[update, reference sheet is now linked at the bottom of post]
By Angus McFarlane,
There was an overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headinginto a period of significant cooling. The possibility of anthropogenic warming was relegated to a minority of the papers in the peer-reviewed literature.
Introduction
Whether or not there was a global cooling consensus in the 1970s is important in climate science because, if there were a cooling consensus (which subsequently proved to be wrong) then it would question the legitimacy of consensus in science. In particular, the validity of the 93% consensus on global warming alleged by Cook et al (2103) would be implausible. That is, if consensus climate scientists were wrong in the 1970s then they could be wrong now.
Purpose of Review
It is not the purpose of this review to question the rights or wrongs of the methodology of the 93% consensus. For-and-against arguments are presented in several peer-reviewed papers and non-peer-reviewed weblogs. The purpose of this review is to establish if there were a consensus in the 1970s and, if so, was this consensus cooling or warming?
In their 2008 paper, The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, Peterson, Connolley and Fleck (hereinafter PCF-08) state that, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.” This conclusion intrigued me because, when I was growing up in the early 1970s, it was my perception that global cooling dominated the climate narrative. My interest was further piqued by allegations of “cover-up” and “skulduggery” in 2016 in NoTricksZone and Breitbart.
Therefore, I present a review that examines the accuracy of the PCF-08 claim that 1970s global cooling consensus was a myth. This review concentrates on the results from the data in the peer-reviewed climate science literature published in the 1970s, i.e., using similar sources to those used by PCF-08.
Review of PCF-08 Cooling Myth Paper
The case for the 1970s cooling consensus being a myth relies solely on PCF-08. They state that,”…the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent…A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.” [Emphasis added].
PCF-08 reached their conclusion by conducting a literature review of the electronic archives of the American Meteorological Society, Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR). The search period was from 1965 to 1979 and the search terms used were “global warming”, “global cooling” and a variety of “other less directly relevant” search terms. Additionally, PCF-08 evaluated references mentioned in the searched papers and references mentioned in various history-of-science documents.
In total, PCF-08 reviewed 71 papers and their survey found 7 cooling papers, 20 neutral papers and 44 warming papers. Their results are shown in their Figure 1.
A cursory examination of Figure 1 indicates that there is a 62% warming consensus if we use all the data and this consensus increases to 86% pro-warming, if we were to ignore the neutral papers (as was done in the 93% consensus). Therefore, the Figure 1 data seems to prove the contention in PCF-08 that 1970s global cooling was a myth.
However, I find it difficult to believe that the 1970s media “selectively misread” the scientific consensus of the day and promoted a non-existent cooling scare. Therefore, I present an alternative to the PCF-08 analysis below.
Methodology of this Review
In this review, I use an identical methodology to PCF-08, i.e., I examine peer-reviewed scientific journals. Non-peer-reviewed newspaper and magazine articles are not used. A significantly larger number of papers are presented in the current review than were used in PCF-08.
The PCF-08 database of articles is used but this is extended to examine more literature. Note that examining all of the scientific literature would have been beyond my resources. However, my literature survey was facilitated by the work of Kenneth Richard in 2016 (hereinafter, KR-16) at NoTricksZone, in which he has assembled a large database of sceptical peer-reviewed literature.
Some people may wish to ignore the KR-16 database as being from a so-called “climate denier” blog. However, almost all of the papers in KR-16 are from peer-reviewed literature and consequently it is a valid database. It is also worth noting that 16 of the papers used in the KR-16 database are also contained in the PCF-08 database.
The combined PCF-08 and KR-16 databases form the benchmark database for the current review. It was intended to significantly extend the benchmark database but, on searching the relevant journals, only 2 additional papers were found and these were added to form the database for this review.
It should be noted that KR-16 states that there were over 285 cooling papers. However, many of these papers were deleted from the current review as not being relevant. For example, several papers were either outside the 1965-1979 reference period or they emphasise the minor role of CO2 but do not consider climate trends.
I agree with PCF-08 that no literature search can be 100% complete. I also agree that a literature search offers a reasonable test of the hypothesis that there was a scientific consensus in the 1970s. I reiterate that the resulting database used in this review is significantly larger than that used by PCF-08 and consequently it should offer a more accurate test of the scientific consensus in the 1970s.
Most of the papers in the review database acknowledge the global cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s (typically 0.3 °C global cooling). Therefore, deciding between cooling, neutral or warming was relatively straightforward in most cases; namely did the paper expect the climate regime during the 1940s-1960s period to either to continue from the date that the paper was published, or did it expect a different climate regime in the medium-to-long-term?
Notwithstanding the straightforward test described above, some of the papers make contradictory statements and are thus more difficult to classify. Consequently, their classification can include an element of subjectivity. Fortunately, there are very few papers in this category and consequently an inappropriate classification does not materially affect the overall results.
The test criteria are summarised in Table 1.
| Classification | Test of Classification of Papers | Typical Examples from Papers |
| Cooling | Cooling expected to either continue or initiate | Kukla & Kukla (1972)
“…the prognosis is for a long-lasting global cooling more severe than any experienced hitherto by civilized mankind.” |
| Neutral | Either non-committal on future climate change or expects warming or cooling to be equally possible | Sellers (1969)
“The major conclusions that removing the arctic ice cap would have less effect on climate than previously suggested, that a decrease of the solar constant by 2-5% would be sufficient, to initiate another ice age, and that man’s increasing industrial activities may eventually lead to the elimination of the ice caps and to a climate about 14C warmer than today…” |
| Warming | Warming expected to either continue or initiate | Manabe & Weatherald (1967)
“According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO, content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2C.” |
Table 1: Summary of Classification System for Papers
The search terms “global cooling” and “global warming” used by PCF-08 are used in this review but they have been expanded to include “cool”, “warm”, “aerosol” and “ice-age” because these, more general terms, return a larger number of relevant papers. Additional search terms such as “deterioration”, “detrimental” and “severe” have also been included. These would fit into the PCF-08 category of “other less directly relevant” search terms.
Several of the papers in the database are concerned about the effects of aerosol cooling and they state that this effect dominates the effect of the newly emerging CO2-warming science. Indeed, a few papers warn of CO2 cooling.
However, PCF-08 do not include any papers that refer to aerosol cooling by a future fleet of supersonic aircraft (SST’s) but several papers in the 1970s assumed an SST fleet of 500 aircraft. This seems incongruous now but, to show that this number of aircraft is not unrealistic; Emirates Airlines currently have a fleet of 244 (non-supersonic) aircraft and 262 more on order. Therefore, I have included papers that refer to the effects of aerosols from supersonic aircraft and other human activities. Of course, supersonic travel was killed-off by the mid-1970s oil crisis.
Furthermore, a number of PCF-08 and KR-16 papers were re-classified (from cooling, neutral or warming) as summarised Table 2.
| Reference | Original | Amended |
| Sellers (1969) | Warming | Neutral |
| Benton (1970) | Warming | Neutral |
| Rasool and Schneider (1972) | Neutral | Cooling |
| Machta (1972) | Warming | Neutral |
| FCSTICAS (1974) | Warming | Cooling |
| National Academy of Sciences (1975) | Neutral | Cooling |
| Thompson, 1975 | Warming | Neutral |
| Shaw (1976) | Neutral | Cooling |
| Bryson and Dittberner (1977) | Neutral | Cooling |
| Barrett, 1978 | Neutral | Cooling |
| Ohring and Adler (1978) | Warming | Neutral |
| Stuiver (1978) | Warming | Neutral |
| Sagan et al. (1979) | Neutral | Cooling |
| Choudhury and Kukla, 1979 | Neutral | Cooling |
| a. Amended Classifications to PCF-08 | ||
| Reference | Original | Amended |
| Budyko, 1969 | Cooling | Warming |
| Benton (1970) | Cooling | Neutral |
| Mitchell, 1970 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Mitchell (1971) | Cooling | Warming |
| Richmond, 1972 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Denton and Karlén, 1973 | Cooling | Warming |
| Schneider and Dickinson, 1974 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Moran, 1974 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Ellsaesser, 1975 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Thompson, 1975 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Gates, 1976 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Zirin et al., 1976 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Bach, 1976 | Cooling | Warming |
| Norwine, 1977 | Cooling | Warming |
| Paterson, 1977 | Cooling | Neutral |
| Schneider, 1978 | Cooling | Warming |
| b. Amended Classifications to KR-16 |
Table 2: Amendments to Classification of Papers in Database
Two examples of the amendments to the classification of the papers in the database are explained below:
1. The Benton (1970) paper is classified as “Cooling” in KR-16 but the paper states that, “In the period from 1880 to 1940, the mean temperature of the earth increased about 0.60C; from 1940 to 1970, it decreased by 0.3-0.4°C…The present rate of increase of 0.7 ppm per year [of CO2] would therefore (if extrapolated to 2000 A.D.) result in a warming of about 0.60C – a very substantial change…The drop in the earth’s temperature since 1940 has been paralleled by a substantial increase in natural volcanism. The effect of such volcanic activity is probably greater than the effect of manmade pollutants… it is essential that scientists understand thoroughly the dynamics of climate.” [Emphasis added]. Consequently, this paper is re-classified as neutral in this review. Not the “Cooling” classification in KR-16 and not the “Warming” the classification in PCF-08).
2. The Sagan et al. (1979) paper is classified as “Neutral” in PCF-08 but the paper states that, “Observations show that since 1940 the global mean temperature has declined by -0.2 K…Extrapolation of present rates of change of land use suggests a further decline of -1 K in the global temperature by the end of the next century, at least partially compensating for the increase in global temperature through the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, anticipated from the continued burning of fossil fuels.” [Emphasis added]. Therefore, this paper is re-classified as cooling in this review (conforming to the KR-16 classification).
Results from Review & Discussion
The review database contains a total 190 relevant papers, which is 2.7 times the size of the PCF-08 database. Of the 190 papers in the review database, 162 full papers/books and 25 abstracts were reviewed (abstracts were used when the full papers were either pay-walled or could not be sourced). Furthermore, 4 warming papers from PCF-08 were not reviewed because they could not be sourced. Therefore, the PCF-08 classification was used for these papers in this review.
The results from the review are summarised in Figure 2.
It is evident from Figure 2 that, for the 1965-1979 reference period used by PCF-08, the number of cooling papers significantly outnumbers the number of warming papers. It is also apparent that there are two distinct sub-periods contained within the reference period, namely:
1. The 1968-1976 period when cooling papers greatly outnumber the warming papers (85% to 15%), if we ignore the neutral papers (as was done in the Cook et al (2103). The 85% to 15% majority is an overwhelming cooling consensus. Additionally, this is probably the period when the 1970s “global cooling consensus” originated because cooling was clearly an established scientific consensus – not the myth that PCF-08 contend.
2. The 1977-1979 period when warming papers slightly outnumber the cooling papers (52% to 48%) – a warming majority but not a consensus.
The following observations are also worth noting from Figure 2 for the 1965-1979 reference period:
1. Of the 190 papers in the database, the respective number of papers are 86 cooling, 58 neutral and 46 warming. In percentage terms, this equates to 45% cooling papers, 31% neutral papers and 24% warming papers, if we use all of the data.
2. The cooling consensus increases to 65% compared with 35% warming – a considerable cooling consensus, if we ignore the neutral papers (as was done in the Cook et al (2103).
3. The total number of cooling papers is always greater than or equal to the number of warming papers throughout the entire reference period.
Although not presented in Figure 2, it is worth noting that 30 papers refer to the possibility of a New Ice-Age or the return to the “Little Ace-Age” (although they sometimes they used the term “Climate Catastrophic Cooling”). Timescales for the New Ice Age vary from a few decades, through a century or two, to several millennia. The 30 “New Ice Age” papers are not insignificant when compared with the 46 warming papers.
Conclusions
A review of the climate science literature of the 1965-1979 period is presented and it is shown that there was an overwhelming scientific consensus for climate cooling (typically, 65% for the whole period) but greatly outnumbering the warming papers by more than 5-to-1 during the 1968-1976 period, when there were 85% cooling papers compared with 15% warming.
It is evident that the conclusion of the PCF-08 paper, The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, is incorrect. The current review shows the opposite conclusion to be more accurate. Namely, the 1970s global cooling consensus was not a myth – the overwhelming scientific consensus was for climate cooling.
It appears that the PCF-08 authors have committed the transgression of which they accuse others; namely, “selectively misreading the texts” of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979. The PCF-08 authors appear to have done this by neglecting the large number of peer-reviewed papers that were pro-cooling.
