Global Cooling Alarmism in the 70s

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

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

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

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

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

#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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again, no direct quotes to support a bare assertion. Well done, StephenB! skram

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

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

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

skram

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

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

SKRAM Perhaps have a read on why we are sceptical? http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/climate-change-deniers-are-completely-insane/ Andre

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

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

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

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

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

StephenB I feel for you, you see to people like WD400, SKRAM, Alan Fox, and Aurelio, the truth of a matter is as comparable as the importance of ketchup or not? 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. Anything that challenges their belief system that the truth can not be known is vehemently defended even if it means that reason and logic has to be discarded. We see this over and over and over again, that brings me to the following conclusion, and I am 100% certain of this claim; Atheists are overly emotional pansies, that don't want to know what truth is! In closing I will quote CS Lewis; "We need not inquire whether God will punish him for his cowardice and laziness; they will punish themselves. The man is shirking. He is deliberately trying not to know whether Christianity is true or false, because he foresees endless trouble if it should turn out to be true. He is like the man who deliberately 'forgets' to look at the notice board because, if he did, he might find his name down for some unpleasant duty. He is like the man who won't look at his bank account because he's afraid of what he might find there. He is like the man who won't go to the doctor when he first feels a mysterious pain, because he is afraid of what the doctor may tell him. The man who remains an unbeliever for such reasons is not in a state of honest error. He is in a state of dishonest error, and that dishonesty will spread through all his thoughts and actions: a certain shiftiness, a vague worry in the background, a blunting of his whole mental edge, will result.." Andre

StephenB:

Interesting. After complaining endlessly about my second hand sources, you and piotr depend on a “reviewer” to tell you what the NAS report said. I notice that no one has downloaded the report itself.

In case you didn't notice, Mark Frank posted a link to the NAS report itself as well as to its summary. He mentioned that the report is long, but nonetheless he provided a link. Anyone who is interested can access it (I did). You, on the other hand, couldn't even be bothered to read a two-page article. A summary for you would be more than you can handle. Feel free, however, to delve into the report itself. (I am not holding my breath.) skram

skram, Interesting. After complaining endlessly about my second hand sources, you and piotr depend on a "reviewer" to tell you what the NAS report said. I notice that no one has downloaded the report itself. Here is a hint: All the reports of that vintage are the same. They send a message, then they hedge their bets to cover their anatomy, then they revert back to the original message and say, nevertheless, “action must be taken.” Naturally, it is the last message that resonates. That’s what the press picks up on. Of course, your reviewer left that part out, didn't he? It is important to read the entire report and not just rely on what the reviewer tells you it said. You are doing exactly the same thing that you falsely accuse me of doing. Physician heal thyself. However, many scientists (not journalists) of that period didn’t beat around the bush. They argued for global cooling without protecting themselves with the qualifiers. Here are some examples: [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. StephenB

StephenB:

Make your case.

wd400 has already linked to a summary of the NAS report. If you go there you will find this tidbit:

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.

Do you ever read anything beyond the title, StephenB? skram

skram

An authoritative report from the Academy of Sciences, on which that article was based, also contradicts your assertions.

Make your case. StephenB

skram

You’ve presented a hundred titles. Digging into a random article from your list turned up evidence that things weren’t exactly as you presented them.

I have already refuted your claim. However, I don't think your attempt to save wd400 will succeed. He made a ridiculous claim. Let's find out how honest he is? StephenB

StephenB:

I presented almost 100 articles on global cooling. Defend your claim that the “majority” of them describe a tentative hypotheses.

You've presented a hundred titles. Digging into a random article from your list turned up evidence that things weren't exactly as you presented them. The NYTimes article ended up summarizing the situation as “we don’t know enough to be sure if the climate is changing, or indeed what direction it will change in.” An authoritative report from the Academy of Sciences, on which that article was based, also contradicts your assertions. The onus is now on you to present some real evidence. skram

I would have though that the previous post made it pretty clear I was done wasting my time on this. I'll leave you with one more opportunity to youdate your views on this

If a final act of desperation, you offer an article written in late 1979 as evidence of a non-cooling argument, at the very time when the cooling craze had given way to the warming craze.

The only report I've referred to is the one described, which is from 1975, the middle of what you think was a "cooling craze". If you actually read the report you'll see in the middle of this "cooling craze" the scientific position amounted to "we don't know enough to be sure if the climate is changing, or indeed what direction it will change in". wd400

wd400

You’ve proved yourself almost utterly impervious to evidence in this thread (you get some credit for updating a couple of positions). Moreover, you’ve shown exactly how you treat evidence in an argument.

It is clear that you are the one who is turning himself into a pretzel. Every article that I alluded to has been shown to say exactly what the title says it will say. All you have been able to do is desperately claim that it doesn't reflect the convictions of the scientific community at the time, which is ridiculous, and when that doesn't work, you say that the article doesn't say what is says, which is even more ridiculous. If a final act of desperation, you offer an article written in late 1979 as evidence of a non-cooling argument, at the very time when the cooling craze had given way to the warming craze.

When those clippings are examined the majority of them describe tentative hypothesis and the many unknowns about climate science in 1970s.

I presented almost 100 articles on global cooling. Defend your claim that the "majority" of them describe a tentative hypotheses. StephenB

kairosfocus

Club of Rome, pollution per Carson’s Silent Spring, population bomb, and possible nuke war, were all there as dominant themes. In a lower key but also spread, were stories like the coming ice age. I recall how news about cold spells killing off orange crops in Florida were played even out in the Caribbean .

