By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Watch this historical record of predictions for global cooling in the 1970s and compare it with the apocalyptic predictions of warming today. The Emperor has no clothes. We are in the Pleistocene Ice Age.
The 1970s Cooling Scare Was Real https://t.co/AIzdnenEVr via @YouTube pic.twitter.com/bSxnPsg9rh— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) December 22, 2021
I lived through this and know it was real. Remember, the alarmist back then wanted to use giant airplanes to dump coal dust on the poles and Greenland to melt the ice faster.
I was there too. It was real media hype that sold copy. Today is more advanced, technologically speaking, but the BS is there, just the same. Same motivations. Same as it ever was.
Same people as well, except those who died.
Yes, some of those alarmists were onboard the Human-caused Global Cooling train, and then when the temperatures started warming up in the 1980’s, they pivoted 180 degrees, and got on the Human-caused Global Warming train.
And now it’s starting to cool again. It may be time for another pivot.
Ah, yes, but you forget the interconnecting acid-rain train, that met with the chlorofluorocarbon train, to buy a ticket for the global-warming train. Which broke down before it ever left the station … due to a lack of coal.
The pivot has already happened, have you not noticed that “global warming” has become “climate change” ?
Alarmist Climate Science is full of ambiguous descriptions.
Science is supposed to be as precise as possible. Ambiguous descriptions don’t fit this bill.
Ambiguous descriptions fit the climate change propagada bill.
I was at the university at that time. It was the mainstream “ecological” subject.
And it was being heard in middle school. Repeating the experience I told about in my May 2011 guest post at CEI’s blog,
If I remember right, it wasn’t led by the teacher, but was instead just a spontaneous topic among us kids in our science class.
The narrative is heat now, instead of cold, but the cure is the same: give our money to the Left, and do as they say. Only this time they’ve added pronouns.
Excellent!
I lived through this too. The alarmists were also talking about setting off nukes on the poles to melt them.
Alarmists are the tools of the new world order folks that look to control every aspect of human life. Anything to ramp up fear to gain more control be it weather or a virus.
1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
I knew it was real because Spock told me so…
Now I know it is real because Di Caprio told me so.
(Whenever he is not jetting around the world or on a yacht of a royal arab billonaire (oh human,female and gay rights)
he is superbusy saving the climate.
I as well. The main difference was that we were not quite so conditioned to gullibility and still questioned authority.
I would say it took me about a year, after I started seeing the Human-caused Global Cooling claims in the literature, to realize they didn’t have any evidence for these claims, just unsubstantiated assumptions and assertions.
I was willing to give the alarmists the benefit of the doubt, and I kept waiting and waiting, but they never produced anything close to definitive evidence of what they claimed, and it frustrated me to no end.
What really was frustrating to me was them using speculation as established fact. And publications like Scientific American were putting this BS (Bad Science) out. I wish the internet had been available back then. I would have blistered someone’s ears/eyes.
And now we have the exact same situation with Human-caused Global Warming. It’s promoters have never produced one shred of evidence backing up their claims. Yet the world carries on as if they have.
Delusional.
A few comments above you state that cooling is starting to happen, without a shred of evidence apart, I guess, from a few years of data post an El Nino event. If you have some strong evidence, I want to see it. Otherwise , you’ll have to wait to see if your speculation is correct.
Here’s the front page of the UAH satellite website.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
This is evidence of cooling.
Yes, we will have to wait a little longer to better see the trend.
Fair point, so we can agree that the evidence is not there either way. The only thing we can count on is change. Everything else is a carnival side show.
I remember it.
James Delingpole also dealt with the Global
Cooling denial paper.
Today the Emperor’s tailors have no gold, sorry, have no green, sorry, are utterly bankrupt and ruthlessly, relentlessly pursue NetZero for a $100 TRILLION bail-out.
Net-Zero a Ruthless, Relentless Focus for GFANZ: Mark Carney , UN Climate Finance czar, at COP26 :
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-01/net-zero-a-ruthless-relentless-focus-for-gfanz-carney-video
The difference is in the 1970’s the transatlantic was prosperous – today after decades of globalization, de-industrialization, just look at deficits, and FED money pumping, and now inflation, not just in energy prices.
This a completely different Money-cene from the Pleistocene, sorry, 1970’s.
More like Ob-cene!
I’m surprised that Stephen Schneider, whom I knew, would use the degree symbol with Kelvin.
Abolished in 1968.
Somehow, he hadn’t gotten the message yet.
Some people reflexively still use “Centigrade.” Old habits die hard.