I find it very surprising that PCF-08 only uncovered 7 cooling papers and did not uncover the 86 cooling papers in major scientific journals, such as, Journal of American Meteorological Society, Nature, Science, Quaternary Research and similar scientific papers that they reviewed. For example, PCF-08 only found 1 paper in Quaternary Research, namely the warming paper by Mitchell (1976), however, this review found 19 additional papers in that journal, comprising 15 cooling, 3 neutral and 1 warming.
I can only suggest that the authors of PCF-08 concentrated on finding warming papers instead of conducting the impartial “rigorous literature review” that they profess.
If the current climate science debate were more neutral, the PCF-08 paper would either be withdrawn or subjected to a detailed corrigendum to correct its obvious inaccuracies.
Afterword
I reiterate that no literature survey can be 100% complete. Therefore, if you uncover additional references then please send them to me in the comments. It would make this review much better if we could significantly increase the number of relevant references.
Additionally, if you disagree with the classification of some of the references then please let me know why you disagree and I will consider appropriate amendments. Your comments on classification would certainly increase the veracity of the review by providing an independent assessment of my classifications.
References
The references used in this review and their classification are included in the spreadsheet here:
References-Global Cooling Consensus.xlsx
I remember well, good ole Jame Hansen. LOL I was a senior in 1977. Some think this winter my approach the same conditions. Of course we will read that the blocking off the coast of Washington will be caused by CO2 and Global Warming. If NASA is correct and we cool some, the headlines will read, what happens after the solar minimum. I am 59, I really don’t care. We can’t change the climate.
The WA State record low was recorded on 30 December 1968, IIRC, in Winthrop.
The same day was also the lowest, ie -35, I ever experienced in my hometown in NE OR, but our state record low was set most recently at Seneca to my south in 1933, a tie with a previous date.
I believe it was -54F and it was recorded within a week or so of the lowest recorded temperature outside of Antarctica of -90F in Oymyakon Siberia. Same air mass? Survey says: Yes.
Is this really the climate to which Alarmunistas want us to return?
I am old enough to have memory of the press coverage for that era, and there were definitely dire warnings of a cooling trend. It would appear there is more than a bit of gaslighting going on.
285 Papers 70s Cooling 1
http://notrickszone.com/285-papers-70s-cooling-1/
I see that Nick Stokes completely IGNORE this link.
Gee I wonder why………….
Snicker………………
Because most of them, if you had taken the time to actually read them, are NOT about predictions of “imminent global cooling”at all.
Of course! & you know that Gaslights contribute to Global Warming, er, Climate Change!
Me too Tom. I was 14 in 1965. My memory isn’t the greatest but I don’t recall ever hearing anything about any possible warming but quite a bit about us humans causing an early arrival of the next ice age due the combustion partials blocking the sunlight. I never agreed with the global warming alarmist but mostly just ignored it until I realized (mostly from reading on this blog) just how must of our money and effort was being wasted and how much more is in planning stages to be wasted. My fear is that our economy is fragile and always has been and the actions demanded by the alarmist could make the great depression look like a picnic. Wars seem to come about when economic calamity occurs.
Even popular magazines such as True and Popular Science (and perhaps Popular Mechanics) carried articles warning of a new ice age, if memory serves me right.
Even popular magazines such as True and Popular Science (and perhaps Popular Mechanics) carried articles warning of a new ice age, if memory serves me right.
I remember that as well. Science Digest had a special issue about the Coming Ice Age. I think it was 1976. They also had an issue with a large article written by Isaac Asimov. I wish I’d kept them.
Tom Halla
Yes, there were popular articles
about global cooling
in the mid-1970s
It would have been tough
to predict global warming
after 30 years of cooling,
and get that prediction published.
But in the twentieth century,
and probably earlier,
there have ALWAYS been some scientists ,
desperately seeking attention,
in the mainstream media,
by predicting
a warming,
or cooling,
or some other,
coming disaster.
Unfortunately,
I believe this article
is meaningless data mining.
I also wonder why anyone
would care about opinions
in the 1970s, even if there
was some way to accurately
measure those opinions today.
The “re-interpretations”
of the papers
made me
VERY suspicious.
Does a study of some articles that
got published in the 1970s, not all of them,
really tell us what ALL qualified scientists
believed at the time ?
I say “NO”.
In the good old days,
it was considered junk science
to make wild guess predictions
of the future climate —
now it is a leftist sport.
.
.
Now let me explain why:
There were few scientists in the 1970s
who called themselves climate scientists,
or climatologists.
But there were many scientists qualified
to state an opinion about the future climate.
Few of them made long-term predictions
in writing, that were published.
Those that did put their opinions in writing,
would have had a hard time getting published,
if they predicted warming, after the
multi-decade cooling period, since 1940.
So, the subset of scientists
predicting the future climate,
is a minority
of all scientists qualified to do so
(assuming ANYONE is really qualified
to predict the future).
And the scientists whose papers
actually that got PUBLISHED in the 1970s,
were most likely to be those
who predicted global cooling.
What got PUBLISHED,
and publicized,
DOES NOT reveal
what all qualified scientists
believed at the time.
Of course I can’t read the minds
of scientists back in the 1970s,
any more than you can
… but I can observe
that it did not take long
for a global warming
consensus to develop.
The speed of the developing
global warming consensus
strongly suggests, but does not prove,
that many scientists already believed in
the greenhouse theory and man made
global warming in the 1970s,
even if they NEVER wrote, and
got published, papers saying that.
My climate change blog:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
any studies
Rasool &Schneider is mentioned above. That was originally neutral because in the introduction they say that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause 0.8 degrees of warming and you would need an 8 fold increase for 2 degrees of warming so it would be a minor effect, too small to negate the catastrophic cooling to come if we didn’t decarbonise the economy. Once their calculations were shown to be rubbish, they became leading scientists in the push to decarbonise the economy to stop global warming with Schneider even becoming Thinker in Residence in South Australia advising the government to turn the state into a basket case because of electricity from renewable sources.
Its pretty clear that the change from global cooling was influenced by science but going from benign warming to thermageddon was politics.
Their guess at ECS can now be seen not to be rubbish. Estimates keep falling. Since net feedback effects might well be negative, it’s entirely possible that climate sensitivity could indeed be less than the lab value of ~1.1 degree C per doubling of CO2, rather than the two, three, four or more times that figure, assumed due to supposed net positive feedbacks.
I interviewed Schneider over his “nuclear winter” paper. He admitted that the aerosol and particulate assumptions from sooty, burning cities, forests and fields had wide error margins.
“had wide error margins” as in they shouldn’t have bothered publishing?
“Their guess at ECS can now be seen not to be rubbish” . They didn’t provide the calculations. Just stated it as the consensus. And its still rubbish. Despite all the adjustments to the various estimates of temperature anomalies to get rid of the pause, they are still only consistent with about a third of a degree of warming going from 300 to 400 ppm, due to emissions.
In 1974, the CIA reported the “growing consensus” among scientists that dangerous global cooling was in the offing:
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/05/cia-1974-global-cooling-to-produce-global-unrest-beyond-comprehension/
Me too.I remember working out how old I would be when this happened.Even as a young snow lover I can remember thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t enjoy it so much in my 70’s.I will be 66 in a few days and I’m getting very twitchy about the quiet sun.
Peterson et al, also missed this gem, in the NOAA.
1972 – Kukla-Mathews publishes in Science, an article about the end of the current inter glacial. Also writes a letter to Nixon in 1972, specifically warning about global cooling.
1973 – First Climate office started in Feb 1973 (ad hoc Panel on the Present Inter Glacial). This was after a meeting of 42 of the most prominent climatologists, and apparently there was consensus about cooling. Especially as the NOAA, NWS and ICAS were involved.
1974 – Office of Climate Dynamics opened.
1978 -Carter signs Climate Program Act, partly due to the SEVERE WINTER experienced the preceding winter.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw29_proceedings/Reeves.pdf
Little did the know that the unforgettable winter of 1976/77 was just the PDO flip.
The PDO wasn’t discovered until the mis-’90s, by a UW fisheries researcher.
Excellent work Angus, I believe what you say, thanks.
Angus McFarlane -good work – thank you.
It cooled .3 from 1940 to 1978. It warmed .3 from 1979 to 2018.
Any questions?
Were either numbers ‘right’ then or now?
1) What caused the cooling?
2) What caused the warming?
3) What are the error bars on those numbers?
Mark
0.3 + 0.3 adds up to 0.6 degrees of “climate change”.
Head for the hills !
Or perhaps it cooled by nearer 0.5degC between the highs of the late 1930s/early 1940s and early 1970s, and has since the early 1970s warmed by about 0.5 to 0.6 degC.
There is much evidence to suggest that the temperatures today in the Northern Hemisphere are no higher than they were in the late 1930s/early 1940s. But of course, the thermometer temperature reconstruction is not fit for scientific purpose such that no one really knows what the correct position is.
A review like this without any details is useless. Perhaps the details are meant to be in the spreadsheet mentioned, but there is no live link.
Only one example of reclassification to cool is given, and it is in the classic KR style of picking out and bolding out of context. Just repeating the quote without bold:
“Extrapolation of present rates of change of land use suggests a further decline of -1 K in the global temperature by the end of the next century, at least partially compensating Extrapolation of present rates of change of land use suggests a further decline of -1 K in the global temperature by the end of the next century, at least partially compensating for the increase in global temperature through the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, anticipated from the continued burning of fossil fuels.”
and it isn’t forecasting cooling at all. It is saying that land use, a minor factor, may partially compensate “for the increase in global temperature through the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, anticipated from the continued burning of fossil fuels”
IOW, it won’t warm quite as much as it might have. That is not a cooling paper.
Nick, did you apply your reasoning to the other consensus???
Just asking for specifics of n actual cooling paper that PCF-08 is supposed to have missed.
I counted 8 . Amended Classifications to PCF-08
Rasool and Schneider (1972) Neutral Cooling
FCSTICAS (1974) Warming Cooling
National Academy of Sciences (1975) Neutral Cooling
Shaw (1976) Neutral Cooling
Bryson and Dittberner (1977) Neutral Cooling
Barrett, 1978 Neutral Cooling
Sagan et al. (1979) Neutral Cooling
Choudhury and Kukla, 1979 Neutral Cooling
Yes, but no details or justification is given; just an assertion. There are 16 cases shown where a cooling paper in PCF08 was changed to neutral or warm.
The references seem to be missing…hopefully he will it..
Dammit! I forgot to put up the excel file. It’s on me. Let me get at it.
It’s now linked at the bottom of the post
Tanx.. : )
It doesn’t say “partially” compensate, it says -1 K exactly. But yeah, I’d say that is a neutral paper.
“at least partially compensating for the increase in global temperature”
Two opposing mechanisms are presented without declaring the net effect, although the preponderance of evidence suggests cooling as that is the only trend given a magnitude. It does NOT say the net effect is warmer, only that there is a warming effect from CO2.
“partially compensating” says the net effect is warmer.
But “at least partially compensating” means it may more than compensate for the warming. The phrasing is rather odd, but suggests the net effect could be either warming or cooling.
To this UK English speaker the phrase “at lesst compensating for” means that the best outcome is neutral and the worst is continued cooling.
The effect of cooling aerosols might be equalled by the warming effect of CO2 but not exceeded by the warming.
Quite straight forward.
I missed that because of the weird double paste, but it’s not the language they should use. If it’s partially compensating, they should state quantifiably the net change and why or who thinks that.
Its called a ‘buck each way’.
Later when accused of making the wrong call all that is said is that the claimer does not understand the science.
I am an old guy and maybe have the onset of senile dementia, but the papers refer to cooling (net) of -1 K. Or down 1 degree Centigrade if you prefer. Now, if you are hung up on the dire effects of CO2 you can cite the ameliorating effect, but the subject at hand is whether the paper predicts cooling or not. Nick, stick to the subject.
I would call this the ‘Topiary” effect: hedges trimmed to the shape of one’s confirmation bias.
We all hate it when our ox is Gored. And so the discussion continues.
It is saying that land use, a minor factor, may partially compensate
That is NOT what it said. I quote, bold mine, taken directly from your comment:
at least partially compensating for the increase in global temperature through the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect
There is a substantial difference between “may” and “at least partially” compensate. In fact the latter suggest that partially compensate is the minimum, and could plausibly be more, as in fully or more than compensate for greenhouse effect.
It is a cooling paper, by your own quote. You only made it into a warming paper by changing a single word and hoping nobody would notice.
“It is a cooling paper”
So how does “at least partially compensate” warming translate into definite net cooling, and so overruling PCF08, which put it at neutral.
