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Global Cooling Alarmism in the 70s

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Those who doubt global warming alarmism sometimes point to the global cooling alarmism of the 70s.  The idea is that alarmists will latch onto whatever happens to be at hand to clang their bell, cooling then, warming in the 90s; explaining away the plateau now.

Mark Frank has made the risible assertion that  “the global cooling thing was a non-event” in the 70s.  StephenB has offered Mark a service by setting him straight:*

1970 – Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age – Scientists See Ice Age In the Future (The Washington Post, January 11, 1970)

1970 – Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself? (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970)
1970 – New Ice Age May Descend On Man (Sumter Daily Item, January 26, 1970)
1970 – Pollution Prospect A Chilling One (Owosso Argus-Press, January 26, 1970)
1970 – Pollution’s 2-way ‘Freeze’ On Society (Middlesboro Daily News, January 28, 1970)
1970 – Cold Facts About Pollution (The Southeast Missourian, January 29, 1970)
1970 – Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports (St. Petersburg Times, March 4, 1970)
1970 – Pollution Called Ice Age Threat (St. Petersburg Times, June 26, 1970)
1970 – Dirt Will .Bring New Ice Age (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1970)
1971 – Ice Age Refugee Dies Underground (The Montreal Gazette, Febuary 17, 1971)
1971 – U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971)
1971 – Ice Age Around the Corner (Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1971)
1971 – New Ice Age Coming – It’s Already Getting Colder (L.A. Times, October 24, 1971)
1971 – Another Ice Age? Pollution Blocking Sunlight (The Day, November 1, 1971)
1971 – Air Pollution Could Bring An Ice Age (Harlan Daily Enterprise, November 4, 1971)
1972 – Air pollution may cause ice age (Free-Lance Star, February 3, 1972)
1972 – Scientist Says New ice Age Coming (The Ledger, February 13, 1972)
1972 – Scientist predicts new ice age (Free-Lance Star, September 11, 1972)
1972 – British expert on Climate Change says Says New Ice Age Creeping Over Northern Hemisphere (Lewiston Evening Journal, September 11, 1972)
1972 – Climate Seen Cooling For Return Of Ice Age (Portsmouth Times, ?September 11, 1972?)
1972 – New Ice Age Slipping Over North (Press-Courier, September 11, 1972)
1972 – Ice Age Begins A New Assault In North (The Age, September 12, 1972)
1972 – Weather To Get Colder (Montreal Gazette, ?September 12, 1972?)
1972 – British climate expert predicts new Ice Age (The Christian Science Monitor, September 23, 1972)
1972 – Scientist Sees Chilling Signs of New Ice Age (L.A. Times, September 24, 1972)
1972 – Science: Another Ice Age? (Time Magazine, November 13, 1972)
1973 – The Ice Age Cometh (The Saturday Review, March 24, 1973)
1973 – Weather-watchers think another ice age may be on the way (The Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 1973)
1974 – New evidence indicates ice age here (Eugene Register-Guard, May 29, 1974)
1974 – Another Ice Age? (Time Magazine, June 24, 1974)
1974 – 2 Scientists Think ‘Little’ Ice Age Near (The Hartford Courant, August 11, 1974)
1974 – Ice Age, worse food crisis seen (The Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1974)
1974 – Believes Pollution Could Bring On Ice Age (Ludington Daily News, December 4, 1974)
1974 – Pollution Could Spur Ice Age, Nasa Says (Beaver Country Times, ?December 4, 1974?)
1974 – Air Pollution May Trigger Ice Age, Scientists Feel (The Telegraph, ?December 5, 1974?)
1974 – More Air Pollution Could Trigger Ice Age Disaster (Daily Sentinel – ?December 5, 1974?)
1974 – Scientists Fear Smog Could Cause Ice Age (Milwaukee Journal, December 5, 1974)
1975 – Climate Changes Called Ominous (The New York Times, January 19, 1975)
1975 – Climate Change: Chilling Possibilities (Science News, March 1, 1975)
1975 – B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon? (The Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1975)
1975 – Cooling Trends Arouse Fear That New Ice Age Coming (Eugene Register-Guard, ?March 2, 1975?)
1975 – Is Another Ice Age Due? Arctic Ice Expands In Last Decade (Youngstown Vindicator – ?March 2, 1975?)
1975 – Is Earth Headed For Another Ice Age? (Reading Eagle, March 2, 1975)
1975 – New Ice Age Dawning? Significant Shift In Climate Seen (Times Daily, ?March 2, 1975?)
