By Andy May
As Angus McFarlane shows in a 2018 well researched wattsupwiththat.com web post (McFarlane, 2018), some 65% of the peer-reviewed climate papers, that offered an opinion, published between 1965 and 1979 predicted that the global cooling seen at the time would continue. He references and is supported by a Notrickszone.com post by Kenneth Richard (Richard, 2016).
Attempts to erase the “global cooling scare” from the internet by the notorious William Connolley, who has rewritten 5,428 Wikipedia articles in a vain attempt to change history, failed. As James Delingpole explains in The Telegraph, Connolley systematically turned Wikipedia into a man-made global warming advocacy machine (Delingpole, 2009). He rewrote articles on global warming, the greenhouse effect, climate models and on global cooling. He tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the Wikipedia pages he trashed famous climate scientists who were skeptical of man-made global warming like Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. He also blocked people from correcting his lies.
William Connolley is friends with Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, which includes Phil Jones and Raymond Bradley. He is also a cofounder of the alarmist website Realclimate.org. Obviously, Connolley made sure that Mann and Bradley received glowing praise on Wikipedia until he was fired in 2009 and removed as a Wikipedia administrator (Delingpole, 2009).
We are not surprised that Connolley shows up as a co-author on the peer-reviewed paper, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in BAMS, written by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008). The paper is nonsense and made no difference because facts are stubborn things. That the paper passed peer-review illustrates how corrupt climate science has become. The paper begins with this:
“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.” (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008)
Figure 1. The U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia global average temperature reconstruction since 1850. It shows, like other reconstructions, global cooling of about 0.09°C (0.16°F) from 1944 to 1977.
The global cooling scare of the 1960s and 1970s did exist, both climate scientists and the public were afraid that the global cooling trend, that began in the 1940s (see Figure 1), would continue and the world would turn very cold, maybe even return to a glacial period like the one that ended about 11,700 years ago at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch.
The Peterson, et al. paper carefully cherry picks 71 papers and claims that only seven papers between 1965 and 1979 disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future. They found 20 that took a neutral position and 44 that agreed with the global warming consensus. But the world was cooling then and had been since 1944. Kenneth Richard researched this and expanded the time frame to 1960 to 1989. Richard found 285 papers that disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future (Richard, 2016).
Of these 285 papers, 156 discussed the cooling since 1940 and predicted future cooling. Seven tried to show that CO2 might be causing the cooling. A complete list of papers can be downloaded from Kenneth Richard’s post. The alarmists fudged the numbers to show a 97% consensus that man caused global warming, then they fudged the global cooling consensus in the same way.
Angus McFarlane took the databases created by Kenneth Richard and Peterson, et al., merged them (there were 16 duplicates) and then did an independent search of his own. He found two additional relevant papers that were not already in one of the two databases. Then he eliminated the papers that were outside the original Peterson et al. period of 1965-1979.
McFarlane’s database is smaller than Richard’s and only has 190 relevant papers, but this is 119 more than Peterson, et al. found and it covers the same period. McFarlane’s review of the papers found that 86 predicted future cooling, 58 were neutral, and 46 predicted warming. Of the 86 cooling papers, 30 predicted a possible new “ice age.” Strictly speaking, we are in an ice age, what they mean is a new glacial period where ice advances to a major new maximum extent like 19,000 years ago in the last major glacial maximum. The 86 cooling papers are 45% of the total. If we ignore the neutral papers, like John Cook, et al. did (Cook, et al., 2013) in his 97% consensus study, then cooling papers are 65% of the papers that offered an opinion. Using Cook’s rules, we can comfortably claim there was a global cooling consensus in 1979.
However, once the mid-twentieth century cooling trend reversed and became a warming trend, it did not take long for the “consensus” to reverse as well. The global surface temperature trend changed to warming (about 0.017°C/year as shown in the graph) around 1977, and the peer-reviewed climate papers from 1977-1979 changed to a ratio of 52% warming to 48% cooling, a bare majority of warming papers, ignoring the neutral papers. During the 1980s the papers quickly changed to pro-warming.