Why would he use Kelvin which is obscure to the layman instead of the identically sized Celsius?
To sound more sciency. But then he blew by using the degree sign.
I keep getting conflicting “advice” on this issue, maybe someone here can point me (and everyone else …) to the “definitive” answer ?
1) Absolute temperatures : Use “Kelvin” or “degrees Celsius / Fahrenheit”
0°C = 32°F = 273.13K
2) Differences in temperature : Use “degrees K” or “C / F degrees” (?!)
1C° = 1.8F° = 1°K
I don’t know a definitive answer to your question, but I think the best answer is probably to just make sure your prose is clear. E.g., if you mean “difference in temperature of…” say “difference in temperature of…”.
A nit: I think you meant:
0°C = 32°F = 273.15K
I lived through this, in Northern Minnesota, even walking to school one morning (3 blocks) when the radio reported the temperature was minus 53 degrees F. We all thought this was simply normal, and it ignored the scare stories. I even filled a glass jug with green chlorine gas and left it on the back porch to liquify (at around -40) but it was March by then, and never got that cold.
The CIA report on global cooling had the same dire predictions as they now make for global warming. One brings death the other more food.
I got this from Tony Heller’s site.
Grabbed wrong image.
This is better.
Here’s a 1974 CIA report:
http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf (or here)
This one appears to be a different scan of the same document:
https://sealevel.info/CIAclimateResearchIntellProbs_1974.pdf
I think that’s the report referred to in the 1976 news article. My guess is that it was prepared and dated in 1974, but not released until 1976.
(Or, was there another CIA climate report in 1976?)
Here’s an excerpt, from the Summary:
The grim climate to which we were thought to be returning was the Little Ice Age. “Boreal” means cold:
This was a different report, from the same time period:
https://sealevel.info/CIA1974_potentialtrends.pdf
Here’s an excerpt:
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences also published a long climate report, the following year:
https://sealevel.info/resources.html#nas1975
Here’s an excerpt:
Here’s another excerpt:
Here’s a paper that it referenced:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-3290-2_14
Here’s the abstract:
It is interesting and disturbing that some of the papers referenced in those reports seem to have simply disappeared, like this one:
Mitchell, J. M., Jr. (1974). The global cooling effect of increasing atmospheric aerosols, fact or fiction? Proc. IAMAP/WMO Symp. Phys. and Dyn. Climatol. (Leningrad, USSR, August 16-20, 1971), World Meteorological Organization, Geneva (in press).
Thanks Dave, great collection of summaries.
Alarmists try to pretend that the “Ice Age Cometh” concerns didn’t exist. But the facts show differently.
The 2030s cooling scare will be real too.
Don’t worry! There is Peace!
Immanuel: God is with us, in the same boat. He can direct the wind as He pleases….
Wishing you Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
https://breadonthewater.co.za/2021/12/15/christmas-and-the-coming-of-peace/
In the early 70s there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet.
Provide the evidence or you will be called a liar.
Judging by his/her past actions, (s)he doesn’t care if others see him/her for what (s)he is.
“Predictions are tricky. Especially about the future”
Maybe all these climate conjecture ‘scientists’ should abide by Yogi Berra’s sage observation.
the video addressed that claim- so that proves you didn’t watch it
Griff is clueless about the Scientific Method.
Even if your assertion was true (it isn’t), when was a scientific hypothesis ever confirmed by the number of people who subscribed to it?
The October 1972 Science article about the conference was:
“The Present Interglacial, How and When will it End
That says much about the mentality of those who harp on consensus or claim “The science is settled.”
isn’t interesting then that it was the doomsday predictions that got all the publicity ?
No there wasn’t
Name them
That is demonstrably a falsehood. The Letter to President Nixon of 3 December 1972 about the dangers of the oncoming glaciation was sent on behalf of 42 scientists. So please give us a few names of the at least 252 climate scientists who said otherwise.
Deserved
It is so easy to trust your unsubstantiated pronouncements, griffy.
You’re lying as usual. Almost no one was discussing warming.
By Angus McFarlane,
“There was an overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was heading into a period of significant cooling. The possibility of anthropogenic warming was relegated to a minority of the papers in the peer-reviewed literature“.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/19/the-1970s-global-cooling-consensus-was-not-a-myth/
Says who? Oreskes?…
Liar liar pants on fire.
And Cook found 50% more climate scientists say humans are not responsible for even 10% of warming rather than humans being the primary cause of warming. Anderegg’s data shows the same for disagreement with the IPCC’s basic claims compared to support.
