Guest Post by David Middleton
You can always count in TIME magazine’s Bryan Walsh for a good laugh…
Well, I suppose that Mr. Walsh is correct that a 1977 TIME magazine cover did not predict “another ice age.” The prediction (sort of a prediction) was from a 1974 TIME magazine article…
The full text of the article can be accessed through Steve Goddard’s Real Science.
TIME, like most of the mainstream-ish media, has acted like a climate weathervane over the years…
Dan Gainor compiled a great timeline of media alarmism (both warming and cooling) in his Fire and Ice essay.
While the 1977 TIME cover was a fake, this 1975 magazine cover and article were very real…
Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics was a 1977 National Academies publication. It featured what appears to be the same temperature graph, clearly demonstrating a mid-20th century cooling trend…
The mid-20th Century cooling trend is clearly present in the instrumental record, at least in the northern hemisphere…
So, why are the warmists so obsessed with denying this? Is the mid-20th century cooling period so “inconvenient” that it has to be erased from history like the Medieval Warm Period?
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Buzz B says:
June 11, 2013 at 4:35 am
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, …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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. Shackleton’s 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 @ur momisugly 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 don’t 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 I’ll 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 @ur momisugly 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 😉
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. 😉
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. 🙂 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.