It says
“Extrapolation of present rates of change of land use suggests a further decline of -1 K in the global temperature by the end of the next century”
The key is it definitely says a further decline of -1 K,
which I read as the net result of various factors causing declines and increases.
Obviously that decline is presented as one factor (anomaly) weighed against the clearly stated warming factor of global increase. This is exactly why this type of paper research should be done very carefully since people tend to interpret in the way that fits their initial motivation to start looking.
That said, even with all the corrections, in my view there will be likely no warming consensus found for the stated period. It would become 50-50 or 60-40 either way and in such environment the media bias & selection method will become way more decisive in how it’s remembered. Which is exactly the lesson to take away from it.
Nick, Nick, Nick,
The question was, what was the science saying about the current state of the global temperature trend at the time. Was the earth cooling at that point in time or not? The statement from the paper was that AT THAT TIME the earth was cooling, that land use would accelerate that. The observation that “by the end of the next century” this cooling would at LEAST partially off set greenhouse effect (if not more) is talking about what? 120 years later?
The paper clearly describes a cooling earth at the time, not a warming one.
David,
“The question was, what was the science saying about the current state of the global temperature trend at the time.”
No, it wasn’t. There was indeed a consensus that the temperature trend at the time was down. There still is. That is different from a “cooling scare”. The issue (question) defined in the article is:
“There was an overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was heading into a period of significant cooling.”
“if there were a cooling consensus (which subsequently proved to be wrong) then it would question the legitimacy of consensus in science.”
Now downtrends in temperature are in the record; they haven’t proved to be wrong, and they aren’t a big deal.
The point, Nick, is that the warmists of today are claiming that there was never a “scientific” consensus of a cooling trend. This article is demonstrating that there was actually a consensus and that the warmists of today are (yet again) rewriting history to suit their own narrative.
” that the warmists of today are claiming that there was never a “scientific” consensus of a cooling trend”
Well, quote them. What do they actually say? It’s sort of quoted in the araticle. From the abstract of PCF08:
“An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age”
That is what they say is wrong. It involves prediction, not a description of recent trends. And it speaks of imminent, not eventual. That is what KR and Angus confuse. They bring in a whole lot of papers that merely describe recent trend, or the glaciation cycle, and say they promoted the myth. But it is quite different. Many papers they cite are not controversial, then or now.
That is different from a “cooling scare”.
I sat through multiple classes in high school in that time frame where multiple students broke down and cried because they thought the ice age was coming. I really don’t give a d*mn what evidence you cite, I LIVED THROUGH THE COOLING SCARE AND IT WAS REAL.
As I relate downthread, I was one of the few to call bsh*t on the hysteria, and I took a ton of grief from teachers and other students for it. I called bsh*t on the cooling scare then, and I call bsh*t on the warming scare now.
Hivemind,
Not only was there a cooling consensus, it was based on extrapolating the behavior of the recent past. That consensus was wrong and the trend reversed. Apparently, they failed to learn that it’s invalid to extrapolate short term climate trends allowing another ‘consensus’ to arise around extrapolating the new short term trend.
Nick
It’s a shame you didn’t go to the same lengths to critically examine Resplandy et al.
davidmhoffer you are not alone, I too lived through it. It wasn’t just in the schools, it was one TV and in the newspapers as well. As Leonard Nemoy’s popular “In search of…” program attests with the 1978 episode “In search of the coming ice age”.
“There is a substantial difference between “may” and “at least partially” compensate. ”
Exactly right, that “at least” phase tends to tip it onto the cooling side
Nick the link to the spreadsheet is at the bottom of the article.
I came to the same conclusion, Nick.
You don’t need to be a scientist or anything other than literate to understand the meaning of “partially compensate”.
On the other hand I lived through the 70s. Whatever the “consensus” that Connolley et al might have been trying to downplay — and after his persistent activist tinkering with Wikipedia, why should anybody assume anything he says on climate is to be trusted? — the media consensus was that cooling was what we needed to worry about.
Since the media have always been mugs for a good scare story (personal experience!) it is a certainty that “global cooling” was what they were being fed by sources that they had every reason to believe were reliable. (Hype, exaggeration, a bit of scaremongering are OK; actual lying they try to avoid!) Which had to be either the science establishment or the environmentalists.
They were being fed rubbish then just as they are being fed the other side of the the same rubbish now. And for the same reason. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” (H L Mencken)
The question isn’t and has never been whether or not the media supported the idea of imminent global cooling – there may well have been a lot of reporting claiming the ice age was coming (I don’t know of any studies of media reporting at the time), the question was always, “was there a scientific consensus in the 70s that a significant and long term global cooling trend was imminent?” I do not think there is any evidence suggesting the answer to that question is “yes.”
But this to me raises another important consideration. If there was a cooling consensus in the 70s, so what? So what if scientists “got it wrong” 50 years ago – we know a lot more now about the climate than we did then. The earth actually was cooling at the time, probably as a result of aerosol forcing, so hypothesizing about continued cooling would hardly have been unreasonable.
To me the entire premise of this argument is fallacious – that we shouldn’t trust scientists now if they’ve ever been wrong in the past.
I disagree with the final sentence. If scientists in the climate field have been wrong in the past, then laymen are wise to be skeptical of their claims in the future.
This is true of any field. Eggs were good, then bad, then good, then bad, … Laymen should be skeptical of findings in the diet/nutrition field because of the contradictory results over time. Especially since lots of money is involved in selling dietary and nutritional advice.
Which reminds me, the climatology field also has a lot of money involved. So there are two excellent reasons for laymen to be skeptical of climate scientists: They have been wrong in the past, and there is the potential for them to make a lot of money off of either global cooling or global warming.
Agree, that paper should be classified as neutral or warm.
Nick, once again you thread-hijack with false wording.
Nice work. And it’s 100% true that if this paper isn’t retracted that a bias is proven. I’d only add that a 52% in this cased doesn’t represent a “majority” but is more of “a roughly even split.”
Extra, extra read all about it, US model backwards on temps in the eastern united states for Nov., Ky is -8 mtd.
Who runs and programs this model anyway, all the others have it the opposite. Gore running it?
Once upon a time scientific consensus included: caloric, phlogiston, spontaneous generation, luminiferous ether, the four humours, etc.
Over time they eventually fell to the scientific process. Maybe we need another Paris Academy of Science to sponsor a red team/blue team competition as it did for spontaneous generation.
Ya know consensus and most everythang else discussed^4 about climate change is moot because:
1) 33 C warmer w/ atmosphere is rubbish,
2) Up/down/”back” GHG energy loop is thermodynamic nonsense,
3) BB upwelling LWIR from surface is not possible.
1 + 2 + 3 = 0 RGHE & 0 GHG warming & 0 CAGW.
Still waiting for an alarmist defender to refute these points.
Actually, there’s a much more recent consensus. Ancel Keys came up with the theory that everything was the fault of dietary fat. His science was crap. In spite of that he captured the consensus and it was enforced. People who bucked the consensus had their careers trashed. link The comparison with CAGW is pretty direct.
The usual thing when people find out about past bad science is to say that we’re more sophisticated than that now. Ancel Keys and his fat consensus are modern. That was within the lifetime of most of the people on WUWT.
Cooling world was my understanding for a long time. At some point I was working in remote regions of developing countries & upon visiting family heard people expounding global warming. Personally I think, in the long run, cooling is destined to be a feature. I suppose I want to see how it plays out.
Yes I want to see how it plays out, and give the warmists a chance to prove their theory,
because if we reduce the CO2 like they want, neither side can show they were right.
gringojay,
A while ago you posted a link to a study on chickpeas and elevated CO2, the link didn’t work. Do you have a good one?
@aaron, – Do you recall the WUWT OiginalPost title or maybe the publihed research paper’s title? I don’t keep “files” so can’t pull up source documnts & this tablet makes it hard to search back WUWT posts (there are so any a ot). I know where I was when cited the chickpea study & that means it was posted someime during the last week of Sept. or by 10 October (2018).
That’s Naomi Oreskes’ take on it.
But here’s what happens if you try to explain this to believalists.
Dr. Oreskes is a woman, so she must be believed.
She’s right, for a change, that the consensus in the late ’60s and ’70s was cooling. As anyone alive then and payding attention knows.
I was alive then, and paying attention, and I agree the consensus was definitely Global Cooling. That’s one reason I’m so skeptical of the current Global Warming claims because I have seen all this before and the consensus turned out to be wrong.
It had been cooling for decades since the 1940’s so why wouldn’t people think we were experiencing global cooling. We were!
The Global Warming papers were just speculating about the possible effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. Just like they do today.
Right at the end of the 1970’s the temperatures started warming and not soon after that, we had a Global Warming consensus.
It seems that whatever direction the temperature trend takes, many climate scientists seem to think that trend will last forever and make wild predictions about the future.
Tom,
There is something that can be said for the synoptic view provided by experience. One comes to a very different conclusion if the examination of the behavior of the sine function is limited to 0 to 90 degrees, versus the looking at 0 to 360 degrees.
+1
Remember the cooling scare well. Man-made aerosols (pollution) blocking out the sun. Famine coming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_1975!_America%27s_Decision:_Who_Will_Survive%3F
Ah the ’60s and ’70s. There was a cooling scare, an overpopulation scare, a man-made pollution scare all rolled into one. At the time it was hard to separate them all out.
And in the media, (I understand this isn’t a media study) there was a steady drumbeat of an immanent ice-age.
‘imminent’ if you please…
And they made and make wold predictions.
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/08/1970-global-cooling-scare-front-page-news/
“The ice age scare was front page news in 1970. Scientists said it was caused by burning fossil fuels, and would cause the Antarctic ice sheet to collapse – drowning coastal cities. They wanted to melt the Arctic and poison Africans to save the planet.
Front page of the Washington Post, January 11, 1970. Colder Winters Held Dawn Of New Ice Age. “That’s the long range forecast being given out by climatologists”
I also remember from that time, an analysis (repeated in a couple of popularized articles) that found short (a decade or so), medium (several decades), and long term (several centuries) cycles into which the temperature record could be decomposed with a reasonable fit; and that all three cycles seemed to be adding together to create a large cooling trend for the 1970’s-90’s time period.
Although that analysis did NOT find a exact match with the 11 year sunspot cycle, it was an attempt to fit a noisy record, so .. could have been.
I lived through it as well. It was real, and there was a consensus on cooling.
We were being encouraged to burn Fossil fuel to increase atmospheric CO2 in the hope that a greenhouse warming effect could “at least partially compensate” for the cooling that was predicted. That was the wording.
Yes, there was talk of GHE, as a possible hope against the next ice age.
That’s one gem of a mistake, though the paper was not published scholarly, was it?
Oreskes, Naomi. “From weather modification to climate change: The work of Gordon JF MacDonald.”
Dyslexic typo in a couple of places – Cook et al (2103)
Another typo is at the top of the page where it is stated there was a 93% consensus, when the actual figure is 97%.
I get confused about which Time magazine cover(s) are fake – isn’t the Penguin one fake?
Doesn’t affect the substance of the article though.
Yes, it is fake. Details here.
Time magazine itself also tells the story: http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/
But it may still be worthwhile to find out exactly who faked it in the first place. Remember, folks in the old Ozone Action environmentalist organization planted a fake name in Art Robinson’s Oregon Petition Project in order to prompt major news organizations to declare the whole petition worthless, so I wouldn’t put it past some enviro-activists to plant a fake magazine cover on the internet and then crow about how many ‘conservative zealots’ use it without question to say the global cooling craze (which I also remember well) never happened.
” some enviro-activists to plant a fake magazine cover on the internet “
That was the point of the article I linked. It debunked a 2017 WUWT article claiming that it had been planted by activists just prior to the linked Time article in 2013. But I traced it back to at least a Free Republic article in 2007, where it appears with the true 2007 cover. It seems to be someone’s idea of a parody, which people liked and passed on as real. And here it bobs up again, despite all the debunkings.
ps the 2007 links seem to have dead images. But they were there.
Nick,
I was a teenager in the 70’s and I remember distinctly all the hysteria around the impending ice age. Particularly sensitive when you live on the frigid Canadian prairie in the first place. One class discussion got so intense that some students broke down and cried because they thought they were going to have to abandon their homes and farms and find a new place to live.
I was one of the few (very few) students to call bsh*t. I didn’t have access to scientific journals at the time, but I did have access to all the magazines and newspapers that the school library subscribed to. I read the articles, and there were lots of them, cover or no cover. Some of them had enough references and detail that I could take it back to the teachers and point out the exaggerations and misrepresentations. Not that they listened to me, but that’s not the point. The point is that Time cover being real or not, the articles and general discussion of the science centered on cooling. Anywhere from a little to ice age. That was the consensus at the time.