1975 – There’s Troublesome Weather Ahead (Tri City Herald, ?March 2, 1975?)
1975 – Is Earth Doomed To Live Through Another Ice Age? (The Robesonian, ?March 3, 1975?)
1975 – The Ice Age cometh: the system that controls our climate (The Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1975)
1975 – The Cooling World (Newsweek, April 28, 1975)
1975 – Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead (PDF) (The New York Times, May 21, 1975)
1975 – In the Grip of a New Ice Age? (International Wildlife, July-August, 1975)
1975 – Oil Spill Could Cause New Ice Age (Milwaukee Journal, December 11, 1975)
1976 – The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? [Book] (Lowell Ponte, 1976)
1977 – Blizzard – What Happens if it Doesn’t Stop? [Book] (George Stone, 1977)
1977 – The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age [Book] (The Impact Team, 1977)
1976 – Worrisome CIA Report; Even U.S. Farms May be Hit by Cooling Trend (U.S. News & World Report, May 31, 1976)
1977 – The Big Freeze (Time Magazine, January 31, 1977)
1977 – We Will Freeze in the Dark (Capital Cities Communications Documentary, Host: Nancy Dickerson, April 12, 1977)
1978 – The New Ice Age [Book] (Henry Gilfond, 1978)
1978 – Little Ice Age: Severe winters and cool summers ahead (Calgary Herald, January 10, 1978)
1978 – Winters Will Get Colder, ‘we’re Entering Little Ice Age’ (Ellensburg Daily Record, January 10, 1978)
1978 – Geologist Says Winters Getting Colder (Middlesboro Daily News, January 16, 1978)
1978 – It’s Going To Get Colder (Boca Raton News, ?January 17, 1978?)
1978 – Believe new ice age is coming (The Bryan Times, March 31, 1978)
1978 – The Coming Ice Age (In Search Of TV Show, Season 2, Episode 23, Host: Leonard Nimoy, May 1978)
1978 – An Ice Age Is Coming Weather Expert Fears (Milwaukee Sentinel, November 17, 1978)
1979 – A Choice of Catastrophes – The Disasters That Threaten Our World [Book] (Isaac Asimov, 1979)
1979 – Get Ready to Freeze (Spokane Daily Chronicle, October 12, 1979)
1979 – New ice age almost upon us? (The Christian Science Monitor, November 14,

Mark Frank

<blockquote> I was very much around and aware in the 70s and can verify that the global cooling thing was a non-event.</blockquote>

Perhaps you were in a frozen chamber. I was also around at that time, and I can verify that it was quite the event. Every major climate organization endorsed the ice age scare, including NCAR, CRU, NAS, NASA, and CIA.

 

*From http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html

 

Comments
SB #278
As of now, I have read every one that you managed to acquire. They all say what the title says they will say, without exception.
I was actually referring to the papers you indicated in #265 – none of which I have acquired yet.
(That includes #7, which describes warming as something that leads to or triggers cooling [that's a long way from saying that it is "about warming and cooling"]) Don’t read into the article what you want to be there. Read out of the article what the author meant to convey.
I apologise – I only noticed the second column of the article. The article certainly majors on cooling. It is less certain what Barrett (the scientist the article was reporting on) was actually saying.