Yes, and let us not forget that the same theme was pushed in the early part of the 20th Century, followed by its opposite theme in 1930's, followed by another flip flop in the 1970's, followed by yet another flip flop in the 1990's GLOBAL COOLING: 1890s-1930s The Times, February 24, 1895 “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again” Fears of a “second glacial period” brought on by increases in northern glaciers and the severity of Scandinavia’s climate. New York Times, October 7, 1912 “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923 “The possibility of another Ice Age already having started … is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.” Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1923 “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” Time Magazine, September 10, 1923 “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.” New York Times, September 18, 1924 “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age” GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1960s New York Times, March 27, 1933 “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise” Time Magazine, January 2, 1939 “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right…. weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” Time Magazine, 1951 Noted that permafrost in Russia was receding northward at 100 yards per year. New York Times, 1952 Reported global warming studies citing the “trump card” as melting glaciers. All the great ice sheets stated to be in retreat. U.S. News and World Report, January 18, 1954 “[W]inters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing.” GLOBAL COOLING: 1970s Time Magazine, June 24, 1974 “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1974 “Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect” Reported that “glaciers have begun to advance”; “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter”; and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool”. Science News, March 1, 1975 “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the ‘very extraordinary period of warmth’ that preceded it.” Newsweek, April 28, 1975 “The Cooling World” “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.” International Wildlife, July-August, 1975 “But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetime.” New York Times, May 21, 1975 “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” GLOBAL WARMING: 1990s-? Earth in the Balance, Al Gore, 1992 “About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level due to global warming, in the next few decades.” Time Magazine, April 19, 2001 “[S]cientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” New York Times, December 27, 2005 “Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming” The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 2006 “Billions will die, says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not usually a gloomy type. Human civilization will be reduced to a ‘broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords,’ and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot where a few breeding couples will survive.” StephenB

Stephen, You've proved yourself almost utterly impervious to evidence in this thread (you get some credit for updating a couple of positions). Moreover, you've shown exactly how you treat evidence in an argument. This thread starts with you lifting a quote from a skeptical blog and attributing it to your own memory (as described in 25 and pointed out to you many times), then you have these rediculous claims about "billions" being marked to die in 1895 (even a moments thought should have made the veracity of that one obvious). When the evidence that scientists were talking about warming much more than cooling in the 1970s was presented you googled up some new links about press clippings. When those clippings are examined the majority of them describe tentative hypothesis and the many unknowns about climate science in 1970s. You've clearly made not effort to understand the articles, because attributing some of them as evidence to your claim is utterly ridiculous. Like the articles about cranks building themselves shelters or scientists talking about the ~10K year glacial-interglacial cycle. I would like to think there are genuine skeptics, who are wither capable of looking at the same evidence and reaching a differenct conclusion, or indeed updating their views when they find new evidence. Butf you really think it's fair to compare these sorts of clippings to the combined weight of science supporting mainstream climate science today, then I'm afraid you don't fit that description. So when I say you are laughable I'm not trying to undercut your "arguments" by attacking your character ("ad hominem"), I'm saying you are so detached form the evidence all that I can do it laugh. wd400

MF: Let's recall the headline and lead to this post:

Global Cooling Alarmism in the 70s January 24, 2015 Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design 251 Comments 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 . . .

Conclusion:

Mark Frank

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

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.

Sufficient has been provided to show that there was endorsement by dominant factions of influential bodies. But an alarm does not happen unless there is a media diffusion. And you picked up on one of the signature impacts of such spreading in the newspaper and dominant broadcast media house age. MF, you, BA and I were all around at the time. Club of Rome, pollution per Carson's Silent Spring, population bomb, and possible nuke war, were all there as dominant themes. In a lower key but also spread, were stories like the coming ice age. I recall how news about cold spells killing off orange crops in Florida were played even out in the Caribbean . . . I suppose that was a sign of a good tourist season coming up. And, weekly newsmags had much more influence then than now . . . Cf again 34 above. KF PS: WD, WUWT is in fact the most viewed blog on climate issues and has some very serious commentary. Watts is of course a meteorologist. Tim Ball, who I clipped above, is someone who has a serious point. Let me clip just one point from his article:

As a climatologist, trying to put all the pieces in the puzzle, I have always known it was necessary to consult with specialists. For example, when using statistics, I relied on Alex Basilevsky, whose biography lists climate studies. He was especially interested in Markov probabilities. This failure to consult specialists was identified by the Wegman Report as a serious failure of the paleeoclimate group associated with the “hockey stick” fiasco. In a devastating finding they wrote, It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. The challenge, when dealing with specialists, is to know enough to ask the right questions and understand the answers. This worked well in many cases, but often created more problems, because I received different answers from people in the same specialization. The last sentence by Wegman seems to imply that they didn’t consult because they knew their work would not withstand scrutiny. That proved to be the case, when Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitirck looked at what was going on. However, there is another issue of differences between specialists . . .

kairosfocus

wd400

It’s kind of laughable to compare the state of the science in 1975 (and the confidence with which positions were held) with today. But laughable is what Stephen and Barry have become.

If that is the case, then why can't you refute the argument or respond intelligently to the evidence. An adhominem attack is not a refutation. It is an act of desperation. StephenB

What are you on about Andre? [Oh, I get it, Evolutionary biology is "1859" science. That's pretty dumb.] wd400

skram

A strong word diluted by “hints” and “may have” makes weak tea. The article is full of references to how uncertain the situation is.

You are confusing a theme with its qualifiers. Do you know what a theme is? Do you know what a qualifier is? The article's theme is about the inevitability of global cooling and its causes. Most of the article is about the possible causes. It is not about doubts or uncertainty--those are qualifiers. That is why the title doesn't say, "Doubts about global cooling disclosed." StephenB

Well there you have it. 1975 science is suspect compared to today. 1859 science however is gospel truth right WD400? You are a joke. Andre

#249 KF

That widespread diffusion and echoing in print as lesser papers carry the conventional wisdom is exactly one of the effects one is looking for, the dissemination of a dominant line of talking points. As in, message dominance

KF. I thought we were looking at whether the science was flip-flopping between one story and another. We all know that press stories can "take off" for no obvious reason. The point is that all those stories (and quite possibly some of the national one's - they are behind a pay wall) reflect just one science story - in fact if you read the story seems to be about something a Dr Arnold Reitze, who is an "expert in the legal aspects", said. Mark Frank

F/N: Soime reading that “should” not exist: http://wattsupwiththat.com/201.....y-problem/ A stimulus for thought on a problematique. KF PS: WD I suspect the substance is clear enough for purpose.

