Guest nostalgia-izing by David Middleton
A common theme in Warmunist vs Skeptic “debates” is the notion of a scientific consensus regarding global cooling in the 1970’s. My recollection is that there was no scientific consensus, because there weren’t enough climatologists around back then to hold a decent debate, much less form a consensus. However, there was indeed a global cooling “crisis.”
A Little 70’s Background
I have been a professional geologist/geophysicist in the oil & gas industry since May 1981… From September 1976 through May 1980, I was a college student at Southern Connecticut State University (“That fine oil school”) in New Haven, Connecticut. Winters were fracking cold back then. The Northeastern United States blizzard of 1978 (AKA “Storm Larry”) shut the State of Connecticut down for almost a full week. Classes were cancelled, we were snowed into our dormitories… And all we could do for an entire week was to drink beer, play Risk and engage in huge snowball fights… Then the crisis hit… Every package store within walking distance of campus ran out of beer and all other alcoholic beverages. We were forced to dig our cars out of the snow and become the first climate refugees. (If at any time you think I might be being sarcastic, you’re not thinking hard enough.)
Despite all of these extracurricular activities, I found time for classes and even kept most of my old textbooks. If there was a climate change consensus, it should have been in at least one of them.
Historical Geology
Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.
[…]
Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation. Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.
Meteorology
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.
Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Physical Geography
The atmosphere’s blanketing effect over the earth’s surface has been compared to the functioning of a greenhouse. Short-wave sunlight passes as easily through the glass of the greenhouse as through the atmosphere. Because glass is opaque to the long-wave radiation from the warm interior of the greenhouse, it hinders the escape of energy.
As a planet, the earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on the average, because it loses as much radiant energy as it gains.
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974]. p. 64.
Yes… That Reid Bryson.
A Century of Climate Crises
Dan Gainor and Warren Anderson compiled a great summary of “weather vane” climate crises back in 2006…
Fire and Ice
It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age.
The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.”
[…]
Dan Gainor and R. Warren Anderson, May 17, 2006
Fire and Ice is a great read with some fantastic graphics:
And some classic music…
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
— The Clash “London Calling,” released in 1979
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear era, but I have no fear
’Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river
I would have worked in this Bob Dylan song…
You don’t need a weather man
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965
To know which way the wind blows
Since weather isn’t climate, it appears that you do need a weather man to know which way the climate blows! (/Sarc)
While it would be fun to have a look at all of these fake crises, I’m going to focus on That 70’s Climate Crisis Show because I was in the live audience.
That 70’s Climate Crisis Show
In Search of… The Coming Ice Age
After the cancellation of the greatest TV show ever made, Leonard Nimoy found the next best entertainment niche to Mr. Spock…
In Search of…. The Coming Ice Age
30min | Documentary, Sci-Fi | Episode aired May 1978Storyline
An inquiry into whether the dramatic weather changes in America’s northern states mean that a new ice age is approaching.Pat Bushnell
IMDB
Dr. James Hayes
Dr. Chester Langway
Dr. Gifford Miller
Dr. Stephen Schneider
The segment with Dr. Stephen Schneider is particularly worth watching. He was asked about geoengineering schemes to avert “The Coming Ice Age.”
Can we do these things? Yes. But will they make things better? I’m not sure. We can’t predict with any certainty what happens to our own climatic future. How can we come along and [garbled] that in our ignorance? We could melt the icecaps. What would that do to the coastal cities? The cure could be worse than the disease. Would that be better or worse than the risk of an ice age?
Some things never change… The cure is still worse than the disease and all of the proposed “solutions” to climate change are far worse than the risk of a slightly warmer world in the 22nd Century.
“Another Ice Age?” Time Magazine Monday June 24, 1974
Science: Another Ice Age?
In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest.Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.
[…]
Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth’s surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.
The earth’s current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past 700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of glaciers spreading over much of the planet. Temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5% of the time. But there is a peril more immediate than the prospect of another ice age. Even if temperature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries—the U.S., Canada and Australia — global food stores would be sharply reduced. University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.”
Time Magazine Monday June 24, 1974 Full text.
The Cooling World, Newsweek, April 28, 1975
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
[…]
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.
[…]
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Newsweek, April 28, 1975 Full text.
—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports
Way back in 1975… “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.” Some things never change…
Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing, The New York Times May 21, 1975
This is actually a very good article…
Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing
By WALTER SULLIVAN MAY 21, 1975The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.
There are specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way—the inevitable consequence of a natural cyclic process, or as a result of man‐made pollution of the atmosphere. And there are those who say that such pollution may actually head off an ice age.Sooner or later a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable. Hints that it may already have begun are evident. The drop in mean temperatures since 1950 in the Northern Hemisphere has been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain’s growing season for crops by two weeks.
As noted in a recent report of the National Academy of Sciences, “The global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
Vulnerability to climate change, it says, is “all the more serious when we recognize that our present climate is in fact highly abnormal, and that we may already be. producing climatic changes, as a result of our own activities.”
The first half of this century has apparently been the warmest period since the “hot spell” between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago immediately following the last ice age. That the climate, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, has been getting cooler since about 1950, is well established—if one ignores the last two winters.
[…]
Man‐Made Influence
There is general agreement that introducing large amounts of smoke particles or carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can alter climate. The same would be true of generating industrial heat comparable to a substantial fraction of solar energy falling on the earth. The debate centers on the precise roles of these effects and the levels of pollution that would cause serious changes.Carbon dioxide in the air acts like glass in a greenhouse. It permits solar energy to reach the earth as visible light, but it impedes the escape of that energy into space in the form of heat radiation (at infrared wave lengths).