The only reason to track down an article is to get the details, which can be important in some contexts. However, there is no reason to track down an article in order to establish its theme. The title does that. I am amazed that you, skram, and piotr would try to claim that the information contained in an article would undermine the meaning conveyed in the heading. It’s a losing argument. Every time
I am sorry but this is naive. The titles of press articles (which these are mostly) are notorious for not representing the content. They are designed to sell the newspaper (in the days when people bought newspapers) and so they sensationalise and occasionally fabricate. The content is unlikely to totally undermine the headline, as you put it, in the sense of saying it is not true – but it often completely changes the significance. One example is number 8) in the list which has a headline Pollution Called Ice Age Threat which loses all its significance when you find out it was a friendly meteorologist giving an entertainment to a local club and talking mostly about hurricanes. Another is a bit further on: Another Ice Age? Pollution Blocking Sunlight but is actually a list of unrelated would you believe it “facts” of which this is just one. (This is as far as I have got looking at the list). I would also include the NYT article we have been debating which is actually about uncertainty in climatology. But consider the bigger picture. In my very first comment on this thread I accepted that there was some reporting of alarms about cooling. My main concern has been to show the lack of rigour in the evidence produced in the light of the various insults thrown at alarmists.  It seems that a lot of the sceptical arguments are just recycled quotes from Watts Up or similar with no attempt to assess them critically – otherwise how come #10 got in to the list? The real question is does this throw any doubt on the current concern about global warming. Is it all comparable?  To do that you have to look at the underlying scientific support. This is pretty much addressed by Jerad’s #4 and the paper Skram links to in #272. Yes you can probably dig up a number of papers describing the potential cooling effect of pollution but that simply reflects the state of the science at the time. As the NAS report emphasises – scientists didn’t know which of the many possible forcings were the most important and they hypothesised the cooling effect of pollution, the warming effect of greenhouse gases and the many non-anthropogenic factors. Since then things have moved forward and the effect of anthropogenic GHG while still uncertain has been identified as being the most significant in the short term (next 50 years say).Mark Frank
January 29, 2015
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StephenB: Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age. This is the kind of thing that the journalists used. They're called countervailing influences. Aerosols cool the climate, greenhouse gases warm the climate. The scientific question in the last half of the 20th century was which would predominate. It became clear to scientists that greenhouse gases would predominate over the long run, and would even delay the cooling associated with the Earth's orbital cycle. Meanwhile, the developed nations reduced their emissions of aerosols through pollution controls.Zachriel
January 29, 2015
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Let's have a look at another article listed in the opening post, Climate Changes Called Ominous: Scientists Warn Predictions Must Be Made Precise to Avoid Catastrophe. It was printed in the NYTimes on January 19, 1975. Here are some excerpts.
Changes in the earth's climate are inevitable and mankind must learn to predict these variations to avoid potential catastrophe, a group of prominent scientists concluded after a two-year study.
This is a reference to the 1975 NAS report that has already been discussed here.
The scientists cited recent trends as well as evidence from history and the span of geologic time to suggest that changes in the climate are already taking place and that conceivably, major changes could occur soon.
Ice age scare?
The most drastic change considered in the new report is an abrupt end to the present interglacial period of relative warmth that governed the planet's climate for the past 10,000 years. Recent studies have produced strong evidence that such warm periods tend to last 8,000 to 12,000 years and that they tend to end abruptly.
Scary, no? Well, let's see how certain the scientists are about the coming ice age.
"There seem little doubt that the present period of unusual warmth will eventually give way to a time of colder climate, but there is no consensus with regard to either the magnitude or rapidity of the transition," the panel said. "The onset of this climatic decline could be several thousand years into the future," it said, "although there is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the earth within the next hundred years."
Seems a pretty well balanced report. Not an "ice age scare," as Barry put it in the OP.
Scientists note that there have been major periodic ups and downs in the present interglacial epoch. The best known of these is a long cold spell, often called The Little Ice Age, that is well documented in the European history. It spanned roughly from 1430 to 1850. No one knows whether the present trend in temperature presages a similar cold period, but specialists tend to be more concerned about this kind of possibility than the presumably far lesser risk of an abruptly starting new ice age.
skram
January 29, 2015
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SB: Many scientists, not all, were predicting an imminent ice age. skram
And again, you provide no evidence to back up your assertion.
Unbelievable! Here are some examples I provided @265:
[a] Scientist Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, among many others, warned of a coming ice age. Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age. This is the kind of thing that the journalists used. [b] Professor Stephen Schneider: Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a present Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies In 1971, Schneider co-authored a paper warning of a man-made “ice age.” From Wikipedia….”it is projected that man’s potential to pollute will increase 6 to 8-fold in the next 50 years. If this increased rate of injection… should raise the present background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °C. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age. However, by that time, nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production. This is the kind of thing that Times and Newsweek pick up on. They don’t just make things up. He later flip flopped to global warming [c] Rasool S., & Schneider S.”Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols – Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate”, Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141 – Excerpt: ‘The rate of temperature decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 deg. K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” Schneider was still promoting the coming “ice age” in 1978. [d] Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, From Wikipedia: Bryson’s main contribution to the debate on climate change was the idea of “the human volcano” causing global cooling, via an increase in aerosol loading.[3] This idea was sparked in 1962 by his own observation, while flying across India en route to a conference, that his view of the ground was blocked not by clouds but by dust. At the time, the instrumental temperature record did not show unambiguous warming and the view that the earth might be cooling, and heading for further cooling, was not unreasonable. Others, including Hubert Lamb, who created a Dust Veil Index, thought volcanoes were more responsible for global-scale aerosol. (Sound familiar? It should.)He later flip flopped to global warming. Then, of course, there were numerous books written on global cooling as well. Clearly, it was not a mere jounalistic phenomenon.