Nick, more of the dead pics work in the Internet Archive version of that Free Republic piece, but the one in question might still be among the dead links there: https://web.archive.org/web/20091202083034/http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1887747/posts
Russell,
Thanks. That is the page with many of the cartoons, but unfortunately the Time cover one is still not working. It might be to do with the disappearance of the StrangePolitics site. Fortunately I kept a copy of the animated gif, which is here. I believe that 2007 image is the first appearance of the fake.
The REAL magazine cover in question is here
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601740624,00.html
The scare article from that issue, linked to on that page is reproduced here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1663607/posts
Don’t let the fake news about the fake cover planted by the warmist fakers confuse you.
There WAS a real scare article in Time Magazine, which fueled the REAL fake scare of the seventies.
I have a 1944 birthday and in the ’70s is was “Global Cooling” sometime in the ’80s it had morphed into “Nuclear Winter” and I distinctly remember “Nuclear Winter” and “Global Warming” stories in the press running at the same time. That’s why I KNOW that something isn’t kosher.
The word “myth” in PCF-08 is a tell-tale term more suitable for propaganda purposes than science. William M. Connolley, the C in PCF was the sometime editor of Wankerpedia famed for promptly editing out anything skeptical posted there about global warming. It’s not particularly surprising that PCF-08 has been proven wildly erroneous, Nick Stokes’s tarantella to confuse the issue notwithstanding.
Early’80’s was also acid rain
Give it another couple of years and Time can just reprint their 1977 cover-page article, just change the dates.
I am so ready for the next big environmental crisis. The climate crisis is long over due to be replaced with something else. I remember when environmentalist shifted their focus (zero population growth, acid rain, deforestation, toxic waste, anti-nuclear power) like they changed clothes.
Just check the forecasts for Europe:
From Accuweather:
Winter to get an early start as cold sweeps from Warsaw to Paris and London early this week
November 19, 2018, 11:37:07 AM EST
The coldest air so far this season will sweep across northern Europe during the first half of this week, bringing the potential for snow to some communities.
D’ont forget that after we finish off the global warming scam there is still the ozone hole scam to deal with.
Tomalty
The ozone scare is yesterday’s newspapers.
The next scam, I predict,
will be exploding
silicone breast implants
caused by global warming,
and/or burning fossil fuels.
There will ALWAYS be
a coming catastrophe
and the “solution”
will always be to do exactly
what the leftists say,
without question !
oh its here…its plastic!
in oceans animals and even us..
meanwhile I too copped the 70s iceage running outta everything crap via schoool and media as a teen
Id never heard of warming con till 2007 and gores movie showing appeared in my small rural town via his “converts”
luckily for me i was pre primed by the first scare that stuffed my mind n life around
and had an older wiser chap who also told me to go and really look at the subject
then bless Anthony and the rest of the people here and elsewhere who speak up show data and discuss, i realised it really is a load of sh*t and another global conjob.
9 yrs since copenhagen and im STILL firmly skeptical and angrier by the day
As usual idology gets in the way of the truth.
But really it does not matter, climate or weather, it changes.
We are still faced with the bottom card in the giant sized “House of Cards”That of good old CO2. Lets have the truth about CO2 and all of this nonsence will finally go away.
MJE
Well, I would say that the Canadian government believed the cooling part. I ran a 16mm projector showing a film entitled something like, “The Coming Ice Age”. I would like to find it. Did the national library destroy it, convert it to tape, or save it?
It was co-sponsored by CMOS – Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
Here is a short 2 minute clip by Leonard Nimoy (Spock) of a similar video from the early 1970’s I believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUq0JnaIock
I just watched the 90 minute video you are talking about last winter, but now Google searches comes up empty for it. I suppose it could be in the process of being scrubbed from online ‘memory’ so it disappears, but I have seen it several times, including originally in the early to mid 1970’s at school too. For the record, I lived through that period on the northern prairie in Sask near the tree line at 53 north. It was all the talk for at least 10-15 years of the pending ice age, as were the news reports and my Dad actually starting selling the farm off quarter x quarter and we moved to the city and farmed from there for anther 10 years as winters were just brutal. It was clearly not working out for farming and land prices stagnated or fell during that time. Winters were -40 lows overnight for weeks on end with a brutal windchill, and we had -51F on our farm for the record low in one really bad stretch for which my father kept records. Some of our cows died, and the neighbours horses died from exposure.
If that cooling trend was still happening, we obviously would been entering at least an LIA event by now, but like most cycles, 30 years feels like a real long time, especially if you are just waiting around, like waiting for the kettle to boil. Summers were real short, but also real hot though, I recall. And then Bam!, another Arctic high would descend from Siberia in late Oct/Nov, and not climb above freezing until mid March. Let’s hope we never see that again. If you don’t live through that and suffer, you will never know how bad cold can really be. Cold is real quick death sentence.
I, too, remember the global cooling scare. The twin fears of global cooling and acid rain were the impetus for ending the practice of abating ground-level air pollution by building quarter-mile-high smokestacks.
Here’s Walter Cronkite on 9/11/1972:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhoB-Vf0N08
For a longer example, here’s Leonard Nimoy narrating an In Search Of episode (which also features a very young Dr. Stephen Schneider, in bell bottoms):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ndHwW8psR8#t=7m40s
EXCERPT:
Ah yes, the era of tall stacks to spread the pollution around. Those stacks were 1000 ft tall. Especially along the Ohio river in the valleys. Those were not fun to climb when you had to do testing in the stacks. Elevators were installed later.
Reflecting on this and being old enough to have been watching the TV news during the Vietnam War, my take on all this is that the media became quite addicted to their new found power to influence the public discourse that ever present cameras in the field, rapid transport of film back home ( i.e. within 24 hours) and on site reporters talking directly to camera opinionizing with ‘on the spot’ authoritas provided.
This addiction has now been turbocharged by satellite technology and the internet such that almost no matter what the issue some bobble head can opinionize their video package literally live while events are taking place. Add to that simply faking footage such as hilariously exposed in the recent hurricane in the US and the world is their oyster and brioche their staple diet.
Into this msm world wanter the self important narcissists like Hansen who see the opening to peddle some scklock – horror prognostication of doom conveniently just over the horizon so firm counter evidence is just not possible. In the 70’s global cooling resonated with the still present ( and quite reasoanble) fear of nuclear winter that had been round since the Soviets detonated their first nuke. In the 90’s that was a bullet dodged with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new narrative was the evil, greedy excesses of The West into which the global warming narrative slotted beautifully. Shameless to the core it was the likes of Hansen who peddled the new great fear narrative.
The CAGWarmists are just the shamans, the witcdoctors, the high priests of our time whose vector to power and influence has always been fear of the great deity/demon lurking over the horizon or in a pattern of stars.
Surprised not to see a mention of Nigel Calder’s influential book and associated TV programme from 1974 called The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice.
John Gribbin was also writing articles for New Scientist around that time on the same subject.
No doubt in my mind that global cooling was the consensus 40 years ago.
Nigel Calder gave an update on his blog in 2010:
https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/next-ice-age/
In it he wrote: ”I was present in Rome in 1961 when global cooling was already the main concern at a conference of the World Meteorological Organization and Unesco. The discussions were led by Hubert Lamb of the UK Met Office, who went on to found the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.”
Excellent review of the Peterson 2008 myth paper. Thank you.
My 2 cents
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/23/the-1970s-cooling-anomaly-of-agw/
Interestingly, the human cause fingerprint methodology with climate models shows human cause in warming only after 1970. Has wuwt written about that?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/24/humancausedwarming/
Here is an article from the famous climatologist Hubert H Lamb described as “an international authority on the long term processes of climatic change” published in August-September 1973:-
Lamb, H. H. (1973) Is the Earth’s Climate Changing? For the past 30 years the temperature of our planet has been steadily dropping. The UNESCO Courier: a window open on the world; Vol. XXVI (8/9), 17-20.
The summary by H.H. Lamb in his book “Climatic
History and the Future”, is a more accurate statement of the scientific
viewpoint in the 70’s:
“It is to be noted here that there is no necessary contradiction between
forecast expectations of (a) some renewed (or continuation of) slight cooling
of world climate for a few decades to come, e.g., from volcanic or solar
activity variations: (b) an abrupt warming due to the effect of increasing
carbon dioxide, lasting some centuries until fossil fuels are exhausted and
a while thereafter; and this followed in turn by (c) a glaciation lasting
(like the previous ones) for many thousands of years.”
I am so sick of revisionist history, anyone that lived during that time knows full well that the 2 things that everyone was worrying about was Nuclear war and the coming ice age.
One thing is unequivocal, that the media grandstanded the scientists that predicted immediate global cooling in the 1970s, and that’s the important part. It’s exactly what the media is doing today. It just wasn’t politicized as much, and it was used to reduce real pollution, which made quite a bit more sense than demonizing plant food.
I see the Sellers paper was reclassified from warming to neutral, and in Table 1, is said to be “expects warming or cooling to be equally possible”. So Sellers said that emitting CO2 might warm by 14C, and a change on solar constant might cool by 2-5C. Well, of course, they aren’t equally effective. But they also aren’t described as equally possible. In fact, there is no indication that Sellers expected solar to reduce rather than increase. What he said in more detail was:
“Thus man’s activity, if it continues unabated, should eventually lead to the elimination of the icecaps and to a climate much warmer than today. Annual mean temperatures of 26C, now characteristic of the tropics, would extend as far poleward as 40°. Considering the thermal inertia of the world’s oceans, it is impossible to say how long it will take for this warming to occur – possibly as little as 100 years or as long as 1000 years. During this time, it is not inconceivable that the solar constant will change. A decrease of slightly more than 7% in its value would yield a global mean temperature equal to today. Since such a large drop in solar constant is on the fringe of being highly unlikely, if one believes the earlier results of this paper, it follows that Budyko et al (1966) may be correct after all in stating that eventually man may inadvertently generate his own climate. “
PCF08 correctly said that was a warming paper. It is not neutral, as said here.
it is impossible to say how long it will take for this warming to occur – possibly as little as 100 years or as long as 1000 years.
So cooling for at LEAST a century and possibly as much as a 1,000 years.
So, cooling at the time, and for the foreseeable future. Cooling paper.
“So, cooling at the time, and for the foreseeable future”
No, he doesn’t say it was cooling at the time. And the times quoted seem to be times to completion of warming, not commencement.
Nick,
And the times quoted seem to be times to completion of warming, not commencement.
Nonsense. From your own quote:
Thus man’s activity, if it continues unabated, should eventually lead to
They’re clearly saying that if things continue as they were at that point in time, those things would EVENTUALLY lead to warming. Not that they are causing warming now.
Upon rereading the whole piece however, I agree that it isn’t a cooling paper. Neutral is the better classification since it doesn’t in fact say that the current condition is either cooling or warming. You’re kinda getting pummeled in this thread by those of us with actual memories of the 70’s, but that one I give you.
“You’re kinda getting pummeled in this thread by those of us with actual memories of the 70’”
Memories and anecdotes, but very little that can be put in writing. I have memories of the 70’s too. In 1976, I was a junior research scientist with CSIRO, just transferred from the East to Perth, WA. The state government there asked CSIRO (the federal research body) for advice. Wheat growing was big there where rain permitted, and automation had made it economic to plant crops where the winter rains were marginal, so crops might only succeed every second or third year. But harvesting would require extension of the rail network and other state infrastructure. So, they asked, where is the climate going?
I didn’t know, but being from the East, I was believed to have informed contacts. I did know some people from Atmospheric Physics, in Aspendale, Vic, so I asked around. The answer was unequivocal. Warming from the greenhouse effect. Warming would expand the Hadley cells, whose descent created the Roaring Forties westerlies that brought winter rain to WA. They would be pushed further south, and come north less frequently in winter. Bad news for marginal wheat areas in WA. Don’t do it.
So that was our advice. As it happened, that was followed by three very dry hot years. Our advice looked good, and the extensions were never built. And it has stayed dry.
Such disingenuous lying:
“Thus man’s activity, if it continues unabated, should eventually lead to
They’re clearly saying that if things continue as they were at that point in time, those things would EVENTUALLY lead to warming. Not that they are causing warming now.”
No if you replace the words you deliberately omitted what they’re clearly saying is:
“Thus man’s activity, if it continues unabated, should eventually lead to the elimination of the icecaps and to a climate much warmer than today.
