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 trendā¦
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?
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 trendā¦
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 ā a response to the unfairness and dislocation that globalization can generate ā must be reconciled with human solidarity, respect for diversity, and the ability to work across national borders. The success of Germanyās 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, āOur Fragile Earth,ā 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 āinconvenientā 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 1970ās, 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 āinconvenientā 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.
to be fair, i think theyre upset because people say “it used to be global cooling, now its global warming” and use TIME magazine as a reference even though it only displayed a minority of the scientific community at the time
Looking at the dates of those stories, it’s almost enough to make you think there’s some kind of basic cycle at work here. Huh. Imagine that.
I have looked into this matter too in response to an online disagreement with a fella citing Skeptical Science information as proof that only a handful of scientists precipitated the 70ās cooling scare. I ran down a number of impending Ice Age stories that were listed (I believe between 80-100) in a previous WUWT post. The names behind the 70ās āIce Ageā scare read like a veritable whoās who in Climate Science. I canātā remember names, but professors from the University of Wisconsin and the CRU strongly supported the theory.
So while there may have only been a few proponents of the theory, I failed to uncover any contrary opinions from prominent Climatologists of the day. Itās interesting to note that a large number of the stories contained language calling for increased funding for supercomputers to crunch GCMās. Methinks, most rank and file scientists would have jumped on board, were it not for the abrupt shift to warming in the 80ās. I also ran down a brief (allegedly from the CIA) warning of the dire consequences (most notably to food security) of increased cooling.
Iām curious to know if anyone can vouch for the authenticity of the document.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/1974-cia-report-global-cooling-causing-excess-ice-famine-record-droughts-and-floods/
Rob ricket – I hope you do not need any further proof of authenticity for the CIA report of 1974, a document I have dug up personally from the British Library in 2009 and spent untold number of minutes scanning from microfilm on an antediluvian printer.
At the time I wrote a detailed article at Spiked Online, available at this link http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7817/ under the titie “Same fears, different name?”
At the risk of being pedantic, neither the magazine cover nor the article predicted anything, as they are inanimate objects. The author(s) formed a prediction (forecast) and wrote an article describing their ideas.
So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this?
===========
Because AGW rests on denying that climate changes naturally.
They deny that nature is the most powerful force on the planet. They deny the evidence at hand. They deny that computers projections are not reality. They deny that sea levels have been higher in the past. They deny there was a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, a Roman Warm Period, a Minoan Warm Period, and a Holocene Optimum. They deny there has ever been a time warmer than today. They deny that the oceans are today caustic and were more acidic in the past.
They deny freedom of speech to those that questions their beliefs. They deny to fund contrary research. They deny to publish contrary papers. They deny that those that believe otherwise are worthy of human rights. They deny that censorship and corruption in the name of a worthy cause are wrong. They deny that awarding special rights to belief has time and time again led to untold human suffering and death. They deny that they are the deniers.
I remember a cover of, I’m pretty sure it was Popular Science, somewhere in the 1976 to 1978 time frame that had a picture of skyscrapers being over run by a glacier.
This was in the textbooks at the time, and the “green” movement then used the coming ice age as a reason to conserve water.
Someone needs to thoroughly search Google books from the 1970’s.
oflo says:
June 11, 2013 at 6:13 am
—-
It was a minority then.
It’s a minority now.
I think I still have a copy of the January, 1977 Time up in my attic. I’m going to go check. It actually was about the 1976-77 winter, which was the first of several in a row that froze up the harbors in Maine and made life rough for lobster men and clammers. The winter leading into it, 1975-76, was quite mild. I lived on the coast of Maine back then and remember walking on the ice well out into Casco Bay, from South Freeport harbor past Bustins Island, Little Whaleboat and Whaleboat Islands, to Harpswell. (You had to know where tidal currents were strong, for the ice was thin in such places.)
I believe the harbors froze right down to Chesapeake Bay during the winter of 1976-77, and part of the Time article was about all the troubles ports were having with shipping. I think there was also a fierce drought in California, as a big ridge in the went shunted storms up to Alaska, (and gave southern parts of Alaska a mild winter,) and then sucked air from the Pole straight down to the east coast.
By mid November the winds were northwest and remained northwest in Maine for most of the time until March. It was so cold the sea “smoked” by late November, and the harbors were starting to skim over with ice before Christmas. Because I was young and yearned for cold winters (I have changed) I thought it was awesome.
The temp charts from ’75 shows a drop of about 0.4C or more from ~1940-1975. But today the HadCRUT data looks to be about half that. What’s up with that?
PaulH says:
June 11, 2013 at 6:18 am
—-
You’re among friends, you can be pedantic if you like.
Just don’t do it in public.
A backwards in time extension of this graph would lead credance to the observation of cooling in the 1970’s.
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/b550/RichardLH/uahtrendsinflectionfuture_zps7451ccf9.png.html
oflo says:
June 11, 2013 at 6:13 am
to be fair, i think theyre upset because people say āit used to be global cooling, now its global warmingā and use TIME magazine as a reference even though it only displayed a minority of the scientific community at the time
==========
You must have skipped school in the 50’s and 60’s. Everyone knew the world was cooling because of the atomic bomb testing. We were headed for a nuclear winter if it continued. All the top scientists said so, so we knew it was true.