I could provide more evidence, but what would be the point. You would ignore it as well.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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Mark, I apologize. I did not understand your intent when you took it upon yourself to scrutinize each and every article and comment on it. So long as you now admit your error when you denied the existence of global cooling alarmism in the 70's we are in agreement on that topic. To your point about whether the alarmism over cooling in the 70s was ever as nutbag coo coo as the alarmism over warming now, who ever said it was? Certainly not I.Barry Arrington
January 29, 2015
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#290 BA
he OP states there was global cooling alarm in the 70s. That has been demonstrated. Your and Mark Frank’s refusal to admit the obvious is both sad and sadly predictable.
Barry - what have I not admitted? The very first sentence I wrote on this thread was:
OK. I was wrong to phrase it as a non-event.I will restate it as “not-comparable to global warming”.
Of course there was some concern over global cooling. The important question is how does it compare to the present concern over global warming? The answer is no comparison at all. But the main reason for pursuing this thread was in reaction to your accusation on the previous thread that you guys are “sober-minded champions of dispassionate science” while alarmists are “benighted opponents of scientific endeavour”. I wanted to point out that you are not so very rigorous as you might think. StephenB already admitted (all credit to him) a couple of errors - and there appear to be several very dubious examples of global cooling - especially the one about the lady who had been hiding underground from an ice age since the 1940s.Mark Frank
January 29, 2015
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Barry Arrington:
You seem to be missing the point. The OP is not about “imminent doom.”
And multiple references to ice age in your post don't signify doom? Come on, Barry, it was you who wrote the words "the ice age scare."skram
January 29, 2015
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I have so far checked one article in the NYTimes, and it does not point to imminent doom.
You seem to be missing the point. The OP is not about "imminent doom." The OP states there was global cooling alarm in the 70s. That has been demonstrated. Your and Mark Frank's refusal to admit the obvious is both sad and sadly predictable. What is a religiously committed warming alarmist to do when presented with a forest of evidence that scientists were concerned about global cooling a mere 40 years ago? Why, start picking at this or that tree and then after picking at enough trees deny the existence of the forest. Pathetic. I guess they would prefer to deny the glaringly obvious than re-examine their dogmas. But they shouldn't be surprised when no one takes them seriously.Barry Arrington
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
This is how we analyze trends. We don’t engage in silly speculations about whether or not the titles reflect the article’s theme. Of course they do.
I have so far checked one article in the NYTimes, and it does not point to imminent doom. So there. I will read some more when I have a chance, but I am not holding my breath.skram
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
Many scientists, not all, were predicting an imminent ice age.
And again, you provide no evidence to back up your assertion. Worse, we already know that this is simply untrue. If you read the Bull. Am. Meteor. Soc. article linked in this comment (as I said, required reading!) you will come across this passage:
One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. “Collectively,” the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey “tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling” (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978).
They did not stop there.
However, given that an opinion survey does not capture the full state of the science of the time, we conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society’s electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR). To capture the relevant topics, we used global temperature, global warming, and global cooling, as well as a variety of other less directly relevant search terms.
Curious about their findings? Read the damn paper!skram
January 29, 2015
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skram
Let me remind you, too, that your side insists that the scientists and the press in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age.
Many scientists, not all, were predicting an imminent ice age.
Barry’s opening post contains the words “ice age scare.” If you don’t think the articles whose titles Barry listed did NOT argue about an imminent threat of an ice age, please say so. I’ve been saying exactly that.
Barry was posing my list. The articles posted say exactly what they said they would say. Accordingly, they vary in intensity and urgency, which is evident in the titles, but they do not, as a rule, misrepresent ideas and opinions of the scientists that they cite. Let’s first take a few that hint at a scare while holding back on a formal prediction:
1970 – Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself? (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970) 1970 – New Ice Age May Descend On Man (Sumter Daily Item, January 26, 1970 – Pollution Prospect A Chilling One (Owosso Argus-Press, January 26, 1970)
Notice the qualifiers in the form of questions and “may be” formulations. Now consider those in this next group. They make an unabashed claim about what will happen.