Hmm, such vivid and exact memories from over 50 years ago, and of course anecdotal as well. Don’t play word games of you are going to use the same methods.
The cooling bias was covered over the media and those aren’t anecdotal, those are recounts of past events. Otherwise your recounting is just anecdotal as well.
I agree with your nit picking of the literature, but not of the reality of the media coverage and prominent scientists warning of impending ice age. If the media twisted or conflated, they did it on the same appeal to authority they do now. It’s the same exact methodology, they aren’t known for change.
Enough scientists were concerned about a return to an ice age and the media ran with it for numbers and fear mongering.
How can someone demonstrate such intellect yet be so obtuse, unless he subscribe to a religion without admitting such?
The self deception is strong in this one
If you think CO2 warming of 14C is a valid claim, … then I have some ocean front property to sell you in Colorado. If anything, the paper proves the Author didn’t know squat, and I’m not sure that that situation has been remedied today.
This is just nonsense. Unless there is a stated criteria for how the database of global cooling papers
was collated it doesn’t prove a thing. Peterson et al. describe how they found their papers whereas
Kenneth Richard does not. Furthermore many of the papers Mr Richard describes as cooling papers
should be counted as warming papers – or at least neutral. Dyson’s paper “CAN WE CONTROL THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE?” being a prime example it looks at how to reduce the amount of
CO2 in the atmosphere should it become necessary. The implication is that rising CO2 levels
are a potential danger because of the greenhouse effect and that humans should look at ways to reduce
CO2 emission. This would appear to be a clear warming paper or at best neutral and not a cooling paper.
Nor is there any evidence that Mr. Richard went looking for additional warming papers which would be
necessary for an unbiased estimate.
Plus many others would not count — for example Gribbin 1975 is a nature comment piece not a peer
reviewed journal article. Plus others are outside the timespan investigated by Peterson.
Incidentally typing “global warming” into google scholar and setting the dates range between 1965 and 1979 returns 1260 results. In contrast “global cooling” returns 283 results. Which is a very crude way of suggesting that only 22% of the literature was predicting global cooling in contrast to 78% predicting global warming.
So the consensus even in the 70s was for global warming.
…Google ?…. ROTFLMAO…..
Why don’t you write an article, Percy?
Charles might not post it, but I’m sure that Wikipedia will be happy to get it.
There is little point writing an article. The point I want to make is that you cannot
combine an unbiased list and a biased one to get a bigger unbiased sample. If for
example you had a list of 100 randomly selected citizens of the USA and combined that
with a list of 300 registered democrats nobody would expect that you would have an representative
sample of US voters. Which is precisely what is happening here. Peterson et al look at both
warming and cooling papers while Richard looked at only cooling papers. It makes no sense
to combine the lists.
Who says I wouldn’t post it?
Google of course being neutral
Feel free to use whatever database of scientific papers you like (Scopus, ISI etc)
but you need to define your search terms. I used google scholar because it is
freely available (i.e. not behind a pay wall) so anyone can check my results. I
have also stated what search terms I used so again the results should be reproducible.
Google no doubt has a bias in how it ranks the results but since I only counted the
number of hits that is irrelevant.
In contrast “global cooling” returns 283 results
“Climatic cooling” for the same date range returns 9,800 results.
Your premise is rather unscientific, common terms in use today are not the same as they were then for the same issues. Climatic warming only produced 3,020 results….
I have never claimed my premise was scientific. I was just pointing out the flaws in the
article. And incidentally when I type “climatic cooling” into scholar.google.com I only
get 382 matches between the years 1965 and 1980. Which is significantly less than 9800.
So I am curious to know exactly what you searched for and how.
Funny, I just tried
“climatic cooling” into scholar.google.com
and got “About 874,000 results (0.07 sec)” or “About 10,100 results (0.73 sec)” (depending on if I tossed quotes around the phrase in the search bar). either way it a far cry from the 382 matches you claim.
“ice age” (with quotes) comes in at About 8,660 results (0.09 sec)
Correction, just tried it again (apparently the date search is a bit fiddly)
without quotes climatic cooling is About 17,000 results (0.27 sec)
with quotes “climatic cooling” is About 435 results (0.02 sec)
compared to
without quotes climatic warming is About 6,550 results (0.07 sec)
with quotes “climatic warming” is About 452 results (0.07 sec)
Problem with this approach is that you have no way of filtering out duplicate references.
For instance, a “hit” may include an article that does noting more more than reference another article that meets the search criteria, independent of the reference being pro or con to the assertions of the main article.
These alarmists want us to be alarmed regardless of what the weather/climate is actually doing!
That’s why I give them zero credibility.
How much do the particulates in the air at the time coupled with the lower solar energy output contribute to the temperature reduction?
There were several novels written during that period describing life on a frozen planet. There definitely was a consensus that global cooling was occurring.
An example was “A Creed for the Third Millenium” by Colleen Mc Cullogh, on why one should just adjust to the new ice age.
There were several movies about Planet of the Apes during that period so by the same
logic the consensus was that humanity was going to be enslaved by apes.
What you are missing is that the books of the time tap into the fears of the time. Fears of the Coming ice age (Creed) and fears of the failings of human nature (Apes is not just a great sci-fi story, it’s a commentary on mankind). Not many (or any at all) books of the time tap into the fear of a warming world, now why do you think that is? could it be that it wasn’t an issue that the public was being bombarded with by the consensus of the day, where as the coming ice age was?
How dare you use logic to learn the woke such as Percy!
There is not now and there has never been a consensus regarding climate. Scientists have never registered and then voted on climate related conjectures. But if there were such a consensus, it would be meaningless because science is not a democracy. Scientific theories are not validated through a voting process. The laws of science are not some sort of legislation. Popularity contests have no place in science. The idea of consensus is politics and not science.
You are mostly correct William. Science is like living in a Condo, with a bunch of dorks on the condo strata council all beating their chests. Similar to democracy, I am sorry to say. If you are real lucky, you get a normal condo & board, but that would be the exception. But nothing better has shown up regarding democracy. Some days I give up on science, but in the end, it always self corrects to facts. I hope. But probably never for condo’s.
Yes, therefore we need no ‘failed’ consensus to ‘prove’ that it has no meaning.
“however, this review found 19 additional papers in that journal”
I see what is happening here. PCF08 were looking for “imminent cooling” which is what Ice Age scare means. “that journal” Quaternary Research is a paleo/geo journal that looks at the history of glacial times. Naturally they mention that interglacials don’t last forever, and the current one probably won’t either. That has been known and said for at least a century, but is not a “cooling scare”. So to take the first paper on that list, Wright et al:
“Estimates for the duration of the interglacials range from 10,000 to more than 30,000 yr, according to counts of the annually laminated sediments (organic varves).
The Holocene has already run a course of at least 10,000 yr. If it is like earlier interglacials, it will end soon, giving way to gradually developing cold conditions, which may not lead to glacial maxima for tens of thousands of years.”
Interglacials run from 10000 to 30000 years, and this one has already run 10000. That could have been said any time, including now. It is not a “cooling scare” paper.
Matthews et al in the same journal is another case in point. It studies the dynamics of past ice sheet growth, and says it happens rapidly when it starts. But there is no prediction that it is about to start.
Nick
Both budyko and lamb wrote technical books on the climate which confirmed the consensus was cooling. However several Years later they wrote that the cooling trend apparent since around 1940 was now reversing. The cut off date is very much around 1970 .
Like all good scientists they changed their minds when the facts changed. Looking at papers from the seventies will reflect the change from the cooling to warming consensus. Unfortunately the amount of climate papers being published in the 1940 to 1970 period was limited compared to the deluge of papers that accelerated during that latter decade
There was definitely a cooling trend within the 1940 to 1970 period. this is also reflected in the data that Hansen used, namely the Mitchell temperature curves and the data compiled by Callendar . In 1963 just before his death the very severe winter caused him to think his greenhouse theory was wrong. This is recorded in his archives
With respect by the time you became a research scientist there would have been little scientific talk of cooling
Tonyb
Nick
Both budyko and lamb wrote technical books on the climate which confirmed the consensus was cooling. However several Years later they wrote that the cooling trend apparent since around 1940 was now reversing. The cut off date is very much around 1970 .
The summary by H.H. Lamb in his book “Climatic
History and the Future”, is a more accurate statement of the scientific
viewpoint in the 70’s:
“It is to be noted here that there is no necessary contradiction between
forecast expectations of (a) some renewed (or continuation of) slight cooling of world climate for a few decades to come, e.g., from volcanic or solar activity variations: (b) an abrupt warming due to the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, lasting some centuries until fossil fuels are exhausted and a while thereafter; and this followed in turn by (c) a glaciation lasting (like the previous ones) for many thousands of years.”
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you can come to whichever conclusion you wish by simply selecting a pliant database. Both used in this article seem woefully inadequate.
Of course, I refuse to believe the media in the 1970’s, en masse, were deliberately misrepresenting the scientific “consensus” of the time. At least not without extraordinary evidence, as should be the standard for all extraordinary claims.
So Skeptical Science cant get people to participate on their site, so they regurgitate here. I wounder if the guest blogger is the same person that posted on SKS???
https://www.skepticalscience.com/70s-cooling-myth-tricks-part-I.html
Angus McFarlane you should be ashamed of yourself for posting such rubbish.
As an chemical engineer I remember my conversations with an older climatologist working at NASA, Houston in 1974. He was explaning that there weren’t many professional climatologists, but among the profession, there was a leaning consensus that the world was approaching a cooling phase. However he said, that trends were hard to distinguish and it may take 1000 yrs to discern a trend. He did not think that 100 yrs was not long enough. I was in my mid-twenties at the time and that conversation had a distinct impact on me. He was in his mid sixties at the time and was quite learned.
I’m 68, and I remember both Time issues, I was a subscriber. I still have copies. I always save the good ones and keep them at the cottage…I’m the only one in the family interested in the science stuff. It’s my observation people, generally, are not interested in theoretical physics as it applies to the atmosphere and its CO2 portion.
The ice age scare (just like the warming scare) was nonsense. The required methodology confirms this. A theory, to be scientific, must be falsifiable. In other words, the capacity to be proven wrong. That capacity is an essential component of the scientific method.
The AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) debate, like any, concerns what is and isn’t known. Knowledge trumps pedigree, you either understand the uncertainties surrounding the CO2 molecule’s resonance in the far infrared and its temperature influence or you don’t.
The alarmist’s position of emissions CO2 causing large climate change assumes high sensitivity. And as we all know, or should know, the climate’s sensitivity to the small anthropogenic portion of a radiatively active trace gas (CO2) has not been determined. Estimates (which cannot be confused with measurements) vary significantly, from next to zero to the IPCC range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C. per CO2 atmospheric doubling (540ppm) from ice core calculated pre-industrial levels (270ppm)
The boundaries of natural variability need to be well understood before one can make any claim on causality between CO2 and climate, sea levels, ice volume etc. For any of the man-made global warming claims to have validity the unnatural must be disentangled from the natural. So far the dangerous man-made climate effects exist only in the fervid imaginations of the alarmist advocates within the academic climate science field.
This problem is quite apparent with the climate models and their inability to get global warming right. As the IPCC has confirmed, a 97% failure rate for the period since 1998, “111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations”. (IPCC Synthesis report 2014, p 43).
The climate change issue one of optics as opposed to reality. Like religions, climate change offers damnation or salvation, but only in the future and without supporting evidence. Like religions, climate change also depends both on the authority of and the peer pressure from a popular consensus. And for politicians the money from a carbon tax/cap and trade system is just too much to resist.
Although the scientific support for Catastrophic AGW is nonexistent, the idea is strong. To quote Rupert Darwall:…“Global warming’s success in colonising the Western mind and in changing government policies has no precedent.”
Eventually, within this century, the man-made global warming conjecture will find itself alongside all the other hobgoblins that have come and gone.
M.W.Plia
“As the IPCC has confirmed, a 97% failure rate for the period since 1998, ‘111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations’”.
Because this is so striking, from a scientific perspective it is not a failure, but an opportunity. It evokes questions: Was there something that happened to dampen the expected trend? Is there a systematic error shared by virtually all models, and if so, what is it?
Scientists can also look at what has happened since 2014 and ask, “Have the temperatures rebounded to the expected trend?” in order to shed light on whether it was a model error or a function of natural variability in climate. There is some indication that temperatures are again becoming more in line with predictions, but it will take a few more years to see if this is the case.
Models are not perfect. They are getting better, more able to simulate regional change. It will be interesting to see what the next wave brings. In any case, the fact that the models are imperfect doesn’t mean AGW is wrong.