Just like they told us it was only a co-incidence that Africa and South America had similar coastlines, that it had been scientifically proven that they were never joined. Just like they told us that Ice Ages were not caused by the earth’s orbit, because it had been scientifically proven that the orbit was too regular to cause such large shifts in climate. All the top scientists agreed.
And of course when the overwhelming evidence was presented that they were wrong, well they promptly switched sides, claiming that they had said all along it was possible, just unlikely that the other side had been right. And applied for grant money to prove this.
Scientists need money like the rest of us to survive in their profession. You cannot get money from the government by adopting politically unpopular positions. The simple truth is that you cannot get money from people by telling them something they don’t want to hear. Thus modern science has by and large become slave to opinion.
Tell the crowd what they want to hear and they will love you. Tell them the truth at your peril.
Matt Ridley covered this quite extensively in an Economist article (back before the Economist partook of a certain sweetened beverage):
http://www.economist.com/node/455855
It lists the anatomy of a scientific scare and quotes Newsweek from 1975: āMeteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.ā I remember back then that there were no dissenting voices – this was not just a few people as is now being claimed.
I have just checked the date of the Economist article I linked to – December 1997 – right about the time the temperature increase stopped……. Hmmm. Who is this Matt Ridley guy and what kind of control does he have over the environment? Now there’s a a conspiracy theory for you (;-)
Ric Werme says:
June 11, 2013 at 6:07 am
Probably not, it was most likely covering the cold 1977/78 winter that brought the most hardship to Ohio. Of course, that had happened before, in 1917/18.
======
60 years.
BuzzB
If everyone was 6-1 for global warming in the 70s, then why did the Smithsonian have a Global Cooling display from the 70s on exhibit until at least 2009?
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/global-cooling-exhibit-still-on-display-at-the-smithsonian.html
Excuse the link it was the first one I found….
Yes indeed, Newsweek did enter the fray. This NEWSWEEK article from April 28, 1975 was reprinted in Canada’s Financial Post in 2000:
FROM
Newsweek
April 28, 1975
The Cooling World
There are ominous signs that the Earthās weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food productionā with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas ā parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia ā where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree ā a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. āA major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,ā warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, ābecause the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.ā
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earthās average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras ā and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the ālittle ice ageā conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 ā years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. āOur knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,ā concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. āNot only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.ā
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases ā all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
āThe worldās food-producing system,ā warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAAās Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, āis much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.ā Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Reprinted from Financial Post – Canada, Jun 21, 2000
All Material Subject to Copyright.
pbh
Makes you wonder…..
Who is stupid enough to believe a fraction of a degree predicts any trend in the first place…..
Are there actually people still dumb or desperate enough to pay for a Time magazine?
I’m with Buzz on this one. I do remember very well the cold winter of 76 and 76 when I lived in Dallas Tex. I also remember there was not only magazine article about global cooling, but there were several interviews in the media too on shows like Good Morning America and Today.
Yes, there was a lot of hype. But isn’t that the same thing we skeptics also try to fight? We fight against unscientific conclusions that Hurricane Sandy, or the Moore OK tornado, or the mid-west drought were “caused” or “made bigger” by global warming. It is fair to say there was very little agreement within the scientific community that there would be global cooling. The “Global Cooling Scare” appears to be more of a media created conclusion, rather than a scientific one.
We’ll be better off if we stay with science and not get distracted by this kind of stuff.
Then when Time started believing in global warming, it greatly overstated the case: āTHE IOWA SEASHORE Blue-ribbon science panel predicts continued global warming and rising oceans,ā āWinner & Losers, Nov. 6, 1995,ā Time magazine, Nov. 6, 1995.
Of course, you could say it was hyperbole in service of humor, but they said it.
So there was a very public debate about climate change extending over decades. So much for the talking point about there having never been a debate. Based on the overwhelming consensus, no doubt about the winner of the debate.
I was 7 years old in 1974. I remember the TIME article, cover or not. It was scary. Oddly, I remember it being discussed in Sunday school. Weird the meaningless things we remember
Latitude says:
“Makes you wonderā¦..
Who is stupid enough to believe a fraction of a degree predicts any trend in the first placeā¦..”
===========================================
Whether we have observed a fraction of a degree warming, or of cooling, ignores the climate Null Hypothesis [which has never been falsified] :
Current climate parameters are exceedingly mild. Past global temperatures have easily surpassed current temperatures, both colder and warmer. The Null Hypothesis will only be falsified if/when current temperatures and other parameters exceed past parameters. So far, that has not happened.
In the past, global temperatures have changed by literally tens of degrees on short, decadal time scales ā global temperatures changed naturally, and when CO2 was much lower than it is now.
We have been very fortunate to have gone through a “Goldilocks” period of very stable global temperatures for the past century and a half. That will not continue indefinitely.
The take-away point is this: current global temperatures are unexceptional. They are compared on a tenth of a degree [or hundredth of a degree] y-axis ā making very minor fluctuations look scary. That is dishonest, but it is the only way to stir up alarm and fear in the population.