1970 – Dirt Will .Bring New Ice Age (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1970) 1971 – U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971). 1971 – Ice Age Around the Corner (Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1971) 1971 – New Ice Age Coming – It’s Already Getting Colder (L.A. Times, October 24, 1971)
Is the difference not clear? To say that X “will happen” or “X is coming” is a different kind of message from the first group. Did you notice that the questions and wondering and qualifiers have ceased and the predictions and claims are being made full force? The warnings are there, but they are not laden with high charged, emotional language. Now, observe how the intensity is scaled upward:
1974 – Ice Age, worse food crisis seen (The Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1974) 1974 – More Air Pollution Could Trigger Ice Age Disaster (Daily Sentinel – ?December 5, 1974?) 1975 – Climate Changes Called Ominous (The New York Times, January 19, 1975) 1975 – Climate Change: Chilling Possibilities (Science News, March 1975 – Cooling Trends Arouse Fear That New Ice Age Coming (Eugene Register-Guard, ?March 2, 1975?)
Now the warnings are emotional and intense--"crisis," "disaster," "ominous," "fear." This is how we analyze trends. We don’t engage in silly speculations about whether or not the titles reflect the article’s theme. Of course they do. That is why they are there, to tell the reader what he is going to get. That is what editors do. Now, if you do a quick study of the 66 articles listed, you will notice that most of them leave little doubt about what is to be expected. And yes, they are following scientists. They are not making things up.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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StephenB: The article’s title does not say that a new ice age is “imminent.” It says that a cooling trend may be on the way. SUN USING UP ITS ENERGY: scientists say! Is Earth doomed?!?Zachriel
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
Are you cuckoo? The title is a “quote.” Shall I tell you again what is says since you seem to need repetition. It says “Cooling trend may be on the way.” Nothing about an imminent threat. What is it about that quote that you do not understand?
Let me remind you, too, that your side insists that the scientists and the press in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age. Barry's opening post contains the words "ice age scare." If you don't think the articles whose titles Barry listed did NOT argue about an imminent threat of an ice age, please say so. I've been saying exactly that.skram
January 29, 2015
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skram
We have provided direct quotes indicating that the NYTimes article does not argue that an ice age is imminent.
You are confused. We are discussing the title and the fact that it accurately says what the article will say. The article's title does not say that a new ice age is "imminent." It says that a cooling trend may be on the way.
We have also provided direct quotes from the NAS report, on which the article was partly based, also establishing that the scientific consensus did not predict an imminent ice age.
So what? I never said that it did say that. You are making that up. Also, your claim that the NYTimes article was based, in part, on the NAS report is not accurate. The only reference to the NAS in that article was about the relationship between climate change and food production. It does not call on the NAS report in any way to make its case for global cooling. That comes from other sources. Seriously, you folks need to start reading what is there and stop injecting your wishes and hopes into the text. I have refuted you at every step. Live with it Also, I am waiting for you to apologize for attributing to me the words "complete certainty." So far, you have not admitted your error.
Of course, in a situation like that you can’t provide direct quotes in your favor. You can just bluff, and that’s what you do.
Are you cuckoo? The title is a "quote." Shall I tell you again what is says since you seem to need repetition. It says "Cooling trend may be on the way." Nothing about an imminent threat. What is it about that quote that you do not understand?StephenB
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
I don’t need a direct quote to know that the title of an article describes what it is about to say.
If you want to make a case before your opponent that the article indeed describes that then you need direct quotes. We have provided direct quotes indicating that the NYTimes article does not argue that an ice age is imminent. We have also provided direct quotes from the NAS report, on which the article was partly based, also establishing that the scientific consensus did not predict an imminent ice age. Of course, in a situation like that you can't provide direct quotes in your favor. You can just bluff, and that's what you do.skram
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
Andre, I continue to be amazed at the extent to which some people allow their ideology to guide every aspect of their thinking.
That is, indeed, amazing. This thread is a great illustration. You haven't read the articles beyond their titles and substitute your ideology-driven vision of the situation for facts.skram
January 29, 2015
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skram
And again, no direct quotes to support a bare assertion. Well done, StephenB!
I don't need a direct quote to know that the title of an article describes what it is about to say. The problem is that you either do not understand or refuse to accept this obvious fact. That you can find no exceptions to that common sense rule should give you pause.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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Andre
These people don’t give one iota of what truth means and you know why I say that? I’ve noticed over the years that they love asking to be allowed to get on with being good, without ever fully investigating what good really means. This is because they have this anti-human conception that we can’t really know. They tend to forget that one of the things that distinguishes us from the other animals is the fact that we want to know things simply for the sake of knowing.