This is a joke... right? wd400

MF, Do you recall that especially in the US at the time several major sources dominated news and views coverage, which then diffused far and wide in print, on radio, on local TV stations? For instance consider NYT, Wa Po and a few wire services, and people like Walter Cronkite? That widespread diffusion and echoing in print as lesser papers carry the conventional wisdom is exactly one of the effects one is looking for, the dissemination of a dominant line of talking points. As in, message dominance. KF kairosfocus

F/N: Soime reading that "should" not exist: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/26/ipcc-climate-science-as-a-gestalt-theory-problem/ A stimulus for thought on a problematique. KF PS: WD I suspect the substance is clear enough for purpose. kairosfocus

Also worth a laugh is 1970 - Pollution Called Ice Age Threat. This earth shattering article of about 100 words about a TV weatherman's talk to a local club makes it to page 32 of the St. Petersburg Times (not that it features very noticeably on that page). Apparently this chap said that pollution will cause change over hundreds and thousands of years – but its mostly about what to do if there is a hurricane. Also worth noting that 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) Are all identical words appearing on middle pages of small local newspapers. I didn't get beyond 1970 but so far I don't think who created the list looked beyond the headlines. Mark Frank

KF, I'm pretty sure the lack of response to your posts relates more to how hard they are to parse than their (apparent) content. If you have something meaningful to say, then by all means do so, but if you want a reply then take some time to formulate your ideas in plain English. wd400

Pretty clear summary of that 1975 report here. [EDIT: whoops -that's the same link as Mark shared] It's kind of laughable to compare the state of the science in 1975 (and the confidence with which positions were held) with today. But laughable is what Stephen and Barry have become. wd400

I am beginning to get into this now. In case you are wondering if any of the sceptics read these articles (unless forced to) take a glance at: 1971 – Ice Age Refugee Dies Underground (The Montreal Gazette, Febuary 17, 1971) Remember this is the list of articles illustrating the "global cooling alarm" on one of the primary sceptic web sites. Mark Frank

StephenB:

Unlike some, it is not a heavily propagandized piece. I am sure that is why you chose it.

Good. We have a concession. Followed by motive mongering. No, StephenB, I did not choose to quote this article because it was even-handed. It was the very first article I checked from your list. I subscribe to the Times, so it was easy for me to get this one. I did not check any other articles from that list.

“Hints that it may have already begun are evident.” Evident is a very strong word.

A strong word diluted by "hints" and "may have" makes weak tea. The article is full of references to how uncertain the situation is. Shall I quote from the end again? Those passages have a hard time penetrating your skull.

The Academy of Sciences report notes that any assessment is crippled by a lack of knowledge: “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

skram

In case it is of interest I have found the text of the NAS report on which the article is based  and also this commentary (I tested the links this time). The report is too long to read right now so I just searched on the word “cooling”.  It is only mentioned 5 times in the main text. None of them give any hint of a prediction of imminent future cooling. Mark Frank

scram

The inevitable cooling is a reference to the Milankovitch cycles, which happen on the time scale of tens of thousands years. Yes, eventually the climate expected to return to an ice age, but that is in the long term.

Yes, but they are strongly suggesting (not insisting) that the cooling has already begun "Hints that it may have already begun are evident.” Evident is a very strong word.

And if you care to read the description of the three mechanisms discussed in the paper, one of them—adding man-made CO2 to the atmosphere—leads to warming, not cooling. Did you miss the scenario of the polar caps going away entirely? I quoted it above.

Yes, according to one scientist, human consumption could, in principle, head off the cooling process. Articles of this kind always provide space for those who don't fully agree with what is being said. Unlike some, it is not a heavily propagandized piece. I am sure that is why you chose it. Nevertheless, the piece is about global cooling and its causes. StephenB

StephenB, Global cooling is indeed inevitable. The Milankovitch cycles are real. But that inevitability has a time scale of tens of thousands years. The real question that occupied the people in the 1970s was different: is the cooling about to happen? And on that score, there was no certainty. That's what the article said. skram

skram,

Where is the complete certainty that an ice age is imminent? Nowhere. You are making it up.

???????? Who said anything about complete certainty? No scientific report or commentary would ever use those two words, and neither did I. You just made that up.

The Academy of Sciences report notes that any assessment is crippled by a lack of knowledge: “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

It's the typical disclaimer---a confession that they don't know everything they could know. Don't you ever read reports like this? It doesn't change their argument: global cooling is considered by many to be inevitable. Let's speculate about the causes by analyzing past ice ages. It certainly in not an argument for global warming. You need to get a grip. StephenB

Piotr..... All men are created equal and because of that I care for my fellow man, not because I'm scared of anything....... You must be joking what does empathy have to do with the nature of things? The Earth does not care about you why should you care about it? Andre

Nice try, StephenB. You have managed to eek out the whole three sentences out of context! Let's begin with the first sentence. The qualifier "sooner or later" should be a hint. The inevitable cooling is a reference to the Milankovitch cycles, which happen on the time scale of tens of thousands years. Yes, eventually the climate expected to return to an ice age, but that is in the long term. The article refers explicitly to long time scales: "A major problem in seeking to assess the trend is to distinguish year-to-year fluctuations from those spread over decades, centuries, and thousands of years." And if you care to read the description of the three mechanisms discussed in the paper, one of them—adding man-made CO2 to the atmosphere—leads to warming, not cooling. Did you miss the scenario of the polar caps going away entirely? I quoted it above. And what do you make of this passage at the end of the article?

The Academy of Sciences report notes that any assessment is crippled by a lack of knowledge: "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

Ice age mongering? Hardly. The article concludes:

In his preface Dr. Suomi notes that, by the end of this decade, space vehicles will be available on a global scale to observe the sun's output, energy reflected from the earth, distributions of clouds, snow and ice, as well as ocean temperatures. With these and other inputs a better understanding of how and why the climate is changing should become possible.

Where is the complete certainty that an ice age is imminent? Nowhere. You are making it up. skram

Piotr

May I re-post a link to the Charney Report (1979)?

Feel free to submit a report that doesn't emphasize cooling written after the cooling craze had ended. StephenB

skram

Onlookers, are you waiting with bated breath for StephenB to back up his assertions? Will he provide direct quotes proving that the 1975 NYTimes article declared global cooling inevitable? Well, don’t. For he can’t. Go ahead and read the paper while it’s available on the internet.