Eventually, global temperatures will decline radically, as they have many times in the past. The planet may warm some more, but the odds strongly favor a recurrance of the stadial ā the Ice Age ā which has been in abeyance during the Holocene. And if the planet should warm, geological evidence shows that would be entirely beneficial for the biosphere. It is cold that is the killer.
Some may be interested in what Kukla said in 2007 regarding the prospects of a coming ice age and the Time article where he had been quoted:
http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/an_unrepentant_prognosticator.php
He still believes in a coming ice age!
Here is another cover predicting an ice age. This time from Sweden:
http://www.elbranschen.nu/Bilder/EL_56_2012.png
Translated “New Ice Age rather than warming”
Oops, it’s from 2012, so maybe it doesn’t count…
January 31, 1977:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601770131,00.html
If TIME claims this cover (and the accompanying cover story “WEATHER: The Big Freeze”) did not promote/predict global cooling/coming ice age, they are LIARS!!
But I have come to expect no less from TIME, which is why I no longer read their drivel.
So what can we learn from this? As the global average temperature begins to drop, what does the transition from “The globe is still warming” to “warning: and ice age is coming” look like? Is there a hiatus of several years before the warmist gang reemerges with global cooling scare mongering, do they immediately transition to “see, we told you all along the globe was cooling, look what we predicted in the early 70’s” or do the warmists sulk away in shame and a new breed comes along with the global cooling scare, or some other process?
ferdberple says:
June 11, 2013 at 7:10 am
Whenever someone tries to tell how the weather has clearly changed, I tell they need to compare things to about 60 years ago.
So what do we have here…:
– A TIMES article titled “Another ice age ?” But which does not state that scientists actually believed that it’ll be the case. They were apparently just noticing the contemporary weather anomalies and trying assess if it was part of a global trend, and if yes trying to find the cause.
– A Science news article which goes more in details. We can then see that natural vs man-made influences were being investigated, and that the influence of greenhouses gases alone was set to be 0.5Ā° by 2000…more or less what we had finally. Did the other influences compensate each other or is this estimate also wrong is the remaining question.
World was cooling back then, it’s only natural to see research and articles about it. What I see here is no beginning of a proof that scientists vastly predicted a coming ice age.
Oh hey, there’s another “Big Freeze” cover at Time, see Dec 3, 1973:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html
The story might be “EUROPE: Toward a Winter of Discontent”
Time Magazine is not alone though they are feature a log with their weather scares. Here are compilations from the press on global warming and cooling scares from the past.
“Fire and Ice”
http://www.mrc.org/node/30586
“150 Years of Global Warming and Cooling at the New York Times”
http://newsbusters.org/node/11640
Farmers Almanac
http://www.almanac.com/sites/new.almanac.com/files/1895_cvr1_0.png
“So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so āinconvenientā that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?”
If I remember correctly a lot of blame for the drop in temperature was put on the combustion of fossil fuels leading to ‘global dimming’. Therefore the preventative strategy was to tax fossil fuels. This was just getting underway when it was noted that the temperatures were actually increasing. With a smooth volte-face the proponents of anthropogenic global cooling became the proponents of anthropogenic global warming and !surprise! the preventative strategy was to tax fossil fuels.
From this one can glean that the politicians wanted to tax fossil fuels and were looking for malleable scientists to provide a crisis to support the requirement. This would be a good reason for ‘denying’ the claims of a cooling period. Being fooled twice is a lot more difficult to forgive.
Rick Werme
I think the article is about politics, not climate so cross that canard off the ice age is coming list.
For a ice age to form here in europe the Polar jet stream would need to push down to the south at least as far as Spain. and stay there for a number of years. So you get a more southern track of the prevailing westerlies across the Atlantic staying in place long enough to draw the Gulf stream down to the south as well.
It appears Time magazine will have another opportunity to dust off and release another set of global cooling articles. A Hollywood script writer could not have written a more exiting climate warming wars saga. There are so many twists and turns to this story it is difficult to avoid missing important events and interconnections, and the key paradigm shifts as the saga unfolds and the worldviews of the different fractional groups change.
This is a strawman attempt to document the saga written from the perspective of my world view. The timing of the āRoundsā is based on the start of a significant discussion of the paradigm changing issues for a fractional group in question or a scientific announcement of a key physical event/observation that effects all fractional groups.
Although the same information is available to all fractional groups, there are delays in the change of the world views and there is the need of catalyst events such as massive unemployment, stock market crashes, public announcement of an abrupt change to the sun, the start of planetary cooling, and unequivocal significant planetary cooling for example to change the world views of some of the fractional groups.
The āRoundsā are the subplots thinking or seeing this saga for each sub fractional group: media, public, skeptics, warmists, scientific community as whole, and politicians from the perspective of their world view. World view is the name for what a person believes is to be true or very likely true regardless of whether it is or is not true.
As what causes climate āchangesā is a physical problem, what caused abrupt climate change in the past and the glacial/interglacial cycle, what truly caused the warming in the last 70 years, is not a subjective problem. There is one correct answer. What happened in the past happened for physical reasons. What will happen in the future will be determined by physical events and the physics of the planet and the sun. The discovery that the planet resists forcing changes rather than amplifies forcing changes eliminated some of the hypotheses as to what caused abrupt climate change in the past. As the saga progresses it will become easier and easier to solve the physical puzzle, as new observations eliminate unknowns and uncover key mechanisms.