Dr. Mitchell has pointed out that a variety of factors determine the role of carbon dioxide on earth. For example, the extent to which that gas, introduced into the atmosphere by smokestacks and exhaust pipes, is absorbed by the oceans depends on the temperature of surface waters.
This, in turn, is affected by climate, leading to so called feedback effects. Plants consume carbon dioxide at rates that depend on temperature and the abundance of that gas in the air, complicating predictions of their role.The observatory atop Mauna Loa, the great Hawaiian volcano, has recorded a steady rise in the annual mean level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, amounting to 4 per cent between 1958 and 1972. That, however, was a period of global cooling—not the reverse, as one would expect from a greenhouse effect.
The Mauna Loa observatory has also recorded a steady rise in atmospheric turbidity —the extent to which particles overhead dim the brightness of the sun. The academy study finds that human activity over the last 120 years has contributed more to this atmospheric dust than have volcanic eruptions.
However, it says, the present atmospheric load of man‐made dust is perhaps only one fifth what was thrown into the stratosphere by the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. The role of of atmospheric dust is complex, for it cuts off sunlight from the earth, but is itself heated by that light, warming levels of atmosphere in which it resides.
Until recently the idea that ice ages are initiated by intense volcanic activity was unpopular for lack of evidence for such activity. The hypothesis has gained more credence from the analysis of sediment cores extracted from the ocean floors by the drill ship Glomar Challenger.
According to University of Rhode Island scientists, ash was far more common in layers laid down in the last two million years than in the previous 18 million years.
If worldwide energy consumption continues to increase at its present rates, catastrophic climate changes have been projected by M. I. Budyko, a leading Soviet specialist. He says that the critical level will probably be reached within a century.
This, he has written, will lead to “a complete destruction of polar ice covers.” Not only would sea levels rise but, with the Arctic Ocean free of ice, the entire weather system of the Northern Hemisphere would be altered.
However, Dr. Mitchell has suggested, warming of the climate due to pollution might be enough to head off an ice age “quite inadvertently.”
CAN THE TRUTH BE LEARNED?
More precise knowledge of the past is certain to aid in choosing between various explanations for long‐term climate changes. The Greenland Ice Sheet Program, with American, Danish and Swiss participants, is drilling a series of holes into the crest of the Greenland ice in the hope, ultimately, of reconstructing a year‐by‐year re cord of climate for the last 100,000 years.
So far the ice has been penetrated 1,325 feet, extending the record back 1,420 years. The yearly layers can be counted, like tree rings, in terms of summer and winter variation in the relative abundance of two forms of oxygen (oxygen 16 and oxygen 18). Their ratio indicates temperature at the time when the snow fell to form that layer of the ice sheet.
[…]
The New York Times May 21, 1975 Full text.
The “science” clearly was in its infancy back then… But some things never change…
If worldwide energy consumption continues to increase at its present rates, catastrophic climate changes have been projected by M. I. Budyko, a leading Soviet specialist. He says that the critical level will probably be reached within a century.
This, he has written, will lead to “a complete destruction of polar ice covers.” Not only would sea levels rise but, with the Arctic Ocean free of ice, the entire weather system of the Northern Hemisphere would be altered.
At least their predictions were less falsifiable back then… The ice caps will be toast by 2075. Does anyone have a reference for Budyko’s prediction? Was he also referring to Antarctica and Greenland? Or just sea ice? The fact that the current Arctic sea ice cover is well above the Holocene average leads me to an Alfred E. Neuman moment.
“The Ice Age Cometh?”, Science News March 1, 1975
No words necessary and this brings us to the pièce de résistance…
How the Current Fake Climate Crisis Saved Us From… That 70’s Climate Crisis
According to the sacred climate models, if not for The Climate Wrecking Industry, the planet would be colder than “The Ice Age Cometh”…
This proud member of the Climate Wrecking Industry says, “You’re welcome.”
Post Script
I don’t care what Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck said in their 2008 BAMS article. That article didn’t exist in the 1970’s… But this did…
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
— The Clash “London Calling,” released in 1979
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear era, but I have no fear
’Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river
I can well remember the winter of 78, or was it 77? We had snow in Florida, the university had severe energy rationing, heating was reduced, lights were turned out everywhere except classrooms that were in use, no hallway lights. People wandered around cold and miserable, ice was everywhere, the sidewalks were treacherous. The news and magazines were bleating non-stop about the impending ice age. Honestly, it was like living in a science fiction movie. Power restricted, darkness, impending doom and gloom. Funny how that morphed when it became much more profitable to posit impending doom from heating.
’78. I was up in Boston attending that ‘smallish’ technical school across the Charles River.
We jumped down from the 2nd flr of our brownstone to shovel out the front door. No driving for a week. No real need in the city. As I recall Marshall Law was briefly enacted due to emergency, with Nat Guard patrolling for a spell. They were the only ones with operable vehicles. It was about 6 days before they came about trying to uncover cars and clear the roads. They needed several passes and made numerous errors in finding the roads below.
I also recall very distinctly that the only two types of stores allowed to be operating were pharmacies and “packies” (liquor stores). The food stores had been cleared out very early.
One of the few things I miss about New England… Packies!
Don’t miss the MA “blue laws” – packies closed on Sunday. And limited hours of operation during the week. Did encourage developing planning skills tho’.