Andre, I continue to be amazed at the extent to which some people allow their ideology to guide every aspect of their thinking.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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And again, no direct quotes to support a bare assertion. Well done, StephenB!skram
January 29, 2015
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Mark Frank
How many of those papers have you read?
As of now, I have read every one that you managed to acquire. They all say what the title says they will say, without exception. (That includes #7, which describes warming as something that leads to or triggers cooling [that's a long way from saying that it is "about warming and cooling"]) Don't read into the article what you want to be there. Read out of the article what the author meant to convey. The only reason to track down an article is to get the details, which can be important in some contexts. However, there is no reason to track down an article in order to establish its theme. The title does that. I am amazed that you, skram, and piotr would try to claim that the information contained in an article would undermine the meaning conveyed in the heading. It's a losing argument. Every time.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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wd400
I would have though that the previous post made it pretty clear I was done wasting my time on this.
I think what you mean to say is that you would prefer not to discuss your error and would now like to move on. I will, therefore, issue my challenge once more: Please defend your claim that the “majority” of the articles I presented describe a tentative hypotheses. You have obsessed over my alleged undocumented claims. Let's find out if you can take your own medicine. How about a retraction of your undocumented claim and an admission of error. Are you honest and credible or are you not?StephenB
January 29, 2015
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StephenB:
I asked you to make your case, and you sent me to a summary. If you wanted me to follow Mark Frank’s link, which I will do now, you should have told me.
In my reply to your make-your-case challenge I quoted from the NAS report. Here is that passage again:
There seems little doubt that the present period of unusual warmth will eventually give way to a time of colder climate, but there is no consensus with regard to either the magnitude or rapidity of the transition. The onset of this climatic decline could be several thousand years in the future, although there is a finite probability that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the earth within the next hundred years.
It does make my case (that an authoritative report from the Academy of Sciences, on which that article was based, also contradicts your assertions). You have not responded to this in any meaningful way. You have not even read the summary of the NAS report. I expect more from a specialist in communications.skram
January 29, 2015
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Feel free, however, to delve into the report itself. (I am not holding my breath.)
I asked you to make your case, and you sent me to a summary. If you wanted me to follow Mark Frank's link, which I will do now, you should have told me. Meanwhile, you are silent on the numerous scientific sources I listed who were all in for global cooling and who influenced the journalists that wrote articles during that era. You are also silent and the scientific sources that Andre provided. What happened to piotr's (and your) theme that global cooling was a journalistic phenomenon.StephenB
January 29, 2015
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Andre, I have read Matt Walsh's article with great interest. Eventually I came to this point:
Just going back through the past few decades, according to left wing environmentalists we should all be dead from an Ice Age, and after that it was a nuclear winter, and after that it was overpopulation.
That's the rub, isn't it? We are trying to determine in this thread how real was the notion of the global ice age scare in the 1970s. So far it doesn't seem to check out. Now that I've read Matt Walsh's valuable opinion piece, will you reciprocate and read the article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society? I would appreciate that. P.S. What do you make of Mr. Walsh's statement that "some of these theories, like overpopulation and the Ice Age, have been thoroughly debunked and disproved?" If I understand things correctly, ice ages were real and we still expect that another ice age will eventually come.skram
January 29, 2015
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SKRAM Perhaps have a read on why we are sceptical? http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/climate-change-deniers-are-completely-insane/Andre
January 29, 2015
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This article, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2008, is required reading for participants of this thread. It is available for free in PDF. Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, 2008: The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 89, 1325–1337 (2008). doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 To get straight to the chase,
Even cursory review of the news media coverage of the issue reveals that, just as there was no consensus at the time among scientists, so was there also no consensus among journalists. For example, these are titles from two New York Times articles: “Scientists ask why world climate is changing; major cooling may be ahead” (Sullivan 1975a) and “Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due” (Sullivan 1975b). Equally juxtaposed were The Cooling (Ponte 1976), which was published the year after Hothouse Earth (Wilcox 1975).