I am beginning to think that I am dealing with a cult. The entire article is about global cooling and three of its causes. Here are three quotes that come early, setting up the theme. For those who don't read much, a theme is a short description of what an article is about: “Sooner or later a major cooling of the climate is considered inevitable. Hints that it may have already begun are evident.” “The drop in mean temperatures since 1950 in the northern hemisphere have been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain’s growing season for crops for two weeks.” “That the climate in the Northern Hemisphere has been cooler since 1950 is well established if you ignore the last two winters.” I don't know what it is about that theme that skram cannot understand. The remainder of the article speculates about the causes of past "Ice ages.". Why do you suppose they are discussing ice ages and its causes? Because they want to know the causes of the cooling phase they are writing about. Do I really have to cite all the quotes about ice ages as well. Do I have to explain the meaning of every paragraph. It's a long article. Remedial education in this context is simply too burdensome. Please onlookers. Read the article and explain to skram what it says. So far, my attempts to break it down have not helped him. StephenB

Andre,

Seriously? Who gives a crap about us dying out? You? For whatever reason? Please justify your caring attitude in the absence of any god. Why can’t you do as you please?

Since you are now in ad hominem mode, I'll ask you a personal question too. Are you the kind of guy who doesn't go about harming others only because he is afraid of a supernatural being who might punish him for antisocial behaviour? If so, I'm sorry for you. If not, let's leave gods out of it. For your information. I generally care for fellow human beings, and have a well-developed sense of empathy and cooperation. It's a common inclination in a highly social species, such as Homo sapiens. It's innate and visceral, not philosophical (though of course reinforced by conscious reflection and all the socialisation I have undergone). Piotr

Mark Frank, Thanks for confirming my theme. All your reports were late 1970's, which was the time for the next flip flop. You could find nothing about global warming between 1970 and 1977. Andre

What a coincidence! Global cooling shifted to global warming right after this report!

They catch on quick, don't they Andre? Well, not really. StephenB

Piotr

Quite the opposite. We are realists, and we know there’s no invisible friend to save our backsides if we get into serious trouble by recklessly doing “as we please”.

Seriously? Who gives a crap about us dying out? You? For whatever reason? Please justify your caring attitude in the absence of any god. Why can't you do as you please? You are a realist? The same person that by faith believes that mud not only magically made itself but also conspired to come alive is a realist? You're funny Piotr...... Andre

AS but rapid environmental change (sea temperature and pH, for instance) means organisms die rather than cope./ Whatever happened to power of Natural Selection? Lame Duck? Andre

If you look at a global temperature record graph https://betternature.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/hadley.jpg you can see how they could have been concerned. That was in a period of relatively static temperatures like the one we are in now. How will we break out of the current pause? Increasing or decreasing global temperature. I think it will be increasing. aarceng

AS, points of agreement and difference, but substantial engagement -- which is important to recognise and work with. Pebble Bed technology, LIFTR and other Thorium possibilities etc as well as fusion should be explored. The point on the feedbacks is, we collectively don't have a good handle on them hence debates on clouds etc. I am uncomfortable with coarseness, with structure of projections vs observations etc. Too much of the framing of discussion at media and popular levels does not adequately reckon with such. KF kairosfocus

P, I suggest that instead of the rhetoric of dismissal, you would be well advised to assess worldview options from the ground up. And, kindly explain to me how something like this is a case of irresponsibly hoping for invisible friends to turn up. KF PS: This, by a colleague (whom for cause I often call "Deacon" . . . ) should also give pause. The two policies were developed in co-operation at about the same time. kairosfocus

AS, you have substituted an ad hominem for a substantial engagement. Sadly, typical on your evolving track record. I note to you, that environmental issues and linked policy challenges are cases of broadly interacting problematiques that make issues across several domains highly relevant -- e.g. the biophysical, socio-cultural and economic-policy. Which, is what I engaged at 34, in the context of a major socio-cultural and policy issue, media influence and problems of manipulation. As last weekend is now lost in the stream of discussion, I clip 34:

WD et al, What I pointed to at 1 seems to be happening. The clear evidence is that there WAS a widely publicised perception of global cooling and a call for major actions to address it in the ’60?s and ’70?s; appearing in leading publications of widespread influence. [U/D: BartM in 28, thanks: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/66785/#comment-543874 ] Influence that was much higher than now because of concentration of media power. Which, corresponds with my recall of the times; indeed, speculation on oncoming ice ages was even in the comics and on various TV shows as a given or almost as a given. But, there was no big global this is problem no 1 push. That was reserved for population and pollution bomb stories and/or nuke war fears; then, nuke winter fears early in the ’80?s along with panics over that madman right-wing cowboy fundy ignoramus in the White House, Reagan. [--> FYI, I speak as a witness, that was what was the big push shaping the thought of the generally educated classes far and wide.] At points in the 80?s HIV-AIDS came up for serious mention and projections that simply have not panned out. With 7 bn here, the pop bomb/ Club of Rome etc projections did not come to pass either. [--> I speak of a major thinktank of those days and its early heavy calibre computer models that deeply influenced policy thought. I remember Jerry Pournelle in BYTE threatening to rake them over the coals on their modelling if their claims were brought up again seriously] Sometime between the 80?s and ’90?s the crisis of the day that demands response shifted to global warming; much of the energy on it coming once the cold war was off the table. [--> Again, I speak as a witness] As in, Reagan’s determination to stand did much to win the cold war (The trend in the later ’70?s was much the other way . . . ), in cooperation with a few other key figures. And, the cold war didn’t just peter out, it was won. [--> a reply to a lot of revisionism, in light of cases of much wider patterns of media pushes] After that, climate became the big push. Then, since ’98, it seems the trend line has been on average flat; with hints of slightly down. For years that was sidelined or pooh poohed, but it looks solid now. And as fair comment, there is no solid understanding of why. [--> a key, under-discussed issue that brings the whole under question] And from the late 00?s we have had whistle blowing, which probably has had more impact than is acknowledged. [--> again, a media pattern. The impact on COPs since 2009 is palpable but suspiciously under-reported] There have been recent rewrites on the ’70?s that now try to suggest the publicised view was unrepresentative of that of scientists. That does not change the fact of what was pushed at the time, even if it could be shown so. [--> again, a media push themed point] Likewise, the Medieval and Roman warm periods seem to have been occasionally dismissed. On the whole, the earth is in a warming trend since the last ice age with a fair amount of ice sheets still in evidence. As for causal analyses and heavy reliance on computer sims, the latter is not the same as empirical observation. I won’t say much on the very bad practices of too many stations and the gaps between actual values as measured and as calibrated to feed models. Just, I am not too comfortable with such. Then, there are many issues on proxies. A little humility about limitations would go a long way. And, a little less of speaking with disregard to duties of care to truth and prudence in light of uncertainties would help also.* There is a physical atmosphere warming effect, and it has water vapour (very variable component) as a big contributor with CO2 as a much smaller part, net effect ratio is what, 100:1 or so maybe, IIRC. The real issue is on feedback trends between components, circumstances and drivers, which are not well understood. I also have long taken note that the PATTERN of warming in the models does not fit well with the observed atmosphere structure patterns. A bit of a caution that we don’t understand as deeply as we — especially the somewhat educated, media and classroom conventional wisdom influenced public — too often imagine. In the ’70?s, in the ’90?s and now. [--> where my concerns on prude3nce in analysis come out] After 9/11 there was a hiatus as we went back to WW 0 since the 700?s, but there has been an attempt to backburner that. Looks like the Iranians and Israelis will have something to say about that within a few years. So, we don’t know enough about things more than we are willing to face, too often. And so, caution would help on a lot of topics. [--> again, a call to caution] Including, of course imagining we know ever so much about the unobserved deep past of origins and about the creative powers of forces and factors never shown on actual observation to create FSCO/I. (But then when things calm down a bit I have to get around to getting some folks to be willing to actually face the simple reality that it exists; not to mention its routine cause.) [--> back on UD's main themes, tied in on the issue of the priority of observation in science] There is enough evidence that there was a cooling perception in the ’70?s, which was definitely widely reported and taken for granted. Since then the big push has been warming and the argument we dunit. And remedies have been proposed that put a lot of concentrated power in hands we would be well advised to take second thoughts about. Likewise, on impacts on economies due to energy-economy links painfully evident from the ’70?s oil price hikes to the ’08/09 surge on. And, it’s the oil, stupid . . . [--> fair comment on a compressed survey of 40 years of media debates and underlying technical and epistemological concerns] I won’t say much on nuke power panics, save that I think we need to take a serious 2nd look. Including on Thorium and pebble bed reactors. These make reasonable sense from multiple angles. As does continued investigation into fusion. If algae oil or the like biofuel can be made to work, that too would have significant positive impact. (I don’t particularly like the geopolitics of oil.) From my angle, whoever it was said that measures taken to address climate concerns should be separately valid has a point. If we get energy right, a lot can be done and we can move towards Sol system colonisation. [--> my tech conclusions and suggestions] But, the point the there was a widespread perception of cooling in the 70?s and some familiar sounding remedies and power concentrations put forth as ways forward, is clearly valid. [--> conclusion] Let’s face it. KF * PS: A key definition of lying is to speak with disregard to truth, in hope that one will profit from what is said or suggested being taken as true. In cases where there is a significant uncertainty, the duty of truth and prudence is to acknowledge that uncertainty. Something, that has been all too often missing on too many topics.

I think it is fair comment to say that you failed to read reasonably and chose to pick up a handy ad hominem cudgel to justify not engaging serious concerns and considerations that are wide ranging precisely because we are dealing with a broad based phenomenon in a context of cross-cutting issues and problematiques. Just FYI, I professionally suggested a look at pebble bed nuke reactor technology -- especially the then prospective modular forms -- as one of the policy options to be taken seriously something like 15 years ago. I am of the view that if one is concerned on fossil fuels, one has a duty to look at serious options. Objecting and undercutting then refusing to bear responsibility for economic and livelihood damage is not a responsible option. KF kairosfocus

Andre,

There is no such thing as man-made global warming! Seriously as if some human or 7 billion of them can somehow be more powerful that what the sun can do!

Who said anything remotely resembling this? Jeez, Andre, it's the Sun that's warming the Earth. We are only helping it a little with the products of our civilisation. Carbon dioxide and methane act as greenhouse gases even in small concentrations -- so small that the human contribution has a non-negligible effect. The excess CO2 is man-made; there's no doubt about it. Its isotopic signature, for example, shows it comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

And that is the problem with atheists, somehow they believe in their minds that men are more powerful than anything else, therefor man can do as he pleases.

Quite the opposite. We are realists, and we know there's no invisible friend to save our backsides if we get into serious trouble by recklessly doing "as we please". Piotr

AS, I consider the climate change debate largely a distraction at UD save for how it illustrates the problems of scientism and linked media manipulation. If you want an outline on my views on climate issues, cf 34 and 36 above as I just linked and as your implied view that I have not outlined a specific view suggests you have not seriously responded to. A very good first point to reflect on is the comparison of CO2 and H2O vapour and debates on feedback links and implied lags, multiplied by implications of using moving averages and cycles, with inherent challenges faced by models. KF kairosfocus

KF

I find the non-response to 34 and 36 above ..... inadvertently illuminating.

I will not speak for others - but the reason people I do not respond to many of your comments is they are extremely hard to read. I happened to read 219 this morning but usually I skip them for that reason alone. Mark Frank

F/N: I find the non-response to 34 and 36 above [the latter on just what is climate and just what does the tendency of means to be pulled by extreme values imply, consequently . . . ], joined to the lack of substantial engagement in response to SB's exasperated clipping of a whole article at 141 that had been otherwise largely ignored, inadvertently illuminating. And BTW, dismissive assertions about an author do not answer to the substantial point. As in, have there or have there not been waves of media pushes on climate fears over the past 100+ years? I can vouch for the one in the '70's and the one from the '80's. As, for a wider cluster of headlined crises that have largely not come to pass. And, there is indeed a legitimate concern on media manipulation to energise support for agendas of concentrated power going to states and international bodies not warranted by the track record of their performance. KF PS: Timaeus at 114 is spot on on the issue of focus on the substance not the man. kairosfocus

Aurelio, There is no such thing as man-made global warming! Seriously as if some human or 7 billion of them can somehow be more powerful that what the sun can do! And that is the problem with atheists, somehow they believe in their minds that men are more powerful than anything else, therefor man can do as he pleases. You are nothing to that nuclear reactor in the sky! Andre

Aurelio

CO2 has risen from 280ppm to 400ppm (40%) in fifty years.