Personally, I think it’s pretty extraordinary that they are even able to simulate current climate without tuning to it, or to have things like cyclones appear as an emergent property.
” Cook et al (2103) ”
Was that, perhaps, 2013?
I remember the 1970’s well – I was becoming a read-aholic and I remember very well story after story about the troubling global cooling trend. By about 1975 they had just about everyone convinced there was an ice age headed out way. It was all over the news. (and it IS headed our way, sometime within the next few thousands years or less).
I don’t need an analysis, I lived through it. Its kind of like someone analyzing temperatures and rainfall and then telling my Grandfather (now deceased) that the 1930’s dust-bowl had never happened… He kind of knew that it did – he was the one living it. Just as I kind of know about the Global Cooling scare or the 1970’s – but luckily I only lived through the scare…the ice age is still coming…someday.
How would you classify an appearance in a respected encyclopedia yearbook? The 1976 Compton Yearbook (Compton was owned by the Encyclopedia Britannica people at the time and shares the same editors) includes piece by the NY Times science writer. Is it popular press, or is it “academic” when it is in an encyclopedia? Interesting question. I probably have images of it if you want them. I bought that yearbook for entirely different reasons, and just happened to notice the other article. I want to say. . . . Walter Sullivan? Something like “Climate: Shaper of Civilizations”?
This article is so ripe for plucking that it smells like misinformation. Why put up such weak arguments if they can be shot down easily by just reading a few of the papers? It is plain silly to defend something simply because and only because it confirms your own beliefs.
Maybe global cooling was the consensus but the premises presented here don’t imply that conclusion.
That 1977 Time cover with the penguin, is a well known fake based on a 2007 cover; you can view them all online!* I would hazard a guess that it might be important to check the provenance of an image if you are going to write about myth making!
Perhaps the author should have used the “Big Freeze” cover of 1977, though also misleading, it does have the virtue of being real!
http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1977/1101770131_400.jpg
If it was an intentional use, then it is very poor editorial form because you are giving mixed messages about the intentions of your piece.
It is painful to have watch Nick Stokes punching through this wet paper bag of a post with less than supernatural ease!
Seem’s like he’s the only one bothering to read the material.
I don’t care for arguments about something so nebulous as “consensus belief” particularly when the basic premise appears to be in doubt.**
**Was it 93% or 97% (It is 97.1 or 97.2 in the Cook’s book)
*http://time.com/vault/year/1977/
Nicks first argument was pathetic; a willfully omission of the words ” at least…” which “punching through this wet paper bag of his post” completely countered his assertion.
The post is a rebuttal to a typical fraudulent article created by warmists which used cherry-picked articles to prove a falsehood.
What ‘premise’ do you think is incorrect?
Everyone who was alive in the 70s (myself included) can remember the global cooling scare. I was baffled a few years ago when warmists decided to start saying “that never happened”. I remember it well. I was young and the idea was very frightening to me.
One reason Communists don’t want young people to talk to old people is because it messes with their ability to take over. Older people know things, and can warn young people about them; so it becomes vital to keep the generations apart. No one of millennial generation or younger can remember the global cooling scare, and they rely heavily on internet sourced “knowledge”, so make them hate everyone over 40 and scrub the internet, problem solved!
Engineer colleagues of mine who worked for oil companies in the 70s, were busy designing ice breaking oil tankers to bring oil from the Middle East to Rotterdam, London and New York – so sure were their employers that a (so-called) Nuclear winter was on its way. Global cooling caused by nuclear testing – as believed by CND marchers everywhere, it was as now, ‘all our fault’.
“Global cooling caused by nuclear testing”
70’s? The Nuclar Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, and observed by the major powers.
You lived in the 70s, no doubt, but you must have rarely read newspapers or glanced at magazines, because the nuclear scare and nuclear winter scare were HUGE and omnipresent…
Indeed. The nuclear scare was still a big deal in the 1970s. Just because there was a treaty to ban testing didn’t make the nuclear arsenals of the superpower disappear.
If the test ban ended the fears of Nuclear weapons/Nuclear winter, why did the SALT treaty need to be signed in 1972, a decade after the test ban treaty? The fear of Nuclear winter was very much still around in the 1970s and into the early part of the 1980s.
The claim was a fear of nuclear winter caused by nuclear testing, which caused oil companies to want to develop ice-breakers for use in Europe. And I pointed out that most atmospheric testing ceased in 1963. Of course fear of nuclear war persisted.
No, the claim was that it was fear of nuclear winter full stop that the oil companies were worried about (I quote “so sure were their employers that a (so-called) Nuclear winter was on its way.” notice the period and lack of mention of Nuclear tests in the sentence associated with oil companies). The bit about Nuclear testing was something “CND marchers” supposedly believed (as noted in the sentence *after* the one about oil companies).
“No, the claim was that it was fear of nuclear winter full stop “
Howard Dewhirst’s claim was explicitly:
“Global cooling caused by nuclear testing”
Yes, he was also explicit about who that applied to “as believed by CND marchers everywhere” Are oil companies CND marchers? no they are not.
And see this is the tell for folks like Nick. The typical statists who trust government when his lying eyes tell the exact opposite story, ad nauseum.
Sure Nick, it was safe to breathe the air at ground zero days after 911 because the head of EPA said so….
Sure Nick, the government should have over 20 million classified documents each year, hmm that really speaks of honesty.
Sure, Obama had the most transparent presidency ever….
Sure, they dropped bin laden body in the ocean because… Reasons.
Sure, the bay of Tonkin was legit…
For an old man you have the intuition and scepticism of a toddler. Santa is real to some humans as well, mostly toddlers
How about a bit of history as I remember it all so well in school.
I remember the impending ice age scare very well and why.
I’m understandably sensitive to any whiff of manipulation.
I’ve seen it all at least 4 times before.
Here is some interesting stuff:-
“Sir Crispin Tickell, our man at the UN…..In the 1970s, had written a book warning that the world was cooling…..
…but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming…followed by his sidekick at the UK met office, -Prof, Dr or whatever the soon to be knighted John Houghton.
and the debate to be.-
…turbocharged by the largely conservative dominated BBC and press who had problems with the unions in restructuring the printed media to use new technology…(eg, the famous TIMES/SUNDAY TIMES dispute).
Margaret Thatcher marched into this mess in the first place, manipulated it all and we are still paying the price.
first, it was global cooling while she was out of power,-
– Under the labour governments of the 60s and 70s, it fitted very well with the “consensus” that BIG DIRTY COAL and the unions were to blame for the UK political disaster of the time with some politicians like FOOT now known to have been in hock to the Kremlin.
Margaret astutely steered the debate away using as ammunition the lefty nuclear disarmament/nuclear winter debates , misinformed the British public away from coal & their wonderful conman Scargill.
All you needed was a good attention seeker, + a country in serious industrial decline and an agenda seeking personality.
She fitted the role perfectly thanks to the previous labour governments, nationalised industries…and their ham fisted approach to just about everything.
…pushed the “we’re about to freeze” agenda…so we have to have secure oil and gas, not that dirty coal with strikes every 5 minutes!
So from 1980-1990 she could go for her union bashing future, replacing it with oil, gas, and her city of London banker friends to launder the north sea cash bonanza to keep her sacred Tory party in power for ever. She nearly managed that feat, (helped along by the equally ham fisted Argentinians).
The resultant wanton wholesale destruction of the coal and NPP plus steel industries, followed, true to her agenda, thereby neutering the unions for ever.
After this, when she had got securely into power for a decade, Thatcher changed sides
(Also intelligently maintaining there was masses of cheap oil under the Falkland islands btw….),-
OIL fed her sleezy Tory party spin doctors,propelling the city of London and their “too big to fail bankers” to unimagined power, on the back of cheap north sea oil, so they could get a future strangle hold on the entire UK economy.
So,-
She held a press conference upon the release of the first IPCC assessment (1990) and warned that “greenhouse gases … will warm the Earth’s surface with serious consequences for us all.”
…good old demagogery at work:-
https://youtu.be/Fys5Z63xCvA
So,-
Margaret “founded the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research and gave early direction to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to elevate the issue at home and abroad.
In her dotage once out of power, she changed sides yet again.
Nobody reports this of course in the same “independent media” that she rewarded with vast wads of cash and influence….cos by this time she was discredited.
There’s a good summary here:-
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
“in 2003, she backtracked on her climate advocacy, calling climate activism a “marvelous excuse for supra-national socialism,” and denouncing Al Gore’s calls for international cooperation around climate change “apocalyptic hyperbole.”
In her 2003 book Statecraft* she wrote of “a new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-center governing classes,” …bemoaned the “costly and economically damaging” schemes to limit carbon emissions.”
*“Government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven.”
– Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World.
It’s easy to write your memoirs isn’t it, when the damage is done.
Thatcher proved one thing with her life.
Money, power, influence, the inherent unwritten nepotistic nexus of British politics , the BBC and the media.
(If you don’t believe me look at how Cameron saved his “BBQ and sausages”editor of the News of the World from going to prison).
Brexit? What was that about?
The British (especially Thatcher) were angry at losing their monopoly on this nexus of nepotism to Brussels and want it repatriated.
Thatcher tried and lost, because by this time the city had got drunk with money and their own influence…
In 2016, the British want to feel reassured in a world where they have little role left, after burning up all the oil and gas.
Now all we need is a genuine colder climate.
There’s no coal, no oil, no gas and no NPP engineers left.
Good luck to them!
My article is based on peer-reviewed papers that were included in and/or missed by PCF-08.
If you disagree with my classification of individual papers then please do so as Nick Stokes has done – the occasional disagreement in classification does not alter the overall premise that 1970s global climate cooling consensus was real.
However, blanket statements that my article is rubbish are not helpful because you are basically saying that the peer-reviewed literature is rubbish.
“the occasional disagreement in classification”
Every one I have looked at is wrong. Why don’t you nominate one paper where you think PCF08 wrongly classified or omitted, and defend it in detail?
Everyone you looked at you *claimed* is wrong. Not the same thing as it actually *being* wrong.
“the occasional disagreement in classification does not alter the overall premise that 1970s global climate cooling consensus was real.”
Did you get that, Nick? How many classifications have you disputed, half a dozen out of hundreds? Read the above quote again.
“half a dozen out of hundreds?”
How many have you affirmed? I can’t see that anyone else has looked at a single classification. All we have here is a list of Angus’ opinions – no justification or argument of each case. Every single case I have looked at where he disputes PCF08 is wrong. Even the one or two cases that he features here, and does give an argument for, make no sense.
This is the Kenneth Richard technique, a blizzard of nonsense. You demonstrate a few – O, but there are so many more!
Nick you are angering me here because it was all over the newspapers, books and on TV too. There was a lot of talk about the apparent cooling and some talk about a possible ice age coming on. I lived though it with growing interest as a teenager reading about it, read the book, The COOLING by Lowell Ponte, that covered a lot of research of that time.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
Here is a good sample of what was being reported on in the 1970’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=ZtyM9mPbMUo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhoB-Vf0N08
Several prominent scientists of the day stated these words:
“The ice age is due now anytime” – Professor George Kukla, Columbia University, 1974
“Professor Hubert Lamb says that a new ice age is creeping over the northern hemisphere.”
– ‘The Most Trusted Man in America’, Peabody Award Winner Walter Cronkite, 1972
The scientific community acknowledged the cooling alarmism of the 1970s in the scientific literature.
“Expert judgment and climate forecasting: A methodological critique of “climate change to the year 2000”
Climatic Change, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 159–183, June 1985
– Thomas R. Stewart, Michael H. Glantz
“One could effectively argue that in the early 1970s the prevailing view was that the earth was moving toward a new ice age. Many articles appeared in the scien-tific literature as well as in the popular press speculating about the impact on agriculture of a 1-2 “C cooling.” – Climatic Change, 1985″
Stephen Schneider was all about Cooling back in the 1970’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsdWTBNyvX0
There are many more on this to be read if you stop being a Connolly Clone.
Stop LYING about it, Nick!
He can’t stop lying, it would require him to re-evaluate his allegiance to the cult of CAGW
If you haven’t noticed, this whole discussion is about actually quantifying the support in published science for long term global cooling.
But you’d abandon that because of what you read or saw on the tele, and how it made you feel at the time.
That’s abandoning science in favor of anecdotes.
In other words ignore your lying eyes and believe the false narrative that the alarmists are feeding you. You can bury your head in the sand and believe that the past didn’t happen, those of us who lived it know better.