skram
January 29, 2015
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Polar Vortex of 1974 caused by global cooling http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html Polar Vortex of 2013 caused by global warming http://science.time.com/2014/01/06/climate-change-driving-cold-weather/ You can have your cake and eat it!Andre
January 28, 2015
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MF You need to define what you mean by sceptics here? Climate change sceptics? Man made climate change sceptic or do you mean something else?Andre
January 28, 2015
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SB #265 How many of those papers have you read? You have a track record on this thread of quoting sources which you have not read. In case you haven't been following I have been working my way through the "global cooling" links in the OP. I can only conclude that sceptics are not in the habit of reading them. Here is the summary for the first 10 (which is as far as I got). Some I couldn’t see because they were behind a pay well. 1.) 1970 - Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age - Scientists See Ice Age In the Future4 (The Washington Post, January 11, 1970) Pay wall. 2.) 1970 - Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?5 (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970) Pay wall 3.) 1970 - New Ice Age May Descend On Man6 (Sumter Daily Item, January 26, 1970) p4 of 8. Story about how pollution may at some stage bring on ice age. Mainly concerned with the bizarre suggestions of a Dr Anold Reitze of the legal consequences of such an event. 4.) 1970 - Pollution Prospect A Chilling One1 (Owosso Argus-Press, January 26, 1970) p4 of 20. Identical words to 3) 5.) 1970 - Pollution’s 2-way ‘Freeze’ On Society7 (Middlesboro Daily News, January 28, 1970) p5 of 6. Identical words to 3) 6.) 1970 - Cold Facts About Pollution8 (The Southeast Missourian, January 29, 1970) p4 of 10. Identical words to 3) 7.) 1970 - Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports9 (St. Petersburg Times, March 4, 1970) Very brief article on p 16 mentions both cooling and warming possibilities 8.) 1970 - Pollution Called Ice Age Threat10 (St. Petersburg Times, June 26, 1970) Very brief article on p32 about a TV weatherman’s talk to a local club. Describes how pollution will cause change over hundreds and thousands of years – mostly about what to do if there is a hurricane. 9.) 1970 - Dirt Will .Bring New Ice Age11 (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1970) Very small article on p2. No detail. 10.) 1971 - Ice Age Refugee Dies Underground12 (The Montreal Gazette, Febuary 17, 1971) Laughably irrelevant. It is about a woman who want underground in the 1940s for fear of an ice age.   Notice that 3,4,5 and 6 are all the identical words and occurred in the later pages of small local newspapers. I suspect some kind of syndication.Mark Frank
January 28, 2015
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SB #265 How many of those papers have you read? You have a track record on this thread of quoting sources which you have not read. In case you haven't been following I have been working my way through the "global cooling" links in the OP. I can only conclude that have you not read them. Here is the summary for the first 10 (which is as far as I got). Some I couldn’t see because they were behind a pay well. 1.) 1970 - Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age - Scientists See Ice Age In the Future4 (The Washington Post, January 11, 1970) Pay wall. 2.) 1970 - Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?5 (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970) Pay wall 3.) 1970 - New Ice Age May Descend On Man6 (Sumter Daily Item, January 26, 1970) p4 of 8. Story about how pollution may at some stage bring on ice age. Mainly concerned with the bizarre suggestions of a Dr Anold Reitze of the legal consequences of such an event. 4.) 1970 - Pollution Prospect A Chilling One1 (Owosso Argus-Press, January 26, 1970) p4 of 20. Identical words to 3) 5.) 1970 - Pollution’s 2-way ‘Freeze’ On Society7 (Middlesboro Daily News, January 28, 1970) p5 of 6. Identical words to 3) 6.) 1970 - Cold Facts About Pollution8 (The Southeast Missourian, January 29, 1970) p4 of 10. Identical words to 3) 7.) 1970 - Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports9 (St. Petersburg Times, March 4, 1970) Very brief article on p 16 mentions both cooling and warming possibilities 8.) 1970 - Pollution Called Ice Age Threat10 (St. Petersburg Times, June 26, 1970) Very brief article on p32 about a TV weatherman’s talk to a local club. Describes how pollution will cause change over hundreds and thousands of years – mostly about what to do if there is a hurricane. 9.) 1970 - Dirt Will .Bring New Ice Age11 (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1970) Very small article on p2. No detail. 10.) 1971 - Ice Age Refugee Dies Underground12 (The Montreal Gazette, Febuary 17, 1971) Laughably irrelevant. It is about a woman who want underground in the 1940s for fear of an ice age.   Notice that 3,4,5 and 6 are all the identical words and occurred in the later pages of small local newspapers. I suspect some kind of syndication. Mark Frank
January 28, 2015
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