Erm you make it sound like there has been a 40% increase in CO2 when its actually just increased by 120 parts per million..... So? What's your point I've already shown articles that prove that the Oceans and forests are capable of soaking up much more CO2 than what we thought.... as a result plankton and plants are flourishing more than ever, why because CO2 is their fuel and oxygen is their waste! More CO2 more Oxygen! but beware at 24% oxygen we will spontaneously combust and since we are already on 21% we better raise the alarm and charge people tax for not using more oxygen! Andre

And nobody gives it any thought that the heating and cooling cycles that we have been documenting since the 12th century has anything to do with the Sun's solar activity.... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html#.VMimfnkcTIU Instead we create fear and panic and let the world know that those vermin called humans are to blame for all this! That Big nuclear reactor a 150 000 000 km's away surely has nothing to do with it! All the cause of these cursed humans! Well here goes do the research, all warming and cooling experienced in known recorded history has to do with solar activity.... Check for yourself! Andre

What a coincidence! Global cooling shifted to global warming right after this report! http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html The actual report is now mysteriously missing....... Your samples for global warming are all mid to late 70's but not really any before that. Bandwagon science brought to you by the media, and all we are saying is this, be cautious of the claims! Andre

I thought I would see how quickly I could generate a similar set of headlines for global warming alarmism in the 1970s This lot took me about 20 minutes (following the same principle as the global cooling alarmism I have not read the articles). I imagine I could create a much longer list given a day or two.

Double Atmospheric Trouble The Washington Post November 24, 1979, Saturday, Final Edi-tion Is the World Getting Warmer? Newsweek November 19, 1979, UNITED STATES EDITION The Greenhouse Effect The Washington Post August 4, 1979, Saturday, Final Edition Synthetic Fuels Danger To Climate, Scientists Say The Washington Post July 11, 1979, Wednesday, Final Edition Warming Now, Colder by 2979 A.D. The Washington Post January 8, 1979, Monday, Final Edition Some think it's warming up The Globe and Mail (Canada) February 18, 1978 Saturday Climate Experts See a Warming Trend 'Greenhouse effect' gets quick reaction Chemical Week August 3, 1977 100-Year Trend: Warmer; Confirming What You Feel: Our Summers Are Getting Warmer The Washington Post July 21, 1977, Wednesday, Final Edition Coal Use Seen Heating Up Earth The Washington Post June 1, 1977, Wednesday, Final Edition

I did this by searching on "global warming" in the text between 1970 and 1979 using NEXIS as described in 11 above. This gave 32 hits (the same search gave 1 hit for global cooling). I then eliminated all the items that did not have headlines or the headlines were clearly about something else. Mark Frank

Piotr I'm saying, there is deep rooted problem of fraud being committed for prestige and money, that is why there are so many retractions, prove me wrong.... Had those guys not started Retractionwatch you would not even known about it...... Andre

Andre, Are you here to discuss things, or to create diversion? Retraction Watch is run by well-known science writers in the best interest of science, not against it. Why do you think retractions are so common? Because scientists watch each other's hands, replicate or review each other's work, and it's difficult for fraudsters to avoid exposure, and for sloppy research to gain credibility. Look at these retractions, related to global warming: http://retractionwatch.com/2014/10/21/article-using-tin-foil-cling-wrap-to-debunk-ocean-warming-retracted-after-urgent-peer-review/ http://retractionwatch.com/2014/05/21/gremlins-caused-errors-in-climate-change-paper-showing-gains-from-global-warming/ http://retractionwatch.com/2011/05/17/controversial-paper-critiquing-climate-change-science-set-to-be-retracted-because-of-plagiarism/ Piotr

Jerad, If you disagree with SB may I introduce you to Retractionwatch? People are commiting fraud in science for a few things, money and prestige being two of them..... http://retractionwatch.com/ Andre

MF So do you concede that this mad-made global warming scare-mongering is simply not certain? Andre

StephanB #199

I have to say that you have been very civil and polite throughout this entire discussion and I appreciate it. As I recall, you have not hurled even one ad-hominem argument in my direction, which sets you apart. Your questions have been thoughtful and your responses have been measured. Thinking back, I have been somewhat dismissive of some of your comments without giving them the full response that they deserved. For better or for worse, I have to make my points in as few words as possible in order to address a wide range of excuses (oops, objections).

I see no reason for not being civil although I'm sure I've not always stuck to that!! Anyway, I try.

It is true that I am not a specialist in any field of science, but I have studied science and math at the university level. I can read a scientific report and make sense of it. So while I am not really qualified to do science in any official capacity, I can talk science when I need to. However, the issue under discussion is less about the way science is done and more about the propensity of scientists to follow the herd. And, of course, there’s the money. I know that you discount both elements, but I think they count for a great deal.

I think I'll just leave it at that. We disagree on something that's not really tractable. But I do now know your view. Thank you for the generous response. Jerad

Thanks for correcting my faulty link. SB (and Barry if you are reading) remember the title of the thread. The question is whether the many links to press stories support the claim of global cooling alarmism in the 1970s. This is an example of one such link. As Skram points out, the first two paragraphs summarise the article rather well:

The world's climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are the subjects of deepening debate. There are specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way - the inevitable consequence of a natural cyclic process, or as a result of man-made pollution of the atmosphere. And there are those who say that such pollution may actually head off an ice age.

We get a section on different theories about the causes of ice ages (which is very tentative about timescales) followed by a section on possible man-made influences on climate which could go either way finishing with theories that predict "complete destruction of the polar ice covers" and "enough to head off an ice age". Then finally a section on the prospects for learning the truth. SB writes:

The whole point of the piece is to speculate about the possible causes of past ice ages (Solar energy variations, Pendulum swings, Man-made influences) and associate them with the cooling trend under discussion.

It is true that the main point of the article is to speculate about possible causes of past ice-ages (A small part of the article is to question whether recent cooling could be a sign of these causes). The conclusion is scientists don't know and it could even get warmer. This is not global cooling alarmism. It doesn't predict global cooling in any timescale that matters. It doesn't even say it is likely. It is actually rather a good piece about the uncertain state of climatology at the time. Mark Frank

Onlookers, are you waiting with bated breath for StephenB to back up his assertions? Will he provide direct quotes proving that the 1975 NYTimes article declared global cooling inevitable? Well, don't. For he can't. Go ahead and read the paper while it's available on the internet. Even if you read just the first two paragraphs, you will find the exact opposite:

The world's climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate. There are specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way—the inevitable consequence of natural cyclic process, or as a result of man-made pollution in the atmosphere. And there are those who say that such pollution may actually head off an ice age.