As it appears physical changes to the sun are driving the climate change observations and it appears an abrupt change to the sun is underway, key rounds are timed. If that assertion is correct, the climate warming wars will not go on forever. It appears we will be well into the championship rounds by the start of the next US presidential election.
The climate warming wars ends when there is unequivocal acknowledgement of global cooling, scientific consensus that solar magnetic changes drives climate change, and capitulation of the climate warming activism. It is assumed that will occur well before the start of the Heinrich event.
Round 1: Global cooling, public discussion of global cooling.
Round 2: Discovery of global warming by James Hansen. Start of climate āchangeā activism.
Round 3: Formation of the UNFCCC and IPCC
Round 4: Actual warming, start of the stall in warming
Round 5: Fudging of temperature record by James Hansenās subordinates, start of climate gate scientific fudging of data and analysis, blocking of papers that are off message, IPCC fudged reports, public announcements that all scientists speech with one voice and the time for action is now, ongoing
Round 6: Discovery of fundamental anomalies in the AWG theory, no hot spot in the tropics, Idsoās sensitivity paper, growth of the so called āskepticā scientists, the start of skeptics blogs to discuss the anomalies, Lindzen and Choiās sensitivity paper, Douglass and Christyās latitudinal anomaly paper, Spencerās paper on errors in sensitivity measurement, lack of warming for 16 years, Svensmarkās research and other work on the sun-climate connection, discovery of correlation of solar magnetic cycle changes with past cyclic climate change, discovery of abrupt climate change, discovery of abrupt geomagnetic field changes, ongoing
Round 7: Kyoto Protocol, start of yearly climate change circus, Mannās Hockey stick paper celebration in AR-3, Goreās escapades, Nobel Prize awards for discovery of AGW
Round 8: Climate gate and exposure of Mannās Hockey stick, massive increase in discussion of āskepticsā issues and skeptics papers, discussions of the engineering limits of green energy and economics of green scams, ongoing
Round 9: Media amplification of āextremeā weather events, Media promotion of green scam spending, Politician band wagon enthusiasm for green scam deficit spending
Round 10: Environmental movementās epiphany that green energy is a scam and cannot solve the AGW problem if there is a AGW problem, massive unemployment due to deficit spending, public announcement that the conversions of food to biofuel is a crime against humanity (third world population will starve and there will be food wars if the policy is not stopped) economic crisis, public epiphany that AGW is an excuse for world carbon taxation, a massive UN bureaucracy and transfer of funds to third world countries, public and political epiphany that green scam spending will result in an astonishing reduction in standard of life, on going.
Round 11: (Start of championship rounds) There is the first observed global cooling, waiting for observational evidence of an abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle. Sunspots are changing to pores. It appears the sun will be spotless by end of this year. Key is public announcement of an anomalous change to the sun by NASA and/or public discussion of anomalous cooling.
For some Orwell’s 1984 is taken not has a warning of the nature of dictatorships , but has an instruction manual on how the rewriting of history can be done to suit the present situation .
āHe who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.ā
Here the rewriting of the past to deny the ice ace scare as a means to support the current AGW scares ‘uniqueness ‘ For the word ‘unprecedented’ is a conner stone of the ’cause ‘ without which it may well fall,
Buzz B,
I think you are playing fast and loose with the facts and blowing a lot of hot air. Your second link states:
“survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling.”
So if the survey is correct (which I have not confirmed), then 44 papers out of a total 71 papers predicted warming. Your 6 to 1 ratio is fuzzy math. Secondly, the survey should not have extended to 1979, which is when warming was far more of a concern.
Thirdly, in 1974 the U.S. government was so concerned with a future cooling that the CIA was commissioned to produce a report outlining potential security risks and intelligence problems associated with a cooling world:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/25/the-cia-documents-the-global-cooling-research-of-the-1970s/
An excerpt from the report:
āThe western worldās leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of a detrimental global climate change. The stability of most nations is based upon a dependable source of food, but this stability will not be possible under the new climatic era. A forecast by the University of Wisconsin projects that the earthās climate is returning to that of the neo-boreal era (1600- 1850) ā an era of drought, famine and political unrest in the western world.”
The government was NOT concerned with a warming planet.
Fourth, take a look at what Real Climate has to say about the 70’s cooling scare:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
Their take is as follows:
The state of the science at the time (say, the mid 1970ā²s), based on reading the papers is, in summary: āā¦we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climateā¦ā (IMHO that is our current state of knowledge as well)
I think there is a misconception by both sceptics and warmists on this one.
The cooling was evident from the 1950’s to the late 1960’s and it was during the active period of climatology in that latter decade when papers were written concerning the possible implications of the cooling trend.
Early in the 1970’s Hubert Lamb had determined that the trends now seemed to be inching upwards again and few respectable scientists would have written papers supporting the cooling hypothesis from then on..
Consequently it is not surprising that modern researchers found more papers supporting warming over cooling dating from the 1970’s. If you wanted to find cooling papers you needed to look in the 1960’s.