Connecticut had those too… Closed on Sunday… Closed at 8 PM.
Texas is a little more civilized, depending on the county, you can generally buy beer & wine on Sundays and until midnight.
True civilization is Louisiana and New Mexico… Hard liquor in the grocery stores.
“Closed on Sunday”
.
Man Davie, you’re living in the past:
.
http://ctbeverage.com/page%20setups/Location-New_Britain.htm
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Check the page: Open Sunday: 10 AM – 6 PM
I know reading isn’t your strong suit… but I moved to Texas in 1981. We were discussing the 1970’s.
My advice to you, is to lay off the lead paint chips.
Is living in the past the reason you don’t see things that are real?
Nothing like doubling down on stupid when you find yourself behind.
“I moved to Texas in 1981”
.
I know the source of all your problems.
.
You are an old F@rt
.
No wonder you suck the tit of fossil fuels
As opposed to being a moron.
Hey MarkW, talking about stupid, have you figured out how to post a link yet?
I know Middleton loves his “Cooling crisis” judging by the way he repeats it every second or third post, but it is a zombie myth first killed back in 2008:
THE MYTH OF THE 1970s GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS
(From the abstract)
An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.
“During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey
found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers.”
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
7 Cooling and 44 warming. Despite this Middleton triples down with: “there was indeed a global cooling “crisis.”
The myth continues to be killed but I understand exactly why the likes of Middleton continue to (over and over and over and…) repeat it: they can say “See, they used to be alarmed about cooling. How can we believe anything they say?”
From William Connolley, the vandal of Wikipedia?
Anyone other than blithering idiots would realize I am using That 70’s Climate Crisis Show to ridicule the moronic notion of a modern climate crisis.
Gee Donald this 35yr cold spell has got you quite testy. I hadn’t seen this mean streak in you before. I believe I have 20years or so on David so I must qualify as something worse in your estimation. Self awareness seems to be a lost attribute among a lot of you young uns.
Loydo, you fell for the Connolly misleading tripe and that David M. stated in his post this about consensus of the 1970’s:
“A common theme in Warmunist vs Skeptic “debates” is the notion of a scientific consensus regarding global cooling in the 1970’s. My recollection is that there was no scientific consensus, because there weren’t enough climatologists around back then to hold a decent debate, much less form a consensus. However, there was indeed a global cooling “crisis.”
Their paper YOU cited left out around 285 cooling papers that were published:
285 Papers 70s Cooling 1
https://notrickszone.com/285-papers-70s-cooling-1/
ALL 285 published papers are listed and linked to the paper.
You fell for William Connolly’s lies.
Except in NM – no booze sales on Christmas Day.
A surprise when we stayed there… (^:
Sundays before noon too IIRC. Just buy enough vodka on Saturday… 😎
Not only was the 70’s cooling scare a nothing burger but lo and behold so iare the precious Global MWP and LIA: No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2
From the abstract:
Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs. This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures5, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.
So the MWP and LIA were weak, localised natural variation but modern warming is rapid, global and man-made. Surprise, surprise.
The winter of 1976-77 was very cold, thanks to the PDO flip. The next winter was also cold, and very snowy. There was a more localized blizzard in January ’77, however. The West suffered an historic drought that winter, which I well remember.
http://nwafiles.nwas.org/digest/papers/1977/Vol02No4/1977v002no04-Wagner.pdf
Abstract
The severe winter of 1976-77 over the eastern United States was related to an exceptionally strong and unusual pattern of tropospheric winds and pressure anomalies that persisted from the previous October. The record bitter cold that occurred during January was additionally due to the southward displacement of the cold polar Low, normally found over Northern Canada, by what appears to have been the strongest blocking
High ever observed over the Arctic region. A search of the records turned up several severely cold winters during the 20th Century. with that of 1917-18 being closest to the recent winter in severity, wlth similar antecedent and concurrent phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_wave_of_1978
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Blizzard_of_1978
The PDO wasn’t discovered for another 20 years, by a University of WA fisheries biologist. “Climate scientists” then couldn’t be bothered to study actual climatology, so happy were they playing computer games, as still.
David, Just on John Tyndall.
I don’t usually trust Wikipedia for anything however, there is a link directly from The Royal Institution’s web page on him here https://www.rigb.org/our-history/people/t/john-tyndall to a Wikipedia page here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall (so i’m inclined to trust it as I expect The Royal Institute will have examined it….[ahem]) which states:
Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth’s atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, also known as infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. He was among the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859), after Eunice Foote in 1856. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth’s atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapour strongly absorbed infrared radiation. Relatedly, Tyndall in 1860 was first to demonstrate and quantify that visually transparent gases are infrared emitters. (My emphasis and italics)
As a non scientist and barely educated oaf, I found that rather interesting, considering it has presumably been scrutinised by the great and the good of The Royal Institution.
The very same William M. Connolley who “edited” Wikipedia on climate change?
Budyko’s predictions are in the first two references, but also cited later as well.