StephenB, have you actually read the article? skram

StephenB

And, of course, there’s the money.

Oh, yeah, just follow the money trail: Dear Nick... Piotr

StephenB:

Barry, yes, and it get’s worse. The article, which I just read, does, indeed, say what the title says it will say, but our poor friends simply can’t deal with it.

Would you mind quoting from the article in support of this assertion? Thank you in advance! skram

stepen b: The article, which I just read, does, indeed, say what the title says it will say, but our poor friends simply can’t deal with it. The whole point of the piece is to speculate about the possible causes of past ice ages (Solar energy variations, Pendulum swings, Man-made influences) and associate them with the cooling trend under discussion. Read it for yourself. Only a religious fanatic would misread it the way it is being misread. It seems you have finally found a point of agreement velikovskys

Jerad

Since you’re not a scientist and since you are very focused on public opinion then, perhaps, you don’t quite understand the research scientist’s point of view. For decades it didn’t matter to them what the general public thought.

I have to say that you have been very civil and polite throughout this entire discussion and I appreciate it. As I recall, you have not hurled even one ad-hominem argument in my direction, which sets you apart. Your questions have been thoughtful and your responses have been measured. Thinking back, I have been somewhat dismissive of some of your comments without giving them the full response that they deserved. For better or for worse, I have to make my points in as few words as possible in order to address a wide range of excuses (oops, objections). It is true that I am not a specialist in any field of science, but I have studied science and math at the university level. I can read a scientific report and make sense of it. So while I am not really qualified to do science in any official capacity, I can talk science when I need to. However, the issue under discussion is less about the way science is done and more about the propensity of scientists to follow the herd. And, of course, there's the money. I know that you discount both elements, but I think they count for a great deal. StephenB

May I re-post a link to the Charney Report (1979)? I posted it before Barry started a new thread, and now the old link has become hard to locate. Here's what real experts on climate change thought at a time when -- according to StephenB -- they were spreading an Ice Age scare. http://web.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf Piotr

Does this not give StephenB or Barry Arrington pause for thought?

No, of course not.

How about we just forgo the press and focus on the actual scientific research and publications? That’s what we really care about isn’t it?

But then you can't conveniently copy and paste a hatchet job from some blog to give the wrong impression that the scientific community was promoting global cooling alarmism in the 70ies. hrun0815

Barry

Here’s a sure sign they are grasping at straws: They start to challenge your assumption that an article will say what its title says it will say.

Barry, yes, and it get's worse. The article, which I just read, does, indeed, say what the title says it will say, but our poor friends simply can't deal with it. The whole point of the piece is to speculate about the possible causes of past ice ages (Solar energy variations, Pendulum swings, Man-made influences) and associate them with the cooling trend under discussion. Read it for yourself. Only a religious fanatic would misread it the way it is being misread. Also, keep in mind that this offering is probably the most laid back one they could find. Many others are far less cerebral and far more in the alarmist mode. StephenB

StephenB #181

In effect, you are arguing that journalists consistently misrepresented the majority opinion of scientists on global cooling and global warming, before, during, and after each flip flop–without a peep from those who were being misrepresented or misquoted and without a dissenting point of view from other journalists—for 100 years. Only someone who drinks the global warming kool aid could believe such a fantastic story.

In the complete article you copy and pasted a journalist pointed out how journalists have consistently misrepresented the research state of affairs regarding global climate. I can not adequately address why some scientists did not speak out when their views were not properly represented in the press except to say that many scientists I know don't give a toss what is printed in the papers and don't think it's part of their remit to refute false reporting. And, I say that now scientists have begun to understand that they do have to 'play the game' regarding public news sources. Since you're not a scientist and since you are very focused on public opinion then, perhaps, you don't quite understand the research scientist's point of view. For decades it didn't matter to them what the general public thought. Think about it: did Einstein or Plank or Bohr really care what Joe Blow in Des Moines think about Quantum Mechanics? I hope not. And if the Des Moines Register printed some disparaging article about quantum coupling do you really think any research physicist would bother to respond? AND, you know what, why aren't you arguing from that actual research that existed at the time? Why all this appeal to to what was reported instead of going for the published work? Who really cares what the papers said in the end? Why not focus on the real academic research? Yes? How about we just forgo the press and focus on the actual scientific research and publications? That's what we really care about isn't it? Jerad

Correct link to the NYTimes article: http://goo.gl/V3tBuc skram

OK. I just read the article. I don't care how you interpret the title - anyone who reads it and thinks it is primarily about the inevitably or even likelihood of cooling in our life time has a comprehension problem. This article is about the uncertainty in climate science. It points out that it has been getting cooler since 1950 (a simple fact at the time) but does not draw the conclusion that it is going to stay cooler. A bit further on - "Lack of agreement as to the factors that control climate change make it particularly difficult to assess current trends". And then the bulk of the article discusses some of the possible factors emphasising throughout the lack of agreement. But if we are interested in scientific opinion at the time then surely more relevant is the report from the National Academy of Sciences which seems to have inspired the article. I can't track this down but the article finishes: The Academy of Sciences report notes that any assessment of climate trends is crippled by a lack of knowledge: "Not only are basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions". Given the state of climatology at the time this seems reasonable. In no way can it be described as a prediction of global cooling. Really this is not important - one article written 40 years ago - except it illustrates again how much of the sceptical argument is recycling quotes from opinion pieces and blogs without studying the source material. We had the infamous "1.08 degrees cooling since 1998" and the "1% of scientists don't believe in global warming" and now this. Mark Frank

As StephenB is working on obtaining the NYTimes article, I will provide a few more quotes from it. Just to wet his appetite.