I am assembling information for an article to rebut the one by Connely and Petersen much cited by warmists but there are only so many hours in the day and other articles have my priority.
tonyb
JASON Defense Advisory Council
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/
ā¢The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate, JSR-78-07, April 1979
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/co2.pdf
This report addresses the questions of the sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide, considers distribution of the present carbon dioxide among the atmospheric, oceanic and biospheric reservoir and assesses the impact on climate as reflected by the average ground temperature at each latitude of significant increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Skeptic — 44-to-7 in the NOAA study, 42-to-6 in the BAMS study … I’m pretty comfortable with saying that, by a 6-to-1 ratio, those who ventured a prediction in the scientific literature in the 1970s were predicting warming rather than cooling.
I don’t know what to say about your second point, that the surveys should not have extended to 1979 … they were surveys of the scientific literature for the 1970s … I’m pretty sure that 1979 is within that decade. We can cherry pick if you’d like. Perhaps from May 1976 thru Jan 1977 there were 2 cooling predictions and only one warming prediction … so you win.
Your CIA and realclimate links don’t say much to me one way or the other. They seem to be confirming what I posted in my original link, that there was discussion within the scientific community in the 1970s over what would be the dominant forcing — aerosols or GHGs. That’s the point … it was an open question in the 1970s, with the great majority of climate scientists arguing (correctly) that it would be GHGs that would trump. The skeptics’ repeated line — “they were predicting cooling in the 1970s, now they’re predicting warming, why should we believe them now?” — is demonstrably false. Repeating it over and over as commenters on this web site and others do doesn’t make it more ‘right’; it makes the commenters less credible.
climatereason — I would be very interested to see the scientific literature from the 1960s. I am not aware of anyone who has surveyed that decade.
From 1910 to 1940, it warmed about 0.5 degrees C globally. From 1940 to 1970, it “cooled” at most 0.1 degree C. Almost all of that cooling occurred from 1940 to 1950. From 1970 to the present, it warmed about 0.55 degrees C. There was no 30-year cooling trend as many on this board seem to think … it was pretty much a flat line.
What I don’t understand from folks who apparently understand that brief snap in rising temps is why they are somehow saying the warming has now stopped today … no one ever said the warming trend was going to be some smooth line constantly going up each year or each decade. 1940-41 (and the surrounding years) were anomously warm … if you cut those warm years off the charts, then it is a steady growth. Similar with 1997-98 … but even moreso. At least the warm snap in the 1940s was long enough to change the running 5-year mean such that it took a couple decades to catch back up. The 1998 el nino is truly a stand-alone warming phenomenon that really doesn’t change the constant upward trend on longer term temp averages.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19600111,00.html
As early as 1960, Time was in on the population bomb idea. Not necessarily a distinct elitist intellectual give-us-control panic from the global-wamring or global-cooling give-us-control panics…
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/07/the-intellectual-roots-of-the-population-bomb-where-did-global-warming-exaggeration-intellectually-start/
1960 puts them well before Ehrlich’s the Population Bomb, and Earth Day, when sustainability versus over-population was finally quite the trendy topic.
The bigger picture here is not about the Ice Age talk in the 1960’s to 1970’s at all. It is about the cyclic discussion that swings like a pendulum. It stems from a core human failing, the lack of cross generational memory. People tend to remember their period of existence and forget the previous one(s).
I think one of the most interesting articles that Steve Goddard found is from 1923 …
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/1923-shock-news-radical-change-of-climate-melting-the-north-pole/
At that link to his site you will see the article hosted at “Trove”, scanned from a newspaper in Oz ( they are doing a much better job down under in digitally preserving their history ). I took the liberty of formatting the plain text of the article and I placed into a comment there at the link.
Read that story from 1923 and you will see that everything, I mean EVERYTHING said today was already said earlier, over and over again. Nothing is unprecedented. Actually that 1923 article as is could be submitted here as a current post, strip the dates and no-one would know the difference!
NOTE: scanned newspapers often need crowd sourced editing to correct OCR errors, but this one did not. However, if you copy the plain text from a Trove article, even one that is already corrected for errors, the plain text will often need formatting because of breaks in words using hyphens and broken paragraphs. That is what I did when I “formatted” the text. Once corrected and formatted, the text becomes much more Google or Bing friendly.
Anthony, you might want to use an article like that in a clever trick, just sayin. š
Buzz
The accounts of the 60’s cooling are in the books of the era by such as lamb and budyko. Both those gentlemen are referenced in the CIA document referenced earlier
It was very far from being a ‘ warm snap’ in the 1940’s. It was a thirty year warming period that caused the arctic to melt almost to today’s levels.
I wrote about it here
http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/10/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-ii-1920-1950/
The warming has actually being going on since the start of instrumental records in 1659, albeit in fits and starts. Giss from 1880 is merely a staging post and not the starting post of rising temperatures.
Tonyb
In a few years when the new ice age becomes evident, you will all be sorry you didn’t listen to the consensus opinion back in the 70s. /sarc
The mid-20th Century cooling trend is clearly present in the instrumental record, at least in the northern hemisphereā¦
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/trend
Northern Hemisphere was -0.0063Ā°C a year, or -0.63Ā°C a century, strong cooling signal.