The ice on the Hudson Bay has accelerated as a result of the current circulation.
http://masie_web.apps.nsidc.org/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/plots/4km/r10_Hudson_Bay_ts_4km.png
I have a copy of “Report of a committee on climatic change” by the Australian Academy of science.
Report number 21 March 1976.
“The main body of the report comprises a summary and six chapters.
Chapter 1 examines the overseas reports which led to the request for the establishment of the committee.
There follow two chapters providing short, simple accounts of the mechanisms of climatic change, and mans possible influences on global climate”.
Page 9 says “Conclusions and Recommendations.
We conclude that there is no evidence that the world is now on the brink of a major climatic change.
There is ample evidence that the world’s climate has changed widely during the geological past, and while there is every expectation that it will continue to change in the future.
In 1969 I had just completed my first degree in Physics and the undergraduate small talk in the cafes was global cooling, the Vietnam war and Bob Dylan music.
Its pretty irritating that the Nick Stokes of this world would try to convince you that your memory is false.
What Nick & Co need to set up are Pol-Pot type re-education camps so we can replace our faulty memories with corrected memories.
Nick & Co aren’t trying to convince you that your memory is false. They know that your memory is true (even though they’ll never publicly admit it). It’s the younger generations they are trying to convince because the truth about the 1970s “consensus” is inconvenient to the snake-oil they’ve been selling
Well I’m the younger generation as are my friends. We’re all vastly more read on the topic of climate (albeit not scientists but years worth of study compared to the average news parrot).
You can be assured we aren’t falling for his sophistry, but rather laughing at him for his disappointingly naive religiosity
Yeah, cause we all know that your memory of what you heard and how you felt about it at the time trumps a thorough look at what scientists were actually publishing!
Not very skeptical scientific thinking.
Philip, was that directed at me? I am 35. My close friends and I have thousands of hours invested in the topic, and all three of us came to the same CONSENSUS :P…
CAGW isn’t real, it is a massive hoax predicated on global wealth redistribution and eugenics. For folks like you, I’m assuming, who cling to bad science (hide the decline, Phil jones talking about making up ocean temps and deliberately choosing .15C to offset the warming blip, adjustments downwards in the past, fake tree ring proxy data, bullying, countless international bureacrats talking openly about this being wealth redistribution and a forced plan to forsake capitalism, and on and on and on), there are those of us smart enough to have PERSPECTIVE. You know, that funny little thing that looks at all the players and landscape?
Something you clearly do not have, because you place your faith in liars, much to your folly.
Lol, it’s funny how the most politically and ideologically obsessed UKIP kind of people who spend most of their time ranting about politics and ideology at people to who do and talk about science, also spend the most time complaining about how political the scientists they whinge at are.
y’all do know the picture of a ‘Time’ cover showing on the link to this is a fake?
http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/
Please remove it!
I’m afraid that WUWT is much better at running articles condemning others for a lack of corrections, or late corrections, or corrections that aren’t given prominence, than it is at making corrections, doing them quickly and giving them prominence.
We have a very large cooling in North America during the solar minimum.
The meteorological winter starts on December 1.
If you remember the 1960s then you weren’t there.
What? You mean this is about the 1970s?
I’ll get my coat.
Many years ago when Connolley first came up with this stupid claim I spent a few minutes on google scholar and found some papers that had somehow escaped his notice in his supposedly thorough review of the literature.
I posted some of them on his blog. I wonder if that exchange is still there. In one case all he could say is “we didn’t look at Geology journals”.
His attempt to re-write history was one of the first things that alerted me to the problems with climate science (he was a climate scientist in those days).
Is there some turnaround. A big picture of a polar bear on the front page of the Dutch paper “De Telegraaf”. Now the paper admits, after years of denying, that the polar bears are thriving and growing in number. All these contradicting discussions about iceage, global warming, polar bears, hurricanes, drought, rain, etc, are only confusing. Why to have confidence in global warming policies.
We also have a large cooling in Eurasia during solar minimum.
The meteorological winter starts on December 1.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
“THE MYTH OF THE 1970s
GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC
CONSENSUS ”
“There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an
imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated
the peer-reviewed literature even then. ”
“Despite active efforts to answer these questions,
the following pervasive myth arose: there was a
consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that
either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was
imminent (see the “Perpetuating the myth” sidebar).
A review of the climate science literature from 1965
to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myths basis
lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by
some members of the media at the time and by some
observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse
warming dominated the scientific literature even
then. The research enterprise that grew in response
to the questions articulated by Bryson and others,
while considering the forces responsible for cooling,
quickly converged on the view that greenhouse
warming was likely to dominate on time scales that
would be significant to human societies (Charney
et al. 1979). However, perhaps more important than
demonstrating that the global cooling myth is wrong,
this review shows the remarkable way in which the
individual threads of climate science of the time—
each group of researchers pursuing their own set of
questions—was quickly woven into the integrated
tapestry that created the basis for climate science as
we know it today. “
Even if every man ignites a bonfire, the Sun will decide about temperature changes. Ancient civilizations already knew about it.
What’s the point of your post, Anthony? You just quoted part of the erroneous report, but had no comment, so I was just wondering.
Do you dispute that there was a Global Cooling consensus in the 1960’s-70’s?
I lived during that era, and read every scientific publication available (just about) and I can guarantee you that the majority of the thinking was that we might be heading into another iceage. There’s no doubt about it. The scientific publications are still available. They can be checked.
“Do you dispute that there was a Global Cooling consensus in the 1960’s-70’s?”
Yes – as does the paper I linked to and posted.
“I lived during that era, and read every scientific publication available (just about) and I can guarantee you that the majority of the thinking was that we might be heading into another iceage. ”
And so did I (live through it)
Was 16 in 1970 and had an interest in weather, such that I subsequently joined the UKMO in 1974 and served 32 years
I remember media reports and documentaries/books concerning coming cold.
However that is NOT the same as a consensus on the science.
It is just the media exploiting a nice sensationalist meme.
So you read the sum of the papers published at the time?
If not, I’d suggest that therefore you most certainly cannot “guarantee” me any such thing.
And Tom, (re your comment below) – while I’m at it could you please link to a graph showing that the 1930’s was warmer than present.
Thanks.
Anthony wrote: “I remember media reports and documentaries/books concerning coming cold.
However that is NOT the same as a consensus on the science.
It is just the media exploiting a nice sensationalist meme.”
That’s a distinction without a difference, as far as I’m concerned. Global Cooling was definitely the meme for the Media. We can quibble about each scientific study, but I think the evidence for that is there were more studies about global cooling than global warming during this period of time and this WUWT article and the comments provide ample evidence of such. Where do you think the Media got all their Global Cooling material. It wasn’t out of thin air, they got it from scientists.
Anthony wrote: “So you read the sum of the papers published at the time? If not, I’d suggest that therefore you most certainly cannot “guarantee” me any such thing”
I read quite a few of them. I read all the science media at the time and all the newspapers and saw all the television programs (no internet then). I can’t believe anyone who lived through that era missed it, especially someone like you who is interested in the Earth’s weather. But I guess that’s possible.
I
Anthony wrote: “And Tom, (re your comment below) – while I’m at it could you please link to a graph showing that the 1930’s was warmer than present.”
Why, yes I can, Anthony.
Here’s the Hansen 1999 US surface temperatue chart which shows 1934 as being 0.5C warmer than 1998, and that makes 1934, 0.4C warmer than 2016, going by the UAH satellite chart.
Thanks for asking.
Sure do wish the commenting software could be fixed so these charts would show up in the post rather than having to click on them. This worked even before the big software upgrade, but since the software shot craps, the images won’t appear in the posts anymore. A real handicap to commenting.
and the UAH satellite chart:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_October_2018_v6.jpg
And of course, you will bring up that the US surface temperature chart is only a small percentage of the whole Earth and does not represent the rest of the world when it comes to global temperatures.
But you would be wrong if you made that claim. If you do make that claim, then I will provide you with charts from around the world that show the same temperature profile as the Hansen US surface temperature chart, i.e., that the 1930’s was as warm or warmer than subsequent years. Let me know if you want to see those charts. They blow the Hockey Stick “hotter and hotter” lie out of the water, imho.
“Let me know if you want to see those charts. They blow the Hockey Stick “hotter and hotter” lie out of the water,”
Alarmists never take me up on this offer. I wonder why.
I think I’ll post some of the charts I have in a later post. Force them to look at the truth, as it were. 🙂
If Spock said it, it must be true.
The next big scare con -sense-us.
will be :-0 the climate is not doing anything.
Back in the early 70’s not only was there fear of global cooling but also there was the 1973 energy crisis and followed by talk of peak oil etc etc. It was also the start of my scepticism about futurology. Fusion is still 50 years away, glaciers will melt whenever, all new cars will be electric by 2040, blardy, blardy, blaah. I heard on the radio this morning that we only have 12 years to stop climate catastrophe. And as for AI, sorry it’s just faster processors, memory and comms, but it’s not Intelligence.
I had a book in the 1970s, which I wish I still had copy, which showed icebergs being towed from the arctic to supply San Francisco with water, moon travel and bases by the 1990s, and who knows what else. It was hilarious.
How big does a majority have to be to become a consensus? Does ‘consensus’ have any meaning in a scientific context?
My strong recollection of the 1960’s in the UK is that the media told us that we were in danger of freezing to death in the future. At the time I was not interested in climate issues so I did not read any professional literature.
I earned my degree in geology (Earth Science) in frigid Connecticut during That 70’s Climate Science Show. This was very real…
Griff 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.
There’s also Newsweek…
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…
According to the models Gorebal Warming saved us from The Ice Age Cometh…
So, why are the warmunists 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?
“This was very real…”
It’s all so thin. You’ve had to pad it out with the Science news cover repeated four times. And the one article each from Time and Newsweek in a decade. How can a consensus that was so very real have left such a faint mark?
And then there is the padding with plots of temperature with a downtrend. the claim isn’t that people showed graphs went up and down. The claim is that there was a consensus that scientists were predicting imminent and major cooling.
About as thin as your grasp on reality, Nick. Oh why must the faithful always lead the charge into destruction, in the same name of misanthropy?
You religionists are all the same- always blaming humanity and never actually capable of critical thinking, lest you question the narrative and risk ex communication
I like that Science News cover… There’s also this July 1976 classic…
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/18/archives/the-genesis-strategy-a-chilling-prospect.html
Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also makes an appearance in this classic…
https://youtu.be/L_861us8D9M
“There’s also this July 1976 classic…”
Yes, but what is it saying? Schneider is very worried about food security in the face of climate instability. And there is a passage where he gives the statistics of recent ups and downs.
But here is a sceptic listing the same book as “An Old Failed Prediction of Global Warming”. It quotes parts like this:
“There are various estimates of the response of globally averaged surface temperatures to a doubling of CO2 from a out 300 ppm to six hundred ppm by volume – a value projected to occur by about the years 2025 to 2040. State-of-the-art climate models unequivocally predict that such a doubling of CO2 would raise the surface temperature of the earth. Although these predictions vary considerably, probably the best order of magnitude estimate that can be made today is for a surface warming by some 1.5 to 3oK globally and that the temperature increase in the polar regions might well be amplified severalfold. But there is far less agreement over the magnitude and location of tghe warming than over the fact that CO2 will warm. Projection of the CO2 increase, granted the continuation of present trends to the year 2000, suggests, as said earlier, an increase in CO2 concentrations of about 20 to 25 percent, a change corresponding to an approximately 1 deg K global surface temperature rise (plus the assumed amplification at the poles.”
And the same with his appearance in the video. All that happens there is that the narrator puts to him things that might be done to alleviate cooling, and he says, no, that is a bad idea. We don’t know that it will cool, and the cure might be worse than the disease.
I think the key to all this is the section that Phil. quoted from the summary in Lamb’s book from the period:
“It is to be noted here that there is no necessary contradiction between
forecast expectations of (a) some renewed (or continuation of) slight cooling
of world climate for a few decades to come, e.g., from volcanic or solar
activity variations: (b) an abrupt warming due to the effect of increasing
carbon dioxide, lasting some centuries until fossil fuels are exhausted and
a while thereafter; and this followed in turn by (c) a glaciation lasting
(like the previous ones) for many thousands of years.”
He’s right, there is no contradiction. It is still agreed that
1. There was a cooling trend in the NH at the time
2. There was a general expectation of AGW
3. Interglacials come to an end.
What is happening here is that KR and Angus pick up on any paper that makes reference to 1 or 3 and say that this is an example of scientists predicting cooling, which they later switched to warming.
