an ice age could begin quickly with snow not melting completely one summer. Soon after that I flew across country on business, I think in April or May and realized that not only did the snow have to not melt, but also cover all the vegetation. All those pine trees in the Rockies were doing a fine job keeping the albedo low, so I decided snow through one summer would be more likely well north of the US stopped worrying about it much.
A couple years after that the Keeling curve came out and then things started warming up. Good timing on that one. It set the stage 17 years, err, only 10 years or so for James Hansen to sound the alarm at Congress.
“So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?”
It is because climate “science” isn’t about science – it’s all about politics (and government control of our lives). And the warmists ARE getting desperate…
NASA FACTS, April 1988
…in the early 1970’s, because temperatures had been decreasing for about 25 to 30 years, people began predicting the approach of an ice age! For the last 15 to 20 years, we have been seeing a fairly steady rise in temperatures, giving some assurance that we are now in a global warming phase.
http://www.theclimatescam.se/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/global_warming.pdf
Sorry
Correction
NASA FACTS, April 1998
eric says:
June 11, 2013 at 4:22 am
I believe the cover that most people think of is this one
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19770131,00.html
The article from 31 Jan 1977 was about the unusual cold winter.
I can’t get to the entire article.
Did this Time cover and article predict a coming Ice Age?
If so, then a Time magazine cover article did indeed predict a coming Ice Age.
Ice age? Are these people nuts? Here in Alberta,it is 6:43 AM MDT and we are at a balmy 4C. So when in 20 days from now,when summer starts,we should be at ,oh what…15C? I am so glad we are warming.Oh wait.Last year at this time we where at 21C. OMG. all that extra heat is in the westeren mid USA, and is warming the Pacific,according to jai.
Here’s a peer reviewed (bu James Hansen, no less) paper pooh-poohing the idea of CO2-driven warming and pushing the ice age theory.
Schneider S. & Rasool S., “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols – Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate”, Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141
ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE AND AEROSOLS:
Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate.
Strikes me I’ve heard of that Scnneider S fellow since…
How fortunate are we that our history is preserved across broadly distributed, immutable hard copy documents.
Pity our children, whose history we are now dedicating to infinitely malleable and manipulatable electronic texts, stored centrally on a relative handful of “cloud” servers.
Climate change happens.
“So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?”
It is common practice amongst leftist intellectuals to rewrite history to fit their movement’s needs, as they don’t believe in objective reality anyway (see Plato, Kant, Ravetz).
JohnWho says:
June 11, 2013 at 5:44 am
> Did this Time cover and article predict a coming Ice Age?
Probably not, it was most likely covering the cold 1977/78 winter that brought the most hardship to Ohio. Coal and natural gas shortages forced factories and schools to close for a while. Amish schools stayed open. The next year brought blizzards to both the midwest and New England that people still talk about.
http://cincinnati.com/blogs/ourhistory/2011/01/19/2-winters-for-the-ice-ages/
Of course, that had happened before, in 1917/18.
http://www.mjcpl.org/historyrescue/timeline/1917-18-the-winter-the-ohio-froze-over
I have never seen such an obvious Strawman Argument in my life. Like it makes any difference what-so-ever that it was an article, and not on the front cover…just a ridiculous argument.