Like other proponents of AGW before 1988, such as Arrhenius and Callendar, he considered it to be beneficial, especially for the USSR. He did allow however that some other consequences might be less of a boon to humanity.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1961). Heat and Water Balance Theory of the Earth’s Surface… And the Problem of the Transformation of Nature. Water-Heat Balance Symposium of the 3rd Congress of the Geographical Society of the USSR.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1962). “Some Ways of Influencing the Climate. (in Russian).” Meteorologiia I Gidrologiia 2: 3-8.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1968). “On the Origin of Glacial Epochs [in Russian].” Meteorologiia I Gidrologiia 2:3-8.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1969). “The Effect of Solar Radiation Variations on the Climate of the Earth.” Tellus 21: 611-19.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1971). Climate and Life. Leningrad.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1972). “The Future Climate.” Eos, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 53: 868-74.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1974a). Izmeniya Klimata. Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1974b). “Metod Vozdeystviya Na Klimat (Method of Influencing the Climate).” Meteorologiia i Gidrologiia 2: 91-97.
Budyko, Mikhail I., and I. L. Korol (1975). “Man’s Impact on the Global Climate.” In Proceedings of the WMO/IAMAP Symposium on Long-Term Climatic Fluctuations, Norwich, Aug. 1975 (WMO Doc. 421), edited by World Meteorological Organization ( WMO), pp. 465-71. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization.
Budyko, Mikhail I., and O. A. Drozdov (1976). “Man and Climate (in Russian).” Vestnik Leningradskoyo Universiteta — Geologiya-Geografiya 12(2): 33-41.
Budyko, Mikhail I. (1977). Climatic Changes. Translation of Izmeniia Klimata (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1974). Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union.
¡Muchos gracias!
Interestingly enough, both the 70s cooling scare and the 90s warming scare were blamed on the same thing, industrialization; cooling from air pollution and warming from CO2.
=====================================
Don’t forget agriculture… It gets blamed on both ends too.
Basically, the only way to have a “Goldilocks” climate is for us to freeze and starve to death in the dark… /Sarc?
Head in an oven, feet in the freezer. On average we’ll be fine.
Made me think of a Three Stooges bit…
https://youtu.be/v9mdcKzlQgw
“the 70s cooling scare”
Except there was no cooling scare, it is a myth.
“During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey
found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers.”
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
A particulartly nasty bit of gaslighting from the Wikipedia vandal “editor” William Connolloy.
How old are you Loydo?
I was a Teenager in the 1970’s saw first hand the concerns of a cooling world at the time. It was all over the place too, in the media, TV news and even special presentations.
William Connolly didn’t try very hard to find an additional 278 cooling papers, which are all posted here:
“285 Scientific Publications Affirming A Global Cooling/Weak CO2 Influence ‘Consensus’
Again, there were at least 285 scientific publications that did not agree with the alleged CO2-warming “consensus” opinion during the 1960s to 1980s. The list is divided into several sub-sections:
Cooling Since 1940, Forecasts for Continued Cooling/Ice Age (156 papers)
Dubious Human Influence on Climate, Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity (44 papers)
Rising CO2 Leads to Cooling (7)
Uncertainties, Lack of Climate Understanding, Climate Modeling Problems (30)
Miscellaneous Questionable Human, CO2 Influence on Climate (12)
Non-CO2 Climate Change Mechanisms (26)
Warmer past despite lower CO2 (10)
https://notrickszone.com/285-papers-70s-cooling-1/
Every one of 285 papers are listed and link to them are available, go read a few and see that Connolly search skills are indeed feeble, or was it a deliberate lie?
“go read a few”
I have, and very few have anything to do with a cooling scare.
No trickzone’s fabrication has been mercilessly dismantled here:
https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=4110
Are you equating the so-called “70s cooling scare” with this:
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/GlobalAverage_2018.png
or this:
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAprSepCurrent.png
Really you still don’t realize that Connolly convinced you that it was a “cooling scare” when it wasn’t.
Here are a few papers you didn’t read:
Kukla 1972
Insolation and glacials
Abstract
Climatic changes result from variables in planetary orbits which modulate solar energy emission and change seasonal and latitudinal distribution of heat received by the Earth. Small insolation changes are multiplied by the albedo effect of the winter snow fields of the Northern Hemisphere, by ocean‐atmosphere feedbacks, and, probably, by the stratospheric ozone layer. The role of volcanic explosions and other aperiodic phenomena is secondary. The immediate climate response to insolation trends permits astronomic dating of Pleistocene events. A new glacial insolation regime, expected to last 8000 years, began just recently. Mean global temperatures may eventually drop about 1oC in the next hundred years. A refinement of the Milankovitch theory in terms of the lunar orbit and more data on solar periodicities are needed for reliable long range predictions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1502-3885.1972.tb00145.x
===
Skeeter 1985
A Reevaluation of United States Temperature Trends from 1935 to 1981
Numerous studies of global and hemispheric temperature trends have been undertaken in recent decades. One of the earliest studies was done by Willett in 1950. Willett analyzed temperature records of fifty years for 54 stations. He found that global temperatures increased 1°F (0.6°C) between 1885 and 1940. Winter temperatures during this same period were found to increase by 2.2°F (1.2°C). The most pronounced warming was in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. This warming trend conformed with the temperature trend that climatologists had expected to exist due to the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, even though the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to rise, cooling temperatures have been reported since about 1940. The first study to report this reversal in temperature trends was done by Mitchell in 1961. Mitchell updated Willett’s work through the 1950s and found that temperatures had fallen 0.2°C by the late 1950s from a peak in the early 1940s. In 1970, Mitchell stated that by the late 1960s global temperatures had fallen 0.3°C from the peak in the 1940s, approximately one-half of the prior rise. Similarly, Budyko reported that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere fell 0.3-0.4°C between 1940 and 1976. Summaries by Schneider and Dickenson, Kalnicky, Robuck, Roberts, and Agee all report Northern Hemisphere temperatures declines by at least 0.5°C since the 1940s. In summary, Gribbin states “In worldwide terms, we are in a situation where the earth is cooling more quickly than it warmed up earlier this century. From the above it is clear that the general consensus in the recent literature is that there has been a cooling in the Northern Hemisphere since the early 1940s.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/429517/summary
===
Gribbin 1975
Cause and effects of global cooling
A recent flurry of papers has provided further evidence for the belief that the Earth is cooling. There now seems to be little doubt that changes over the past few years are more than a minor statistical fluctuation. … On page 45 of this issue of Nature, Wahl and Bryson compare recent sea surface temperature patterns with those of cooler regimes in the past, and conclude that over the period from 1951 to 1972 there was a decline corresponding “to a return of about one-sixth of the way to full ice age.” … The observed cooling corresponds to a re-establishment of the ‘Little Ice Age’ which persisted for several hundred years up to the end of the nineteenth century; it may be that all that has happened since 1950 is that the unusually mild spell of the first part of this century has ended.