Ready to agree that both were just fear mongering?
Nutter is calling!
In 1970 he wasn’t even born, but claims to know everything about everything.
Griff
You are shameless. Lol. You don’t know. Were there surveys of climate scientists done then. One of the reasons I got interested in AGW was because of dopey claims like yours. People going on and on about things they had no clue about. Did you live through that period like a lot of us? Your grandma probably had to tell you about the 1970s. Did she tell you how cool plaid bell bottoms were?
When you get some concrete evidence produce it. Put up or shut up.
Dude, if you would have bothered to watch the Video you would have realised that this fake claim was debunked and that the number of ice age scientists was much higher than the number of warmunists.
gRIFF, you are confused.
It is 4 out of 5 (or 4 times as many).
It is ‘Trident’ that is preferred … not warming.
And it is Dentists, not scientists.
… keep your advertising campaigns straight.
The Marxists don’t do history. When it gets in their way they rewrite it. Harder to do these days with the internet so now they censure it by omission.
These retrospective peeks at a phenomenon that was short-lived and a mile wide and an inch deep make me sad. There is simply NO comparison to what is happening today. The retreat of Christianity here in the US, I believe, is responsible for the rise of the Messianic Environmentalist. And what is happening now, the end of coal, manufacturing, natural gas hookups, actually phasing out the internal combustion engine and gasoline simply didn’t have a counterpart in the 70’s. PS My conspiracy theory mind goes into overdrive when biofuels were introduced that would make gas “environmentally friendly”…but also give gas a “shelf life”, precluding long term storage.
It sounds 50/50 to me.
Not even close. There was a greater than 80% ‘consensus’ that global cooling would kill us all.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/19/the-1970s-global-cooling-consensus-was-not-a-myth/
Rory, in the 1970s there was a clear majority opinion that the world was cooling, and that that the cooling trend was a large potential problem. But I don’t recall anyone back then being nuts enough to say that climate change (cooling) would “kill us all.”
They weren’t as crazy as the XR and Guy McPherson crackpots we have now.
I actually read all the scientific literature at the time, and those promoting CO2 Global Warming, were few and far between in the 1970’s.
As the 1980’s started to roll around and warming began, the Global Warming promoters took over the headlines.
That was my experience as well. I remember being considerably taken aback when almost miraculously the “science” began its 180 degree about face. My BS meter became increasingly triggered by each new ‘revelation’. That’s also when the gaslighting began … mildly at first, but with increased venom as the politics became more entrenched. By the ’90s I knew we were being lied to.
climate apocalypse was entertaining fluff back then before the internet and multi 24/7 news channels , during the hey day of the cold war , watergate , stagflation , the gas crisis ; things that actually mattered to people . follow the money : it all goes back to maurice strong and his access to cash , especially rockefeller money in the 70’s . maurice strong , fossil fuel purveyor and self styled destroyer of western capitalism . the originator of the IPCC . canadian farm boy , self made oilogarch , highly acclaimed eco humanitarian , UN leader who ended up exiled in beijing after being caught taking million dollar bribes in UN programs .
I do not remember any of these articles, but I do have a personal experience from that time.
I came to Timmins Ontario in the middle of September 1976 to work for a year in the mining industry. The snow came the last day of September and did not leave till the middle of May 1977 and it was cold. I remember nights of -60C and changing tire with bare hands where my fingers almost froze on the lognuts.
Just a personal anecdote to validate that it was indeed cold in the mid 70’s.
Mr. 76: Thanks for that. My own experience included living in NE Ohio before ’77-’78, SE Ohio after; and four years in Milwaukee. Those were the worst winters in all three regions for many, many years, before and after. The coming ice age was in the news, and even back then the news knew which “experts” to interview. When those same experts later flipped to AGW the news folks never noticed the contrast. I learned a great deal from watching enviros and the press perform duets for the last 5-6 decades.
50 years from now, as the usual suspects will be pushing the latest scare all the while denying that they ever proclaimed warming to be a problem.
And of course, what ever the problem, the solution will be a one world socialist government.
I remember it very well. Got down to 5⁰ for two or three days. The cooling triggered a very hot summer. Just like warming triggers snow in the winter.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears, did it make a sound? 0r, if you get to write the history, were you really a BS artist?
The winters in the 70’s were awful on the Saskatchewan prairies
4 day blizzards, 20’ snow drifts, I had a paper route and I would freeze my butt off, used my toboggan to drag those papers all over town.
We’d have weeks of -30c or colder and when we’d get a little chinook from Alberta and the temp came above freezing for a day we’d all run around without coats celebrating like it’s some sort liberation.