The press in the mid-seventies reported that a consensus of climate scientists believed the world was cooling and the cooling would continue (Struck, 2014). Articles on the cooling consensus appeared in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and National Geographic. A landmark story by Peter Gwynne in Newsweek April 28, 1975 was typical (Gwynne, 1975). It was entitled “The Cooling World.” In the overheated style of Newsweek, the article begins, “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically.” Later in the article Gwynne breathlessly explains “… the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. … and the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Gwynne’s cited sources include the National Academy of Sciences, Murray Mitchell (NOAA), George Kukla (Columbia University), James McQuigg (NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment) (Gwynne, 1975).
George Kukla of Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory did not change his view of a long-term global cooling trend, like many of his colleagues did. When he sadly passed away May 31, 2014, he still believed that a new massive glacial period would begin in the future, perhaps 5,000 years from now. Javier Vinós, in his blog post on “The next glaciation,” (Vinós, 2018) predicts that the next major glaciation will begin in 1500 to 2500 years. It is fortunate that both predictions are far in the future.
When the next global cooling period begins, as it inevitably will, will climate scientists write more global cooling papers? Why should we believe climate scientists who say the world is warming dangerously now, when just 50 or 60 years ago they were saying it was dangerously cooling? A reasonable question. What direct evidence has arisen that convinced them to reverse course? We had a consensus for cooling when the world was cooling, now we have a consensus for warming and the world is warming. Is that all there is to it? Both are hypotheses, what makes them become facts or theories?
Hypotheses are speculative ideas. A real scientist asks, “Is that so? Tell me why you think that.” A rigorous scientific process must be used to demonstrate why observed events, such as global warming or global cooling, are occurring. To show they are potentially dangerous takes even more work.
Consensus is a political thing. The public forms a consensus opinion, then vote and make laws or rules that reflect the opinion. In science, we first form a hypothesis or idea that explains an observed natural phenomenon, such as warming or cooling. The next step is to attempt to disprove it. If we fail the idea survives. We publish what we did, and others attempt to disprove the idea, if they fail to disprove it, it survives. Once this has gone on long enough, the idea becomes a theory. A scientific theory simply survives, it is never proven, it must always be subject to testing.
We mentioned above that seven of the papers examined by Angus McFarlane and Kenneth Richard suggested that CO2 might be causing global cooling. A good example is Sherwood Idso’s, 1984 paper in the Journal of Climatology. The paper is entitled “What if Increases in Atmospheric CO2 Have an inverse Greenhouse Effect?” (Idso, 1984). Idso speculates that additional CO2 will encourage plants to move into more arid areas, because additional CO2 causes plants to use less water per pound of growth. Idso thinks that this might change Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) in such a way as to lower temperatures. In a similar way, Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi speculated that additional CO2 would increase humidity in the tropics and thus cloud cover (Lindzen & Choi, 2011). Extremely small changes in average cloud cover can have a large cooling effect during the daytime.
Peter Webster presents an interesting discussion of Sherwood Idso’s work in his Climatic Change paper, “The Carbon Dioxide/Climate Controversy: Some Personal Comments on Two Recent Publications” (Webster, 1984). Besides an interesting discussion of the emotions involved in the human-caused climate change debate, we can see from Webster’s discussion, and Idso’s paper, how little we really know about the impact of additional CO2 in the real world. Tiny changes in Earth’s albedo, whether due to cloud cover or the distribution of plants can make a huge difference.
Empirical estimates of ECS (the change in air temperature due to doubling the CO2 concentration) have never matched theoretical calculations from climate models. The empirical values (like Idso’s or Lindzen and Choi’s) are normally about half of model estimates, and can be negative, like Idso’s. This is likely because the models are missing something and possible future changes in albedo due to changing cloud and plant cover are likely candidates.
This post is condensed and modified from my new book, Politics and Climate Change: A History.
To download the post bibliography click here.
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A Green New Deal is coming. Regardless of the science past or present. Power defines principle and it will take a hard dose of reality to adjust that balance. The average person person / consumer / voter requires an overruling event to counter momentum. And momentum at the moment is politicians and profiteers pretending to save lives.