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/254014a0
===
Flohnn 1974
Background of a Geophysical model of the initiation of the next glaciation
Since about 1945 [to 1974], global cooling, on a scale of -0.01°C/yr [-0.3°C total], has reversed the warming trend of the first decades of our century. The bulk of these changes is probably not man-made, but of natural origin. … A large majority of the participants of the symposium concluded that the present warm epoch has reached its final phase, and that—disregarding possible man-made variations are comparable in scale with the effects–the natural end of this interglacial epoch is “undoubtedly near”.
https://www2.meteo.uni-bonn.de/bibliothek/Flohn_Publikationen/K227-K255_1972-1977/K242a.pdf
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There are only a couple hundred more like this.
Ha ha your sea ice data started in 1979…..
Your first link does what PISS does a lot, change the temperature data, by cooling the past and warming the present. It is notable that warmists favorite temperature sources are the worst two with a documented history of changing the data. especially for PISS
It was around .5C COOLER from the 1940’s to the late 1970’s as shown in David’s post based on the Newsweek article:
“The Cooling World, Newsweek, April 28, 1975” the chart was from NCAR showing the significant drop.
Loydo,
I LIVED through the decade as a teen and adult ages. I saw it first hand the much talked about cooling in those days. It was on TV a lot, and in the media too.
You seen unable to realize that you are being LIED to.
The Media talked about it a lot too as shown here a sampling:
1970s Global Cooling Alarmism
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
I don’t think you were around in the 1970’s since you otherwise have a terrible memory of those days.
“I don’t think you were around in the 1970’s since you otherwise have a terrible memory of those days.”
I was and I remember global cooling being in the news, but this rewriting of history to make it out like a “crisis” is total bs. There was no “crisis”, no matter how many times Middleton repeats it. The motive for exaggerating is transparent: “they were wrong then, why should we believe them now.” Naked doubt-mongering.
It’s a completely false and disingenuous equivalence.
Loydo,
Sorry but I was a science nerd child of the 70’s who followed the coming ice age news and wholly agree with Sunsettommy. Scientist were on TV talking about the coming ice age. News commentators were constantly talking about the coming ice age and what we needed to do to avoid it. TV shows were talking about the coming ice age. Newspapers and magazines had a lot of articles about the coming ice age. My teachers were telling us kids about the coming ice age. Replace Ice age with CO2 and it will look awfully damn familiar to you.
The whole ice age scare is what made me a skeptic to being with. First time I heard about how we were frying the planet I did the whole “I thought we were going into the next ice age” so I started reading. Reading made me even more skeptical of the whole CAGW scare mongering.
I remember the coming Ice Age as the headline scare just behind nuclear war, newspaper headlines rather than scientific papers though.
Exactly Susan, any one who says otherwise either wasn’t around back then or is a liar or both. Those of us who lived through it remember.
Calling it a “scare” is exaggerating, calling it a “crisis” is a disingnuous rewriting of history.
Exhibit A: Either Loydo is too young to remember the 70s, a liar or both.
“Except there was no cooling scare, it is a myth.”
I was an atmospheric sciences major in the early 70’s. The consensus was global cooling. No amount of revisionist history can change that fact.
“The consensus was global cooling.”
How the definition of consensus has changed.
Ahhh, you cut your teeth at Morrill Hall and purchased beer from Harry’s Packy! SCSU Class of 1986 here (BS Chemistry). What is it about Southern that develops all of these “skeptics” …. lol
1980 BS Earth Science… The Earth Science department wasn’t in Morrill Hall back then, we were in the big building (Engleman Hall?).
Friday happy hour at the Keg House, Saturday $0.25 draughts at Malone’s West… $10 went a long way back then… 😎
I can’t remember the name of the packy I frequented, I think it was near a pizza joint (Pizza Pal? or Captain’s Pizza?)
I haven’t been back to the campus since 1989… But you could tell it was the geo department: flannel shirts, blue jeans & hiking boots.
I seem to recall seeing a couple of SCSU chemistry professors on a list of skeptics… and the roots of my skepticism definitely go back to Dr. Drobnyk and the rest of the Earth Science faculty.
Wasn’t sure if “The Kegger” was open in 1980 or I would have mentioned it. Malone’s West was Clancy’s by the time I was in school, and yes, it was Engleman Hall. Captain’s Pizza was tremendous, it’s closed, would love to get an ahbeetz from there again.