I have my mom’s photo albums, year after year of massive snow drifts that we could tunnel in to standing up, all ended in the winter of 81-82 thankfully.
And based on the mindset and verbiage of the climate Scientologists this is what they want to somehow force us back to, not possible but it shows the level of insanity present in all these people.
It was an awful time.
Griff, do you have any real idea of what you are wishing for?
“The Weather Machine” was made into a two-hour PBS documentary in 1975 – and it’s one of the better, level-headed summaries of what the state of thought was back then.
It can be found here:
https://archive.org/details/theweathermachinepart1
https://archive.org/details/theweathermachinepart2
To just get and download the whole thing as four MP4 video files, use these links:
https://archive.org/download/theweathermachinepart1/theweathermachinepart1reel1.mp4
https://archive.org/download/theweathermachinepart1/theweathermachinepart1reel2.mp4
https://archive.org/download/theweathermachinepart2/theweathermachinepart2reel1.mp4
https://archive.org/download/theweathermachinepart2/theweathermachinepart2reel2.mp4
(If or when it starts playing, just right-click and you should be able to save the MP4 file.)
If you’d like a good watch over the holiday, this provides it.
My family is Christian because the book late great planet earth came out back then and said that Jesus was going to freeze the earth or unless you excepted him.
Hmm, shoulda done more research it seems to me.
“… and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
Jesus is apparently not into the catasrophic climate change thing . . anymore ; )
I am so ancient and clearly recall attribution to smog/aerosols from burning fossil fuels, hence the subsequent bans on domestic coal burning and generation with fuel oil. And lo the trend reversed, warming came about. Attribution? Again, burning fossil fuels, now producing CO2 etc. Always the fossil fuels! Apparently started by the nuclear industry, of which James Hanson was a supporter. Now it’s driven by world socialism and desire to control our mobility and life-styles. Increasingly appears however that it is all part of long term ocean current phases, as hinted at by climate-gate icons Phil & Mick. All will be revealed like the quarks, as the trillion funded
research plays out.
Not only has the cooling scare gone down the memory hole, the cooling itself has been sent there also.
The cooling was certainly real. Their attribution to aerosols seem to have been based primarily on assumptions though. There appear to be periodic, quasi-cyclical warming and cooling periods which have nothing to do with man. Not least because human activity can contribute to both warming and cooling. It is therefore laughable nonsense to try to say that man can affect climate to any great degree. That certainly doesn’t stop the charlatans though, from doing just that.
If I may, as to “a periodic cyclic warming and cooling”, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was discovered by a biologist from Univ. of Wasington in about 1997, when he was studying salmon returns to their home rivers in BC and Alaska and Washington state. He found that there are two regimes to the warmthh of the northren pacific waters. Each regime lasted for about 20 to 30 years, with few years in the middle. This toggling mechanism coincided with the 1970 centered cool period and the warming out of that was to be centered around 1990-2000. He found that when the northern Pacific was warm, the central USA was cool (and salmon counts were high), and when the northern pacific was cool the central USA was warm (and salmon counts were low). The SE USA was in phase with the warm or cool northern Pacific.
Climate cooling… warming… change is undeniable, unfalsifiable… perpetual crisis for-profit. However, [catastrophic] [athropogenic] carbon dioxide forcing is not so much.
The blacktop effect mitigated cooling. The Greenhouse effect is forcing greening. The temperature evolves in space and time with an impulsive orientation (e.g. recurring blocking events that force statistical anomalies).
Late ’70s, the CBC National, then hosted by Peter Mansbridge, ran a roughly 10 minute documentary during its evening news hour about what seemed to be the return of the ice age, narrated by Adrian Clarkson…I know this because I watched it.
Shortened growing seasons, global crop failures, increasingly severe winters, etc., the end of the world as we know it is nigh.
Good luck trying to find this in the CBC archives! I can’t find it…but maybe someone here is better at such searches than I???
That should read “Adrienne Clarkson”.
“Everybody complains about the weather nobody does anything about it.”
It’s still true that nobody CAN do anything about the weather.
But some have learned to profit from it by pretending they can.
Earth is colder when the solar wind is stronger, as in the early to mid 1970’s, because ENSO and the AMO change inversely to changes in the solar wind strength. The AMO was much colder, and there were multi-year La Nina conditions, but the UK and Europe were toasting, so was California. That’s all driven by a positive NAO/AO regime.