Southern Hemisphere was 0.00032Ā°C a year, or 0.032Ā°C a century, basically flat to a very tiny warming signal.
Global was -0.0030Ā°C a year, -0.30Ā°C a century, the average of course.
But the tropics are interesting, 30Ā°N to 30Ā°S.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:1942/to:1978/mean:12/trend
The tropics, where Willis’ Thunderstorm Hypothesis works as the excess heat gets sent up, up, and away, cooled at a significant rate, -0.0027Ā°C a year, -0.27Ā°C a century.
And when the tropics, where we expect stable temperatures year-round and year-to-year, starts chilling off quickly, it’s time to get a better winter coat.
@kadaka
thanks for posting that, the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres was precisely the reason that the period of cooling was determined as being caused by sulfuric aerosols. The subsequent rise in temperatures after the u.s. and Europe stopped their sulfur emissions (80%) reduction is another verification.
The fact that people on this site use that information as an indication that there is no global warming just goes to show how hard they try to lie into a tenable position.
From jai mitchell on June 11, 2013 at 2:10 pm:
I forget which posts on WUWT debunked that, there was one or two new papers out about it, so I’ll let it slide for now. Maybe someone else can dig them up.
Speaking about lying, if you pay attention you’ll notice the predominant view is the global warming was real, not that there was none, but arguments are about how much and the causes. As has been shown here many many times the historical temperature records have been so manipulated that half of the reported “global” warming likely never happened. If you read informative works like Bob Tisdale’s, like The Manmade Global Warming Challenge, you’ll see “global” warming isn’t global but regional, averaged into global.
But I’ll go along with all that being true for the sake of discussion. Let’s see you find a tenable position. After the great Acid Rain scare, we learned interesting things, like rainwater is always acidic as pure water will always absorb carbon dioxide from the air to form a weak carbonic acid solution, and there are lakes and streams that are naturally acidic from mineral deposits and runoff from old mines, etc. Basically we learned about +90% of the Acid Rain scare was only scare, meaningless.
Since the sulfur emissions cooled the earth before, and we have grown sophisticated enough in our exhaust management technologies to filter out the chunky particulates and otherwise only certain things, since the need is so dire, since we must save the Earth from global warming, why not just let out the sulfur emissions? Climatewise the planet quickly responds to presence and absence, so they’re ideal from a control standpoint. If the warming is so harmful, why not just let them out until the planet cools off a degree or so? If it’s like last time, like you’ve said, we’ll have thirty years after shut-off until the warming is worrisome again, and then we flip the switches at the power plants and let the sulfur out again!
It’s a quick treatment, effective enough to buck an entire planetary warming trend in the past, as you have said. If the planet is in such terrible and imminent danger, why not do it?
jai mitchell says:
“The fact that people on this site use that information as an indication that there is no global warming just goes to show how hard they try to lie into a tenable position.”
==================
Pure projection. mitchell believes ā with no testable, reproducible scientific evidence ā that the reduction of sulfur emissions has exactly counteracted the rise in global warming.
At the same time mitchell dismisses the fact that there is no measurable evidence supporting his belief that CO2 is the primary cause of global warming.
That mind-set is typical of alarmist cult members, who cherry-pick their beliefs ā while at the same time rejecting the mountain of evidence that deconstructs their failed belief.
Buzz B says:
June 11, 2013 at 4:35 am
Iām 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, …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Utter bovine feces.
I was in high school and college majoring in science and hung out in the library devouring books/mag/newspapers from 1960 on. Global Warming was not even MENTIONED! A possible coming Ice Age and plate tectonics were the science news at that time and The International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958. Shackletonās work verifying Milankovitch was THE big news. Hays, J.D. John Imbrie, and N.J. Shackleton. “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages.” Science. Volume 194, Number 4270 was published in 1976.
This is where that 1977 article originates.
Time magazine has made political stances editorial policy, officially. Any claim of credibility or seriousness has been shot for decades.
They’re liars. Untrustworthy. Worse than useless.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
are you kidding me? acid rain??? really??????
hmph, you act like it didn’t happen. you are a pretty funny dude. you DO realize that sulfuric acid in solution can be identified as sulfuric acid right??? not carbonic acid???? you don’t have any real idea what you are talking about do you?
here: look at figure 2 in this paper, it shoes how the sulfur cations were measured and how they changed after the clean air act (published in 1996) http://www.esf.edu/efb/mitchell/Class%20Readings/Sci.272.244.246.pdf
of course you will probably say these scientists are falsifying data so they can get a pricey grant or make money on the cap and (sulfur) trade. . .
If we let out the sulfur emissions and continue to release carbon dioxide then the temperature will stay pretty cool at least, wherever the sulfur dioxide goes, mostly the northern hemisphere below 80N latitude. (the lack of sulfur is one reason the arctic is melting!)
but eventually the warming signal will catch up and overtake the cooling signal of sulfur. in this case, eventually, the sulfur will stop being emitted and then runaway warming will occur and destroy crops and shift rainfall patterns, leaving hundreds of millions of people on the move looking for food and water.
Buzz B — You say,”The great majority of scientists engaged in that debate correctly concluded that the warming of GHGs would trump the cooling of aerosols.”
