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?
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 0.5° 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 “inconvenient” 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 ‘Rounds’ 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 ‘Rounds’ 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 ‘changes’ 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 ‘change’ 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 Hansen’s 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, Idso’s sensitivity paper, growth of the so called ‘skeptic’ scientists, the start of skeptics blogs to discuss the anomalies, Lindzen and Choi’s sensitivity paper, Douglass and Christy’s latitudinal anomaly paper, Spencer’s paper on errors in sensitivity measurement, lack of warming for 16 years, Svensmark’s 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, Mann’s Hockey stick paper celebration in AR-3, Gore’s escapades, Nobel Prize awards for discovery of AGW
Round 8: Climate gate and exposure of Mann’s Hockey stick, massive increase in discussion of ‘skeptics’ issues and skeptics papers, discussions of the engineering limits of green energy and economics of green scams, ongoing
Round 9: Media amplification of ‘extreme’ weather events, Media promotion of green scam spending, Politician band wagon enthusiasm for green scam deficit spending
Round 10: Environmental movement’s 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 .
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
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:
“The western world’s 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 earth’s climate is returning to that of the neo-boreal era (1600- 1850) – 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 1970′s), based on reading the papers is, in summary: “…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 climate…” (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/
•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. 😉
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 hemisphere…
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 -0.0063°C a year, or -0.63°C a century, strong cooling signal.
Southern Hemisphere was 0.00032°C a year, or 0.032°C a century, basically flat to a very tiny warming signal.
Global was -0.0030°C a year, -0.30°C a century, the average of course.
But the tropics are interesting, 30°N to 30°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, -0.0027°C a year, -0.27°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 — with no testable, reproducible scientific evidence — 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 — while at the same time rejecting the mountain of evidence that deconstructs their failed belief.