A major unremarked issue with regard to cooling or warming is that the geological record shows that the Earth enters a glacial age slowly. Some tens of thousands of years are usually required for the temperature to drop roughly 20F to the depth of the cold, and that cold will be unquestionably a killing cold. We could be on the cusp of such a drop but won’t see it for a thousand years at least. Emergence back to warmth such as we now enjoy seems to take much less time, a few hundreds or thousands of years. I expect that a lot of work is being done to try and understand this phenomena (at least I hope so) but I see little about it on these pages; occasional mention of Milankovitch cycles but it seems they don’t quite match. Perhaps Andy May knows and can teach us?
“[CRU/UKMet anomaly record] shows, like other reconstructions, global cooling of about 0.09°C (0.16°F) from 1944 to 1977.”
That Figure looks like the usual 5-year smooth.
The 5-year smooth of the 1994 CRU land + sea anomaly record shows a 1941-1976 change of -0.2 C (-0.36 F) cooling.
The unsmoothed anomaly trend goes from a high (1944) of 0.24 C to a low of -0.17 (1976) for a max-min cooling of -0.41 C (-0.74 F).
The mid-20th century low followed after an earlier 32 year warming (unsmoothed) trend from 1909 (-0.4 C) to 1941 (0.16) of 0.56 C ((1.0 F).
But the CRU folks made it an assiduously pursued project to flatten out the cooling trend after 1945.
So, the 2019 HadCRUT4 unsmoothed anomalies are about 0.1 C cooler in 1944 and about 0.1 C warmer in 1976 than the 1994 version.
They’ve removed about half the mid-20th century cooling trend from the published record.
By the way, I’m just prima facie accepting those numbers from the anomaly record. There’s no reason to think they’re physically accurate.
The Tom Wigley and Phil Jones discussion of the ‘1940s blip’ as per the ‘climaregate’ emails shows an offhand treatment of data to serve a predetermined narrative.
http://sealevel.info/FOIA/1254108338.txt
As you say Pat they are still at it:
https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/mean:12
Over time the ‘blip’ will disappear altogether.
This is data from Jones himself….
That is some “blip” they have “mal-adjusted” out of the once-was-data.
They won’t stop until the money goes away, or the science societies rise to the integrity of their historical standard, Chris.
I don’t see either eventuality happening.
“ Using Cook’s rules, we can comfortably claim there was a global cooling consensus in 1979.” etc., etc.
Looks to me that the work of Richards and McFarlane thoroughly destroy the entire case for “Exxon Knew.”
I wonder if Exxon knows. 🙂
“However, once the mid-twentieth century cooling trend reversed and became a warming trend, it did not take long for the “consensus” to reverse as well”
Possibly the biggest driver of “trend reversal” was Margaret Thatcher, who determined that the assumed threat of global warming could be a propaganda weapon in her 1982-83 tussle with the coal miners’ trade union and its militant leader Arthur Scargill. At 37:54 in The Great Global Warming Swindle, Nigel Calder states:
“And she (Thatcher) said to the scientists, she went to the Royal Society and said ‘There’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff.’ So of course they went away and did that“. Paying scientists to give the answer you want is not the way to get unbiased and independent research, it’s using the appearance of research, in the service of a political objective. Once that particular Rubicon was crossed, it was downhill all the way.
Thatcher’s initiative led directly to the arise of the academic climate cabal at UEA. The US followed suit after James Hansen did his propaganda thing at a Senate hearing, and Maurice Strong pushed the UN into creating the IPCC, both in 1988. Soon all the “western democracies” were pouring torrents of taxpayers’ money into this hybrid government/academic complex, whose nominal function was climate research, but whose actual function was to manufacture endless predictions of climate doom. Dissent was suppressed by vicious character assassination, the threat of not getting research grants, and actual job terminations. “Worse than we thought” became a constant motto.
The Iron Lady is looking a bit rusty now, seen in the rear-view mirror. I almost wish there was an after-life so she could look at what she started and spend the rest of eternity regretting it.