Have you ever bothered to take a look at the papers cited in the links you give? I’ve been going through the papers cited by Connelley et al as “warming” papers, and so far I haven’t found a single one that performs such a comparison. As far as I can tell, if the paper even mentions the possibility of CO2 warming, Connelley puts it in the warmist camp.
The lists you cite look about as honest as the recent Oreskes and Cook/Lewandowsky surveys of the literature, which is to say not at all.
There have been several papers recently by “warmists” (and I don’t use that term perjoratively) studying the effects of volcano cooling and how well they are modeled. By the standards of the surveys you cite, these papers could be listed among those “predicting cooling”.
What a pity we didn’t take the climatologists’ advice back in the late 60s and early 70s by spreading black carbon on the polar ice sheets to melt them. That would have made the current claim of anthropogenic climate change certain!
@tonyb Thanks for making that point about the 60s:-)
Buzz B said @ June 11, 2013 at 12:27 pm
“See” but not read presumably. Clearly you never read any of the 1970s papers supporting anthropogenic global warming that you cite!
Buzz B,
The cooling scare was not the whole decade of the 1970’s. It was primarily mid 70’s. So if you want to cherry pick, by all means help yourself.
Your statistics are amusing. If “you” are comfortable with a 6 to 1 ratio, then that’s all that matters. I am happy for you. You donāt provide any link to the actual papers. So the evidence is just hearsay.
I’ll repeat. The U.S. government’s concern in 1974 was not with warming. I cannot help it if you cannot comprehend the CIA sponsored study. Not my problem there, bub.
You said, “if you cut those warm years off the chart”. LMAO! What a trip! You are not happy about the cooling trend from 1940s to the late 1970s, and now you are not happy about the lack of warming the last 16 years. Send your complaints to Mother Nature, dude.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 11, 2013 at 3:16 pm
From jai mitchell on June 11, 2013 at 2:10 pm:
>> The subsequent rise in temperatures after the u.s. and Europe stopped their sulfur emissions (80%) reduction is another verification.
> I forget which posts on WUWT debunked that, there was one or two new papers out about it, so Iāll let it slide for now. Maybe someone else can dig them up.
A cursory look at my Guide to WUWT and posts filed under “aerosols” (see the frame at http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/cat_aerosols.html ) has these possibilities:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/03/another-failure-of-climate-models-carbon-soot-warming-far-less/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/05/yet-another-fix-needed-for-climate-models-this-time-due-to-aerosols/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/19/why-doesnt-the-ar5-sods-climate-sensitivity-range-reflect-its-new-aerosol-estimates/
I remember the Chicago Tribune in the winter of 1979 (the third straight and all-time record cold winter in Chicago) had a 4 part cover story on the coming ice age.
From jai mitchell on June 11, 2013 at 6:18 pm:
I’m talking about acidity, as acidity was what was complained about with ACID rain, and since those times we’ve found out the alarmism about the ACIDITY was highly overblown.
What’s the matter, weren’t you alive back then? They’d find a crystal clear lake or stream, could see straight down top to bottom, which is a sure sign all microbial life was killed off, and declare that ACID RAIN did it.
You do know there’s sulfur in coal, right? There’s sulfur in the ground. So you can have dead lakes and streams that test as being sulfuric acid in solution, but it’s from ground sources, not atmospheric from burning fossil fuels. And that’s what they found there, on that end the hype was overblown.
The other great concern with ACID RAIN was “melting” statues, tombstones, masonry. Even faster-fading car paint, etc. But in the midst of the hype they habitually neglected to mention the natural acidity of rain. I don’t remember anyone differentiating between carbonic and sulfuric acid. University professors, admittedly the ones I observed were in the biology department, were just checking the pH.
I knew what I was talking about, ACID Rain. Apparently you didn’t know that, since you went off elsewhere.
Although you did manage to slip in another “You Silly Deniers! Acting like it didn’t happen!”
I’ll revise my estimation of your reading comprehension accordingly lower.
There are clearly a number of “youngsters” like Buzz fishing here. I started my fishing in the 40’s with parents from the teens and grand parents from the 1800’s and great grand parents from even earlier in a time of both oral and written family history. Temperatures cycle. Climates vary. Only the post 70’s types who don’t read or hear their family history could be so blinded by modern technology and technocrats. They really need to go outside and spend a few days under the sun and stars without their notepads and smart phones and get in touch with reality. Especially when it only reaches a high of 10 C when normal is 20 C here in central Alberta. “La plus la change, la plus la meme chose.”
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 11, 2013 at 8:52 pm
> From jai mitchell on June 11, 2013 at 6:18 pm:
>> are you kidding me? acid rain??? really??????
I remember a Science News story that suggested much of the northeast’s spruce kill may not have been due to acid rain but due to winter storms blowing trees near the tree line back and forth with enough gusto (sorry) to break the trees rootlets and impair water and nutrient uptake the next year.
The next time I was high in the White Mountains in NH, I looked into that a bit and found several areas where many of the taller trees were in sorry shape but the younger, lower trees were doing quite well. I assume that both due to the shorter moment arm and keeping low out of the wind (100 mph at times on days you really don’t want to be up there), the young trees would do okay until they become the next generation of suvivors and stand tall in the deadly wind. For a while.