Dr. James Barrante was a really important mentor for me, I took both Inorganic and Physical Chemistry from him. Google him, he wrote “Global Warming for Dimwits”, mocking the science behind the hysteria.
The one thing I can say for sure … the faculty at SCSU taught us how to be scientists, meaning, to cast doubt on theories, and that LAWS were hard to come by. Tuition was the bargain $505 a semester, and my biased self always thought we received a comparable education to that school four miles to our south!
Fun and a good, basic education at a bargain price.
Funny story… After graduating, I spent about a year trying to figure out what to do. I extended my summer job as a State Park Patrolman at Squantz Pond State Park into October, worked a few odd jobs, talked extensively to the Air Force recruiter in Danbury and collected grad school applications… Then, one Friday before meeting the old gang at the Keg House, I visited SCSC’s career counselling office. The guy I talked to said I needed to go to Texas. He gave me a copy of a book called The College Placement Annual. I sent CV’s to every company in that book who hired people with geology degrees. Every company that I ever heard of replied that they only hired geologists with Masters degrees. But, I did get three bites:
1. Western Geophysical, seismic data processing.
2. Dresser Magobar, mud engineer.
3. Enserch Exploration, associate geologist (trainee).
I also had a offer from Newmont as a metallurgy lab tech in Danbury.
.
Enaerch wound up offering me a job as an Associate Geophysicist… because I minored in math. To make a long story longer, sometime around 1988-1990, Enserch’s Offshore group gave our annual budget presentation to management. The president of the company was so impressed, he wanted to shake hands with all of the geo’s. Bob Fowler was a huge Oklahoma University booster and sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. As he shook our hands, he said, “Tell me your name and where you went to school.” None of us went to OU. I was standing next to Jim Reilly, who went on to be an astronaut and is currently the Director of the USGS. Jim went to the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Fowler shook hands with Jim and said, “Reilly, ah know you, OJT!” Then he shook my hand and I said, “Dave Middleton, Southern Connecticut State.” He replied, “Suthin What?” I said, “Southern Connecticut State sir.” To which he said, “Ah, that fine oil school.”
I saw that comment in the original story and wondered where it came from, that’s a great story. Thanks for sharing, and for all your contributions. I really look forward to reading your posts.
As I have commented before, during the 1970s I was aware of the coming ice age scare, but we were at Mont. St. U. in the autumn of 1974 subjected to a fire and brimstone sermon about CO2 raising temperature to the point of holding all water as vapor. I think it was fair to say that the person involved in this lecture was not alone and there must have been a channel in the academic world simultaneously worried about runaway global warming.
The world bristled with consensi at the time.
“…when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades…”
And of course this being a falsification of the CO2 control knob theory that came later, plunging temperatures during galloping CO2 increases had to be expunged by the team under pressure from global political control knobs. This period is also a falsification of BEST’s methodology of sliding more recent graphed temperatures upward to erase what they believe to be some sort of ‘discontinuity’ in the record that they are sure is instrumental error. There can’t be much doubt that other legitimate climate shifts have been reversed in this process.
The other “eyesore” to ideological climate was the late 30s/early 40s high meant that most of the warming since 1850 had occurred a decade before mid century! The final one was the Karlization of the Dreaded Pause. History records the Dirty Thirties, the plunging cold spell of the Ice Age Cometh ctisis and the Pause (which may resume), but not the temperature record.
It may not have falsified it, but it clearly neutered it.
I graduated college in January, 1971. I was taught that global cooling was coming.
“Interestingly enough, both the 70s cooling scare and the 90s warming scare were blamed on the same thing, industrialization”
No. I was taught that it was cycles. The current inter glacial had gone on way too long, cooling had to come.
I was teaching geology at Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, CA) from September 1971 through June 1982. I remember an ‘unprecedented” snowfall near the latter part of that tenure. Having grown up in northern Illinois, I took the opportunity to teach the California students how to make snowmen and snowballs.
I used to regularly read Science Magazine. I remember that it was about the same time (mid- to late-1970s?) that I read an article that demonstrated that Fourier analysis confirmed the Milankovitch cycles. That is to say, while Milankivitch’s hypothesis had been presented as an explanation for the Pleistocene glaciations, there had previously been little evidence to support it. The ‘Smoking Gun’ had been found AFTER the time the alarmists have accused Exxon of knowing all about global warming. That is, back in the ’70s, we didn’t really know all that much about the causes of climate change — not all that different from today! The difference is that, today, many piously claim that the “science is settled.”
So who do we blame, the Media, the politicians who will do almost
anything to get elected, graduates from University who are looking for a job, and of course Mother Nature.
Throw in superstition and religions who have been warning us for
thousands of years what will happen to us if we do not mend our wicked ways, and today we have a very costly mess.
Barnum and Bailey plus Dr. Gobbles would all be very amused.
MJE VK5ELL
Game, Set, Match, and Tournament awarded to Mr. Middleton! Best and most entertaining dismantling of Climate Alarmism I’ve yet read. Bravo! (Please cc. to President Trump!)
The “funny” thing is that I’m a Luke-warmer… 😉
David, I’m a Luke-warmer too and a little warming and more CO2 is a lot better for growing more barley and hops than a little cooling. We have to concentrate on the important things in life.
To a point more CO2 is probably better… 500-700 ppmv clearly should be more beneficial than harmful… beyond that, particularly over a short period of time, the “crystal ball” is too murky.
A) We’re unlikely to get to enjoy the benefits of any CO2 level above 600 ppm.
B) Optimum for most plants, including all trees and most crops, is 800 to 1300 ppm.