I suggest one avenue of research would be to get the indexes for all issues of Science News and compare the number of articles about Global Cooling with those about Global Warming.
Science News is a weekly magazine that covers all news related to science issues, so you have 52 issues per year with about a dozen topics per issue, which is a lot to chose from.
I was a subscriber to Science News all during the period of discussion and can say without hesitation that the Global Cooling meme was the meme of the time.
I recall when Global Cooling and Human-Caused Global Cooling was first proposed, or rather, when I first became aware that it had been proposed, that it seemed to make sense to me, and so I didn’t reject the notion out of hand, and I kept waiting for the proponents of Global Cooling to provide some definitive evidence, and I waited and I waited and it never came, and I became very frustrated with reading a bunch of claims that were never backed up by any actual evidence. Just claim after claim.
Then in the early 1980’s the Global Warming meme became the prominent one mentioned, and it was the same as the Global Cooling meme: lots of claims but no actual evidence to demonstrate these claims were true. By this time I was pretty jaded on this “human-caused” climate subject.
And with the Global Warming meme, things really started to get out of hand and Science News carried one AGW and CAGW story after another, again with not one ounce of evidence, to the point that I got tired of getting angry every time I would see these unjustified headlines in Science News so I cancelled my subscription, along with my subscription to Scientific American and National Geography, for the same reason. I didn’t see why I should pay to be fed BS (Bad Science).
Yes, check out Science News’ indexes for some insight into the thougts of the time.
Global cooling was also the weather of the time… 😎
Hot or cold
In reality it makes little difference thanks to the ‘heads you lose tails I win ‘ approach used in climate science, not matter what happens this will be held up as proof of ‘climate doom ‘
Once again you need to think about religion approaches such challenges to understand how climate ‘science ‘ deals with this issue , there no point in looking at how other sciences deal with it .
The idea that by empirical means you can ‘win the argument ‘ is an odd one given its not an argument based on empirical data in the first place.
The US government of 1976 naturally enough had a long look at the scientific consensus of the time and produced a 500 page tome concerning it.
A Primer On Climatic Variation And Change Prepared For The Subcommittee On The Environment And The Atmosphere Of The Committee On Science And Technology U.S. House Of Representatives Ninety-Fourth Congress’.
Congressional Research Service: 1976, A Primer on Climatic Variation and Change, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington.
https://ia801702.us.archive.org/4/items/pronclimatic00libr/pronclimatic00libr.pdf
A document which opens with
Quote
PERSPECTIVE A growing fraction of current evidence suggests that the world may be entering a new climate regime. Amid recent expressions of concern that the Earth may be on the verge of entering a new ice age, a potential serious problem for mankind is perceived. However, this concern has been voiced by many, both within scientific circles, and through the mass media without the qualifications appropriate to any such venture into the realm of the predictability of climate.
Impact of Climatic Change If present global cooling trends continue for several more decades, high latitude areas such as Canada, the U.S.S.R. and northern China would experience shorter growing seasons and a drop in output. Helmut Landsberg, a climatologist at the University of Maryland, estimates that a drop in average temperature of 2 degrees centigrade in the region above “ij The degree month value is the sum of the mean monthly temperatures in excess of 32 degrees Fahrenheit. CRS -14 the 40 degree parallel would completely eliminate wheat and corn production in major regions of Canada. A decrease of 1 degree Centigrade in the mean annual temperature in Iceland has already reduced the number of degree days by 2 7 percent –a reduction in the growing season of 2 weeks. In addition to shorter growing seasons from a cooling trend, there would be broad bands of excess and deficit rainfall in the middle latitudes. Europe can expect to be cooler and wetter. The western regions of the U.S. wheat belt- -from Montana to Colorado –would experience increased wheat crop failures. The northern Great Plains would experience a 14-18 day reduction in growing season, but the southern plains would gain in crop yields due to increased rainfall. In general the existing crop belts of the U.S. would shift southward. Overall U.S. agricultural production would be unaffected or perhaps slightly increased. The monsoon rain belt would also shift southward causing these rains to fall into the oceans rather than the traditionally fertile areas of sub- saharan Afri«ca, India, Japan and south China. Production of rice would be seriously affected in the warm lands below 30 degree latitude. Impacts on Agricultural Trade Climatic changes of the order just described would drastically affect the capability of nations to feed their people and the availability of food from traditional exporting nations.
And goes on to say on page 28
Quote
Although it is almost unanimously held that the Earth is presently in a phase of climatic change, theories as to the future course and rate of the change vary considerably. Today, most experts agree that the Earth is in a cooling phase. Proceeding from that observation, the following scenarios for the future are commonly predicted: 1) that Earth is slowly (ever thousands of years) entering into a new ice age; 2) that Earth will rapidly (within 100 years or slighly more) enter in- to a new ice age wherein much the planet will be locked in glaciers; 3) that the present cooling trend is only a minor aberration due to cyclic sunspot activity and is not necessarily a harbinger of a new ice age; 4) that man’s activities (release of CO2, heat, and other substances into the world’s weather machinery) will forestall the onset of a scheduled ice age; and 5) that man’s activities will accelerate the ice age process
They also say
Quote
However, there are also some experts who hold that, contrary to the above, the earth is in a long-term warming phase. Proceeding from that theory, the following scenarios for the future are commonly predicted: 1) that the Earth is slowly (over thousands of years) emerging from the last ice age; 2) that presently, more areas of the world are warming than are cooling; 3) that cooling over the past three decades is but a minor regression in a longer-term warming phase; 4) that man’s activities will precipitate either a slow or fast warming process; and 5) that so significant is man’s impact on the weather, that a major warming trend will soon melt the ice caps triggering a global increase in sea level.
IFIAS. Status Report of the IFIAS Special Project: The Impact on Man of Climate Changes. 10 Oct. 1975, 16 p.
And on page 29
Quote
Although the most popular theory appears to support a global cooling trend, it is almost unanimously agreed by most experts that any climatic o change, even one resulting in a change of as little as + 1 C will have a profound effect on global human health and welfare.
And on page 33
Quote
By far the most popular theory today is that the Earth is undergoing a cooling trend. Just how rapid this trend will be, and therefore, what its impact will be on man is the subject of much speculation. In any event it is widely held that the world climate was unusually stable be- tween 1890 and 1945, but that since 1950, began taking a turn for the worse.
According to Professor Hubert H. Lamb of the Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain, “The decline of prevailing temperatures since about 1945 appears to be the longest continued downward trend since temperature records began,
And on page 41
Quote
Kaplan, I.E. The Threat of A New Ice Age and Some Possible Defences. Science Forum, No. 2, 1975, 7-10.
And the press of course amped all of this up to the max as they always do. It is an undeniable absurdity to claim there was no cooling scare – and yet the warmunards do precisely that. Which is how we can know that what we are dealing with here is quasi-religious dogma having no connection with the world of science whatsoever.
” It is an undeniable absurdity to claim there was no cooling scare – and yet the warmunards do precisely that.”
That’s right and those excerpts you provided summed up the whole subject beautifully.
There were a lot of Human-Caused Global Cooling proponents and a few Human-Caused Global Warmg proponents during that time period, and after the temperatures started warming again in the late 1970’s, the percentage of Human-Caused Global Warming proponents increased by leaps and bounds and the Human-Caused Global Cooling proponents disappeared because their speculations were shown to be wrong.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17841800
Science. 1976 Aug 6;193(4252):447-53.
Global cooling?
Damon PE, Kunen SM.
A reasonable article (ripe cherries for either side included)
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/05/21/archives/scientists-ask-why-world-climate-is-changing-major-cooling-may-be-a.html
Archives | 1975
Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing
By WALTER SULLIVANMAY 21, 1975
One for the warmists
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/14/archives/warming-trend-seen-in-climate-two-articles-counter-view-that-cold.html
Archives | 1975
WARMING TREND SEEN IN CLIMATE
By WALTER SULLIVANAUG. 14, 1975
one for the coolists
http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
either take your cherry to pick
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/1520-0469%281971%29028%3C1513%3ACCATC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Cirrus Clouds and the Climate
Stephen K. Cox
Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Add to Favorites Track Citation Download Citation Email
https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1971)0282.0.CO;2
Received: 19 February 1971
When the distribution of papers is plotted by year of publication, the cooling category is more common from 1970 through 1975 by a wide margin. After that the numbers are about equal. Before 1970 the number of papers in either category is small so it’s hard to say which was predominant. The trends are quite obvious about cooling being the early concensus, then yielding its lead.
I think you are correct and you summed it up very well, Gary.
The changeover from Global Cooling to Global Warming took place in the late 1970’s, when the temperatures started to rise instead of fall, and as the temeratures continued to rise year after year, the human-caused Global Warming narrative got stronger and stronger to the point that now many climate scientists think *all* the current warming from 1979 is caused by human-derived CO2.
The 1930’s were hotter that subsequent years by about 0.5C (1998) and 0.4C (2016) so the notion that additional energy is required to reach current temperature levels is silly. The Earth reached higher temperatures in the 1930’s when CO2 was not a factor, so the current warming could just be more of the same natural variability. If even part of the warming is natural, then the current ECS estimates are toast and are much lower than currently claimed, since they are based on all the current warmth being from CO2.
David asked above why Alarmists were so bent on rewriting the Global Cooling meme history and I think it is because if they acknowledge the cooling, then they have to talk about where that cooling originated. That cooling originated from the hottest decade since that time: The 1930’s.
The Keepers of the Climate Data manipulated the temperature record to erase the high temperatures of the 1930’s, so they want to avoid talking about that subject and Global Cooling brings it to mind.
“The 1930’s were hotter that subsequent years by about 0.5C (1998) and 0.4C (2016)…….. ”
No they weren’t ….
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQIcMCkrRPZjOPD-pSX9tQnJua2_F2LM3_0-NtVICpsQwddVEwn
are those post adjustment, post hide the decline?
Gary, cooling predominated throughout the entire period as shown in the attached image that was supposed to be included in the original post.
I likewise remember the announcements of cooling from teachers, media and the like during the period. I recall nothing about warming. That of course is anecdotal.
I think the takeaway from this is that such assessments are invariably subjective and that scientists are no more informed to make any pronouncements about the future than they were 50 years ago. The old wise saying in science “I don’t know” would seem to be the only honest consensus.
Another list
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the ’70’s? No
I was messing around with R, and made this graphic where Cooling = -1 and Warming = 1.
http://127.0.0.1:15159/graphics/plot_zoom_png?width=1144&height=677
Your link is local, sir.
Sorry. Even I couldn’t see it! I hope this works better.
Of course, I’d prefer the actual graph here instead of the URL. A Google search has not helped. Been a long time since I tried to post an image to WordPress. Apologies. Any tips?
Stoat by name Stoat by nature.
Some years ago, I started to look at the original papers cited in PCF-08. Of the first six papers I could find from their “warming” list, I found none that actually stated in any form that they thought the earth would warm. I gave up in disgust.
I realized that their methodology was ridiculous for the purpose they stated. If a scientist got a grant in the 1970s to examine the possible effects of increased CO2, PCF-08 would automatically count it as a “warming” paper, even if it reached no conclusion that these effects were dominant.
PCF-08 is useful as propaganda, but not as science (or even meta-science).
Why doesn’t ever discuss the mechanism by which co2 was going to induce a new ice age.
A gradual cooling atmosphere wicking surface T, an ever decreasing long term equilibrium state.
Because more co2 radiating heat to space speeds up cooling of the atmospheric layer, and thag plays out all way down through a speeded up sensible flow of heat.
Apologies double posting mod, i made a horlicks of the first.
Why doesn’t ony here ever discuss the mechanism by which co2 was going to induce a new ice age.
A gradual cooling atmosphere wicking surface T, an ever decreasing long term equilibrium state.
Because more co2 radiating heat to space speeds up cooling of the atmospheric layer, and that plays out all way down through the column by a speeded up flow of sensible heat.
Oh God, hear my prayer. Can you please put an end to ALL scientific papers based on literature reviews? Thank you in advance.
Thank you! This was in my 1980’s ecology textbook!
Let me see. About 520 million years ago, CO2 was about 7950 ppm and the world didn’t end. In fact, plants were living in that time period and would use the CO2, forming sugars and other compounds and in the process releasing O2. If CO2 was such a trigger as some believe, the world shouldn’t have continued as a habitable place. Further, Rubisco starts having a hard time when CO2 drops below 180 ppm. I would much rather be further from the 180 ppm level. At higher levels, one gets more plant growth. GOD was, and is, a fantastic engineer. He loves negative feedback and continues to show how insignificant and unknowledgeable man really is.