While acid rain probably was a significant issue in some ways, it certainly had plenty of hype focused around it.
Oh, rainwater, last I heard, had a pH of 5.6 thanks to CO2 in the atmosphere. I wonder if that’s dropped a bit now that we’re 400 ppm and we’re all going to die.
Ric Werme said @ June 11, 2013 at 11:18 pm
Depends on when and where you measure it. I’ve linked to average rainfall pH over a 30 year period for the US below:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/pH.png
Data source: National Atmospheric Deposition Program
http://nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/
And yes, I’m sorry to have to tell you, we are all going to die. Some of us sooner than later. There appears to be no known cure š
Funniest global warming/cooling article from the 1970s: from the Milwaukee Sentinel, Jan 20, 1979. By Dick West of United Press International (found by Steven Goddard IIRC):
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=bNYVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=8BEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3143,3643107&dq=ice-age+consensus&hl=en
The building that the East Anglia climate studies are hq’d in is named after a climatologist, the founder of their program, who was himself a global cooling proponent. Though he later changed his mind.
New ice age,, a scare story to promote the nuclear industry. see the ”Windscale” Inquire
http://www.waltpatterson.org/windscalerpt.pdf
Buzz B,,
I don’t know how old you are but I was a teen in the 1970s UK. In society the talk was mostly about an ice age – early to mid-1970s maybe up to around 1977. It was NOT about global warming. That joker of the pack has alway been with us but was not something talked about in the polite circles of the 1970s. In years to come people like you will deny there was ever any talk of global warming and that only a handful of peer reviewed papers were produced. š
jai mitchell says:
“are you kidding me? acid rain??? really??????”
===========================
Oyher commentators have put mitchell in his place, but I should point out that currently China, Russia, India and a hundred smaller countries emit more sulfur products tha the U.S. ever did. But “acid rain” has disappeared according to mitchell himself.
Real world evidence like that is enough to convince me that the acid rain scare was no different than the Y2K scare, the ALAR apple scare, or the killer bees scare.
A little bit of history for readers’ interest:
In the August 1988 edition of “World” magazine, a relatively short-lived UK publication an article entitled, “The Big Heat”, by Charles Tyler, made a number of claims, including: “If current trends continue, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere could be nearly double the present level by the year 2050 – an estimated 600ppm – with an attendant average temperature rise of 2 degrees C or more.” and, “By the year 2100 calculations suggest that it [sea-level] could be between three and seven metres above today’s level.” The article goes on to set out the horrors and catastrophes that will ensue. With the current temperature “pause” in vogue at present, it is interesting that the article also quotes Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, USA, as saying, “The Earth’s climate does not respond to forcing in a smooth and gradual way. Rather it responds in sharp jumps which involve large-scale reorganization of the Earth’s systems … and the main responses of the system [may] come in jumps whose timing and magnitude are unpredictable.” The article also relates the theory of the Earth Regeneration Society that the increased warming will lead to a return to Ice Age conditions, and it appears also that 1988 was the year that climatologists launched “The Greenhouse Project : Planning for Climate Change”.
And another thing:
In January 1971, the late great Isaac Asimov published an article entitled, “The End”, which centred on population growth and energy. He made a number of predictions: As a result of burning fossil fuels, the percentage of CO2 in the air would rise to around 1% by 2150. If the then present CO2 content (0.04%) were merely to double, the average temperature of the Earth would increase by 3.6 degrees C. Fossil fuels will have gone by 2150. We have one generation (remember this is 1971) to stop runaway population growth and reorganize our cities to prevent “pathological crowding”. But he predicts we’ll fail, so that by 2000, or possibly earlier, mankind will have descended into chaos that will result in as many as three billion people dying. Further, that there will then follow nuclear war, and “as far as human civilization is concerned, that will be THE END.”
He was an excellent sci-fi writer.
You might be looking for the Time magazine cover found here: http://thecynicaleconomist.com/2009/12/07/the-fiction-of-climate-science/ from April 1977. Title? “How To Survive The Coming Ice Age”
I mean really, this guy is saying that Time never had a cover predicting a coming Ice Age? Is he stupid or dishonest? To be fair, there’s nothing that prevents both of those adjectives from applying.
Crikey, that cover was from later and added to the old issue. Now I feel like an idiot. Of course, the examples everyone else listed above provide sufficient counterexamples.
physics geek says:
June 12, 2013 at 12:13 pm
Thanks, saved me the effort of having to point that out. š OTOH, Michael Mann never admitted when he was proven wrong. I wish he had come clean….
The IPCC implied it with their charts where they gave a 95% confidence level that temperatures would not fall below their lower range-limit. The chart from the 1st assessment report’s lower line is now well above the current temp. Charts from subsequent ARs have also been as faulty. The chart from AR4 will be falsified after another year or two of flat temperatures.
But that long-term trend dates back to the 19th century–but CO2 wasn’t a noticeable factor until 1950. If that mild underlying trend continues, as Akasofu and others believe, that won’t validate the warmists’ attribution of the 1976-2002 rise as entirely due to CO2.