David, no worries about the CO2 getting too high. The cooling into the next glacial period should help to limit how high CO2 goes. The bigger problem for humanity will be the cooling. Maybe if our descendants are lucky, our pushing CO2 levels higher in advance will help to keep them higher during the next glacial maximum and maybe that will help to turn around the trend for the glacial maximums to be longer and colder that has occurred over the last million years. I doubt that the overall cold dry climate and extremely low CO2 levels just 15-20 thousand years ago would support even half as many humans as there are today with our current technology (not to mention all that extra glacial ice to deal with).
David
May the farce be with you, Luke Warmer!
I’ve been saving, “The Farce is strong in this one” for just the right opportunity.
So, we are in an era of Climatological Cassandras?
e.g.; Mann, Connolly, Appell, Ward, sks, climatedepot, IPCC, Gavin, Hansen, etc. etc. etc.
Great historical summation, David!
Hansen and Schneider mentioned. Classic.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8QovPJSWfuc/U3Le5UrCZEI/AAAAAAAAGA8/8P6OrhvS-bU/s1600/https+++media.proquest.com+media+pq+hnp+doc+144703752+fmt+ai+rep+NONE+ic=1+_s=1sJ2P2mBK1IBW+2FnaveePm2ksSvQ+3D+(1).png
Schneider’s research on the subjects still resides at NASA https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ra00600k.html
It does not really matter if the average is warmer or cooler, the warmers or perhaps I should say the Coolers, will still blame CO2. The Politicians will ride the bandwagon until it all collapses. So what will bring it down, the lights and of course Industry will finally start to go out.
”Then we will see the general public being very angry, and a new crop of politicians will emerge, all promising to “”Save Us”.
MJE VK5ELL
I started my short career with environment Canada in 1978 and recall our instructor talking about the 30 years of cooling, but he said it was cyclical…..before things got political. Then, in Feb ’79 the station i was posted at set the north American record cold month! Thankfully the world warmed up! To bad it became political
In the early 1970s I was teaching physical geography classes and remember one handmade overhead (the young will not have seen these things). It said: “Cold period weather is more dangerous …. ”
By mid-1970s I became more interested in bird dogs, horses, and wine. Horses do better in cold weather than dogs or wine.
There is/was a Morrill Hall at the Univ. of Idaho. Housed some geology and the State Department of Geology. It was old in the ’70s, so likely gone now.
Morrill Hall at the University of Idaho is still there and still in use. I think they still teach some geology classes there as well.
My first comment here. I’ve been reading WUWT for a couple of years. I like the comments. The articles I read here, I always read at least 25 comments/replies. That said… On January 19, 1977. I was working at every Floridian’s favorite supermarket’s warehouse, in N. Dade County (now Miami-Dade County). Sometime that morning I was on the front loading dock, doing my thing. I noticed white flakes coming down from the sky. The temperature that morning was low 30’s, upper 20’s. At first I thought the flakes were dust from someone on the roof sweeping it. Then i noticed the flakes disappearing as they hit the ground. Melting! I held my left index finger arms length in front of me. A few flakes hit my finger & immediately melted. “No way!” Then, I held my hands out, cup style. Any flakes that landed in my hands melted. I found the nearest intercom for the whole warehouse & announced, “It’s snowing outside!” Manager: “Reynolds, get back to work!” Someone else: “He’s right! It’s snowing outside!” The offices, grocery & produce sections of the warehouse went out to the parking lot or front docks to watch snow come down. Later, I heard of reports of snow as far south as Florida City. 30 miles south of Miami!
David Middleton
Outstanding summary and I had not seen the Nemoy documentary.
Which conveys the sense of dread, but then no one had figured out how to make money from that scare.
And along came “Global Warming” whereby just living could be blamed. The new original sin.
For all the youngsters posting, I completed a BSc in Geology and Physics in 1962. At the U of British Columbia. Before they had a Geophysics Department.
The closest booze store was about a twenty-minute drive away.
Good post,that was how I recall it too.
The fate was cooling but the cause was industry.
Then it was Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and the cause was industry.
But what was really notable was the change in politics,the cold scare was well qualified with doubt,the current meme is rampant propaganda.
The bureaus are the agencies manufacturing or funding the manufacture of “evidence” to fit the desired conclusion.
Your review of recent history,will be denied frantically by the Cult of Calamitous Climate, for it matter not.
Heating,cooling or staying remarkably stable does not matter, panic now and send all your worldly wealth.
I certainly remember the claim back in the 70’s in the UK. I also recall the bitterly cold winters, but I liked them, prefer cold/winter anyway. I also recall a certain David Attenborough making claims of cooling on BBC too. How times have changed. We now have a heatwave in EU and that is now proof positive of man-made climate change. The summer of 1976 is still the hottest in the English record.
Yes, “Mission: Impossible” was the greatest TV show ever made. Nimoy’s career was one long, slow slide afterward.
I started to work that into the post, but then I would have had to cover Space 1999 too.
If there is one thing that persists in climastrology… it is overconfidence in the data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns9P8bhIhnA
A healthy distrust of your own data is the marque of a real scientist.
In the Nimoy doco suggested a drop of 2C over 30 years. (more than the rise over the last 30) This was BEFORE CliSci ever thought of ”adjusting” data. The 70’s cooling scare was very real and for some people to try to deny it now I personally find ignorantly dismissive, outrageous and contemptible.
Scientists believe the cooling period was largely due to other pollution called “aerosols”, such as sulphur dioxide, that shaded the earth.