Thatcher recanted when evidence showed her prior conclusions false, as befits a chemist:
https://theecologist.org/2018/oct/17/who-drove-thatchers-climate-change-u-turn
I doubt anything Thatcher did or didn’t do had any significant effect on the pretty-much world-wide slide toward marxism/socialism. A gnat in a hurricane….
There’s no controversy. A group (52?) of ‘climate scientists’ wrote to President Nixon warming him of the impending cold period and this text is widely available. No controversy.
Warning.
Another good article from Andy May. However … this certified cheapskate won’t pay $20 for his paperback book simply because I believe all paperback books should be 99 cents, as they were when I was a child … but I’d bet it is a great book !
I never had any interest in predictions, including the coming ice age predictions that got mass media attention in the 1970s.30 years later, leftists told me those predictions were just was a small minority of scientists, while the large majority expected global warming from more CO2 in the air. Of course I never trust leftists.
Before the 1970s, it did not seem popular for scientists to make 100 year climate predictions. Given the global cooling from the 1940s to mid-1970s, it would have been tough for any scientist to get media attention by predicting a coming global warming crisis. … Just as predicting a global cooling crisis now would not get any media attention.
I felt the global cooling crisis predictions that got so much media attention in the mid-1970s “taught” other scientists that confident predictions of a long term climate crisis is a good way to get media attention and government grants.
Scientific papers can make assumptions, but the mass media wants confident predictions of the future. And that’s exactly what modern “climate change” has become — repeated, confident (but always wrong) predictions of the future climate. And the future climate can only be bad news — never good news — which the mass media LOVE to report.
It’s a shame there are people like Connolley who mess around with Wikipedia. And it’s not just the global warming topics either. I liked the original idea of Wikipedia as a “correctable” online encyclopedia, but I now consider Wikipedia too unreliable for anything other than minor questions of the day. For example: the track listing of an old album, or reading the color code on a resistor.
Its chief value IMO is as a source of sources.
In the mid 1970’s the Canadian government and the group CMOS sent a film across Canada showing it to the public. The title was something like, “The Coming Ice Age”
I know, I ran the 16mm projector in Winnipeg.
The difference is, the Warmunists need to show warming to support their CAGW ideology. But not just any old warming. They need for it to be “alarming”. Presto, along comes the hokey schtick – problem solved! Away goes the MWP – poof, just like magic. Hide the decline, and any number of tricks with temperature records – voila, we get tamperatures.
The temps did cool for several decades, at a time when CO2 emissions were ramping up. Oops, that’s inconvenient, must get rid of that. Blame air pollution -aerosols. Problem solved.
Whether we’re still warming slightly or cooling now is impossible to say, but we could certainly see cooling in the coming decades, perhaps even reaching LIA conditions by mid-century. We would then see how foolish today’s concerns about warming actually were, as it is cooling we should be concerned with, not warming.
“The next step is to attempt to disprove it.”
You mean that since all Joules are the same, how can the next Joule of forcing result in the surface emitting 4.4 +/- 2.2 Joules while the average Joule of solar input only results in the emission of about 1.62 Joules by the surface?
Or, that if each Joules of solar input resulted in the emission of 4.4 Joules by the surface, the AVERAGE surface temperature would be close to the boiling point of water and it obviously is not.
Or, what magic physics allows the climate system to tell the next W/m^2 of forcing from the average W/m^2 of solar input so that the next W/m^2 can be so much more powerful at maintaining increased surface emissions than any other? Keep in mind that the units of work are Joules.
Or that since emissions are immutably proportional to the temperature raised to the forth power, how can the next W/m^2 of forcing increase the temperature by 0.8C, while the last one only increased it by about 0.3C and owing to the T^4 dependence, the temperature effect of the next W/m^2 is necessarily less than that from the previous W/m^2. Keep in mind that the first W/m^2 will increase the temperature from 0K to about 65K and the first 10 W/m^2 takes it up to 115K.
Or, how about just explaining the origin of the energy replacing the 3.4 W/m^2 of surface emissions above and beyond the W/m^2 of forcing claimed by the IPCC to cause the increased surface emissions?
The bottom line is that the consensus can be trivially falsified, but it doesn’t seem to matter! The only possible reason is that science no longer matters and only conformance to a political narrative does.