Attribution to a cooling effect from industrial aerosols is highly questionable, as low altitude aerosols exacerbate land heatwaves considerably. As with the hot UK summer of 1783 with fumes and dust from the Laki eruption, heavy industrial air pollution with the record high UK max temperatures in Easter 2011 and through 22-27 Feb 2019, the Moscow 2010 summer heatwave with forest fire smoke in the air, and in Syracuse Sicily in August 2021 with fire smoke.
Solar plasma temperature, density, and pressure:
I loved those winters.
I know it was real from its imprint on popular culture. There are a few cartoons and some sci-fi short stories that I saw and read in the 1980s that prominently featured pollution causing global cooling, and either leading to an ice age or or a world covered in soot and smog.
Since I was only 4 in 1980, I don’t remember the height of the scare, but those artifacts left an impression on me as a child.
One thing I remember was that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was at the enter of that, and the very same Woods Hole was a leader when the flipped to alarmism about warming. A second center of that was East Anglia, and they, too flippedd when flipping was a bigger bandwagon, but early on. Cooling didn’t make for grant money, as I have underrstood it over the years. But warming sure did.
Like others here, I remember the period from the winter of 1976-77 all the way through the winter of 1984-85 was freaking HORRIBLE cold, and not a little bit of blizzard-like weather. That last winter, between Rockford and Chiaggo in my town the temp got down to -34F. I NEVER want to do that again. I had lived at the same latitude for most of the previous decade, and had not run into anything like that period. I simply could not figure out why Chicago was so darned frigid – shortly after I got there. I’d never heard of it being THAT cold.
It was just as cold in the decade of the 1910’s as it was in the decade of the 1970’s, according to the unmodified, U.S. surface temperature chart.
The temperaures cooled from the 1880’s to the 1910’s, then warmed to the 1930’s, then cooled again to the 1970’s, then warmed again to 1998, then flatlined (discounting El Nino’s) to 2016/2020, and have cooled 0.6C since that time.
The cooling from 1940 to 1980 was equivalent to about 2.0C of cooling (according to the US chart). So the 0.6C of present cooling means we are about 1.4C away from the temperatures of the 1970’s.
Here’s the U.S. surface temperature chart (Hansen 1999), shown next to a bogus Hockey Stick chart. Note the differnce in cooling from 1940 to 1980, on both charts. The Hockey Stick chart downplays the amount of cooling that took place during this period.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research//briefs/1999_hansen_07/
Hi Tom
It’s more insidious than that.
The left graph is the USA, right graph is the world.
The USA has the best continuous records but doesn’t show the right info. Since modified which you can see if you go on the GISS website and graph the same 5 year mean 1880-2000
The world graph is made up of data points that are primarily cities, the only place they kept even partial records in most of the world.
And so of course that World graph is pretty much entirely UHI corruption
I was taught this shiite in high school and that the world would run out of oil energy , made me think its the the end of the world , no point in having children etc . How times have changed but not peoples thinking .
Ironically, much of what was said about the dangers of cooling (now falsely being attributed to “climate change”) was true. Cooling is in fact, far more dangerous, although we can certainly adapt, and have far more of the capability to adapt now. Good thing, because cooling might be coming, if not already here. How much cooling no one can predict, but another LIA type of cooling is certainly possible. We should be planning for that by doing the complete opposite of what the Climate Caterwaulers want us to.
Calling is not possible it is inevitable
A new glaciation period is also inevitable
They just jumped the gun by looking at the previous 30 years and then extrapolating forever.
Now where else have I read something similar
Three different thoughts come to mind.
1) In 1973 I was in third grade. I remember the teacher telling us that a new ice age was coming. She wasn’t alarmed and she didn’t blather on about it, she just mentioned it as an apparently established fact. I specifically remember this because I was fascinated at the idea even at that young age. I imagined big cities in constant winter conditions and wondered how we would all deal with it.
2) While in college, one of my geology professors told the class that if a process takes less than ten thousand years to occur, geologists refer to it as “instantaneous.” Current and near-term conditions matter to human beings, but arguing about trends that occur over years or decades or even centuries is pointless.
3) The trap that too many people seem to fall into is, “If this trend continues….” That was the main reason for the global cooling scare, and that’s the main reason for the global warming scare. The trend never continues! It’s a “trend!” Trends go up, trends go down, trends fluctuate. Much peace and sanity would ensue if people realized the nature of trends.
Alarmists think trends go on forever.
I remember it very clearly- and all the experts who so damn sure about it. Makes all this politicized “science” clear for the junk it is. It’s incredibly frustrating that they just keep on lying and lying and lying.
Fear served hot or cold.