Smog and acid rain in the 1970s were mostly caused by nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxide from cars and coal-fired power plants. These caused global dimming.
After laws were enacted required catalytic converters on cars and scrubbers on coal plants, the clouds of pollution has reduced and the earth has gone back to warming up again.
From the NYT article quoted in the post…
Smoke particles= aerosols.
However, the mid-20th century cooling was so pronounced that it prevented atmospheric CO2 from rising for more than a decade.
MacFarling-Meure, C., D. Etheridge, C. Trudinger, P. Steele, R. Langenfelds, T. van Ommen, A. Smith, and J. Elkins (2006), Law Dome CO2, CH4 and N2O ice core records extended to 2000 years BP, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L14810, doi:10.1029/2006GL026152.
Fortunately the Pacific Climate Shift of 1976 and the modern fake climate crisis saved us from “The Ice Age Cometh”…
Quick question for Loydo: why are you desperate to deny the existence of the Cooling Scare of the 1970′[s, despite all the evidence?
I remember how cold it was back then. Ice everywhere in the countryside in winter in the 50’s. Scraping the ice off my motorcycle seat before setting out for work in Melbourne in the 70’s. No frosts there now. I felt that the journalists might have been correct. (fool that I am). We were led to think that Milankovich was correct and that an ice age was imminent. However 10 years earlier The President requested a report. (I am sure it has been posted it here before). The CO2 theory.
https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira%20downloads/PSAC,%201965,%20Restoring%20the%20Quality%20of%20Our%20Environment.pdf
I have only one book from that era called “The Winters of the World” about ice ages. (1979 edited by Brian John). No mention of CO2 despite earlier suggestions that it could effect the climate. At that time John seemed to think that anything could happen, even another “Little Ice Age”.
Maybe the cold after WW2 was due to atmospheric particulate pollution from industrial expansion stopping the sunshine, and that the cleaning of particulate emissions from the 70’s onwards allowed the extra warming we have now. I remember talk of smog, and acid rain destroying the Black Forest and that the reduction of polluting emissions was necessary. But it could also have been volcanoes causing the cooling, or whatever.
An interesting time back then.
“In the United States, smog pollution kills 24,000 Americans every year. The U.S. is among the dirtier countries in terms of smog, ranked 123 out of 195 countries measured, where 1 is cleanest and 195 is most smog polluted”
“Smog is a type of severe air pollution. The word “smog” was coined in the early 20th century, and is a contraction (portmanteau) of the words smoke and fog to refer to smoky fog; its opacity, and odor.[1] The word was then intended to refer to what was sometimes known as pea soup fog, a familiar and serious problem in London from the 19th century to the mid-20th century. This kind of visible air pollution is composed of nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, ozone, smoke and other particulates. Man-made smog is derived from coal combustion emissions, vehicular emissions, industrial emissions, forest and agricultural fires and photochemical reactions of these emissions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog
Please permit me to add a European perspective regarding the extent of climate experts’ concern in the 1970s regarding an imminent descent into a new ice age.
In 1974 the BBC published a hard-back book, “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice” by Nigel Calder [Ref. 1] to accompany their 120-minute TV programme “The Weather Machine” which was a co-production with, amongst others, WNET (New York) and OECA (Toronto). The programme was first transmitted on the UK’s BBC2 channel on 12th October 1974. The book itself is in three chapters, the third of which is entitled, ‘The Threat of Ice’.
In the author’s note on page 4 of the book Calder writes, “I have been able to travel around the world, and to meet leading experts on weather and climate in a dozen countries … My gratitude is even greater to the experts whom we consulted … there are nearly two hundred of them.”
On pages 7 and 8 he writes about “… conflicting predictions about the climate of the next few decades ….. These are a few of the reasons why there are fears that the Earth’s climate may be changing substantially for the worse ….. The third chapter chronicles the astonishing new discoveries about the ice ages and evaluates the threat of a major cooling in our time.”
The book is balanced in that it also includes the views of scientists who did not agree with the major thrust of the book. For example, at page 77 Calder writes, “For Bert Bolin of Stockholm University’s Institute of Meteorology the carbon dioxide measurements were of global significance. As a leader of international efforts to get to grips with the problems of climate, Bolin recognises the possibly crucial importance of man-made carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect. It is a tricky business though … An increase in cloudiness by two per cent could offset an increase of 100 per cent in the carbon dioxide in the air. As Bolin sees it, the effects of carbon dioxide will eventually be evaluated in elaborate numerical models that show the interactions of many different factors affecting the climate, of which carbon dioxide and cloudiness are only two.”
I infer from the above that of the relatively small number (by modern standards) of climate experts working on these matters in the 1970s:-
(i) a good proportion were concerned about a descent into a new ice age;
(ii) a few were already thinking ahead to today’s concerns.
Reference
1. Nigel Calder, “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice”, first published by the BBC in 1974, ISBN 0 563 12646 9.
Regards,
Idiot_Wind.
RAND had at least one analyst devoting a good amount of effort to analysis of the Global Cooling – 1965 – 1969.
That likely helped boost the foundation for the 1970s scare.
Myself, I do not recall the 1970s Global Cooling scare. I do recall major social attention to excessive energy use. This, in the early 1970s, was the beginning of the major push for people to turn lights off when not in use, etc.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/f/fletcher_j_o.html
I think the JASONS have been monopolized by skeptics. –AGF
Great article . Will that get through the screening process ?