For as long as humans have gathered in groups and had speech to communicate, in addition to clubs, rocks, and muscle, some have used speech to control the majority. Truth and facts always got in the way of that activity, so were largely ignored. Nothing is different today. God’s will or CO2, demon or virus, whichever is more useful in the moment.
All this talk of consensus is nothing but speculation. Scientists never registered and voted on matters such as the validity of the AGW conjecture. But even if they had, the results would be meaningless because science is not a democracy. The laws of science are not some sort of legislation. Scientific theories are not validated by a voting process or some other sort of popularity contest.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the conclusion that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. So in terms of the Earth’s climate system, nothing has changed. If the future is anything like that past I would expect the the long term cooling trend since the Holocene Climate Optimum will continue and will include the warming and cooling periods that we have been experiencing. Our current interglacial period will end but it may take several thousand years for that trend to become obvious. In the mean time we should enjoy the current interglacial period while it lasts.
Actually, ECS might well be negative, net of the net.
Sings all the words in perfect tune (God, how do I amaze myself *everytime*)
“Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve been reading the Times again
Because a power grid softly failing
Switched the leccy off while I was sleeping”
Ain’t *everybody* asleep??
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blackouts-fear-forces-power-alarm-at-national-grid-cr7fjr5xb
I just bought Andy’s book. Can’t wait to read it.
Two years ago I had just completed a month long stay at Princeton University, Department of Physics. In the airport lounge on my way back to Tokyo I read an article in the Danish left leaning newspaper Information about global warming. It was strongly recommended that we refrain from flying. I wrote a causal comment that I was about to fly from New York to Tokyo and didn’t care about the ensuing carbon foot print. For this provocation I was permanently banned from writing comments in the paper.
Soon you will be sent to a reeducation camp. Or worse.
If the Stalinists win, you’ll only be reeducated. Or starved or worked to death.
If the Trotskyites, executed summarily.
I stopped my prescription of Information in the 80s while still living in Denmark, it became way too left wing for me.
Before that, the newspaper was really good, had well written investigative articles and no tabloid dummy bate.
Same goes for Scientific American and many other papers – sad.
It will not be Global cooling that kills us and it will not be global warming that will kill us what will kill us is the global socialists using climate change as an excuse to kill all Humanity.
Just some reports.. The Cooling alarmism is well proven
Cooling from 1940-1970s is also obvious in many untampered data sets
And not just in the NH
Even in older HadCrud data
La Nina gets an honourable mention as Sydney weather chills out-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/sydney/sydney-shivers-through-one-of-coldest-november-nights-on-record/ar-BB1aJ79s
Interestingly-
“The mercury dropped down to 12C on Thursday night and fell as low as 10C in Camden, on the city’s south-west outskirts, as a surge of powerful southerly winds moved up the coast.
The chilly overnight temperature fell just short of the lowest November 5 minimum temperature of 8.9C recorded in 1913.”
No UHI changes to see here folks move along.
You are probably right.
When I appealed the ban it was pointed out to me that my comment also constituted sexual harassment because it could be construed as a mockery of some of the very concerned and climate scared ladies in the commentary.
Ice age in the northern hemisphere started about 2.6 million years ago likely because of the formation of Panama isthmus. That piece of land is quite narrow and some parts are experiencing distension. I wonder if anyone geophysicists have calculated with the current plate velocities what Central America would look like in near future (1-10 million years form now)
I took one meteorology class in college. It was 1970. The topic of climate was touched on briefly. The consensus was then that Earth was cooling and we should be worried.
We’re doomed.
Ever since 2000 I’m afraid-
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
Chin up stiff upper lip and all that and keep calm for the sake of the children.
The 1970’s global cooling is all about the highest solar wind speed/pressure of the space age driving a much colder AMO and multi-year La Nina, amplified by changes in low cloud cover and lower troposphere water which the colder ocean phases drive.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/association-between-sunspot-cycles-amo-ulric-lyons/
The imminent threat ahead is a pair of super centennial solar minima from 2095 and 2200 AD, very similar to the pair from 1360 and 1250 BC which collapsed most civilisations at the time.