If worldwide consumption continues at its present rates, catastrophic climate changes have been projected by M.I. Budyko, a leading Soviet specialist. He says that the critical level will probably be reached within a century. This, he has written, will lead to "a complete destruction of polar ice covers." Not only would sea levels rise but, with the Arctic Ocean free of ice, the entire weather system of the Northern hemisphere would be altered. However, Dr. Mitchell has suggested, warming of the climate due to pollution might be enough to head off an ice age "quite inadvertently."

How's that for crying global cooling? I think you ought to read the article. skram

Have you read the article, Barry? Guess not. skram

SB: Here's a sure sign they are grasping at straws: They start to challenge your assumption that an article will say what its title says it will say. Pathetic. Barry Arrington

That's pretty funny, StephenB. You have an uncanny ability to detect what the article says by just reading its title. Let's test your theory. Buy the article or go to the library and read it. Then we'll discuss its contents. skram

StephenB Please, people, you must do better. We do; that's the whole point. We read the bloody article as well. Believe me -- it's much better. Piotr

SB: Of course you judge an article’s theme by its title. Mark Frank

Unless of course you read the article itself.

The theme will be the same. (Assuming the writer is literate and knows what he is saying). StephenB

skram

You’ve missed the first title of that article, my friend.

I read both titles. The second title is the theme and the conclusion, which is what matters. It is about the "inevitability of global cooling." You will likely find a defense for that conclusion if you read it carefully. The theme is developed in the early paragraphs. The first half of this century has apparently been the warmest period since the “hot spell” between 5000 and 7000 years ago immediately following the last ice age. That the climate, at least in the Northern hemisphere, has been getting cooler since 1950 is well established—if one ignores the last two winters. It draws a contrast between the way things were (warming) and the way things are now and are going to be (cooling). That's the theme of the 1970's. If you display the entire article (as opposed to your chosen excerpts) I am sure that you will find that point confirmed. People write things for a reason. StephenB

SB

Of course you judge an article’s theme by its title.

Unless of course you read the article itself. Mark Frank

You've missed the first title of that article, my friend. And now I've given you the full synopsis. It does not support your take on the situation. If I were you, I'd go and read the rest of the articles, at least some of them, to find out what they actually say. This should be a good lesson. skram

skram

StephenB, as a person with a degree in communications, you should be ashamed of yourself for doing such a hatchet job on the previous literature. You literally judge the book by its title. Is that what they taught you in school?

Of course you judge an article's theme by its title. That is what a title does; it tells you what the article is about. When an article says that “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” you can safely assume it is about a major cooling trend. You were thinking what???--that the purpose of the title is to fool the reader? Please, people, you must do better. StephenB

The record of the press inconsistency is clear as well.

In effect, you are arguing that journalists consistently misrepresented the majority opinion of scientists on global cooling and global warming, before, during, and after each flip flop--without a peep from those who were being misrepresented or misquoted and without a dissenting point of view from other journalists---for 100 years. Only someone who drinks the global warming kool aid could believe such a fantastic story. StephenB

I wonder whether StephenB ever bothered to actually read any of the articles he listed. My guess is no. I have read this one:

New York Times, May 21, 1975 “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”

If you subscribe to the NYTimes, you can search for it in the paper's archive. The article's actual title is "Scientists ask why world climate is changing; major cooling may be ahead" on p. 45 of the May 21, 1975 issue. The title StephenB quotes appears in the article's continuation on p. 88. The article mentions both the warming due to the increased greenhouse effect and the cooling that will eventually occur in the next Milankovitch cycle. Both effects are real. They just happen on different time scales. The CO2 concentration rises on the time scale of a century (thanks to man's increased activity). The Milanovitch cycle has the time scale of tens of thousands years. Here is an excerpt from the article.

The first half of this century has apparently been the warmest period since the "hot spell" between 5000 and 7000 years ago immediately following the last ice age. That the climate, at least in the Northern hemisphere, has been getting cooler since 1950 is well established—if one ignores the last two winters. It had been forecast by some specialists that last winter would be especially cold, but as all ice skaters know, it was unusually mild in the New York area. In Boston it was the warmest in 22 years and in Moscow it was the second warmest in 230 years. A major problem in seeking to assess the trend is to distinguish year-to-year fluctuations from those spread over decades, centuries, and thousands of years. Lack of agreement as to the factors that control climate change make it particularly difficult to assess current trends. Of major importance, therefore, is the debate of the cause of such changes and the role of human activity in bringing them about. Among the major hypotheses are the following:

The article goes on to discuss these: 1. Solar energy variations. 2. Pendulum swings (the Milanovitch cycles). 3. Man-made influence. Overall, a pretty balanced article mentioning all of the major causes of climate change that are being discussed today. Not crying wolf. StephenB, as a person with a degree in communications, you should be ashamed of yourself for doing such a hatchet job on the previous literature. You literally judge the book by its title. Is that what they taught you in school? Just my two cents. skram

StephenB

Sorry Jerad, I am not buying it. Perhaps you can persuade onlookers that your suspicions (“I suspect that most scientists, now and then, figured it didn’t matter”)can counteract my evidence. The record of inconsistency is clear.

The record of the press inconsistency is clear as well. I happen to know scientists who just like to keep their heads down and get on with their research. And I know many who really do think it doesn't matter what the newspapers say. But I know no scientists who are just in it for the money. Some who work for big corporations are probably not working on their first or second choice of research but they all want to do research. And I have never, ever met any academic who buys into a big lie. Everyone I've met is fiercely independent and knows that they are much more likely to be remembered by history if they buck the system and win. Name a famous scientists who DIDN'T come up with something new and paradigm shifting, if not breaking. It's part of the culture. So, when you get hundreds of scientists who sign the ICCC reports, who go on the record as supporting its findings then, not only are they participating in an activity promoting their belief, but they are also setting themselves up for being vilified by their own field if they are proved wrong. Anyway, the real point should be: look at the scientific research. Find scientific fault there and base your arguments on that, not with the popular press. The press bends and shifts with the wind, they don't care who is right, they're just trying to garner subscribers/viewers/customers/advertising. Follow that money trail. Jerad

Sorry Jerad, I am not buying it. Perhaps you can persuade onlookers that your suspicions ("I suspect that most scientists, now and then, figured it didn’t matter")can counteract my evidence. The record of inconsistency is clear. StephenB

StephanB

If it wasn’t true, one of you, or someone from your side, would have provided evidence for a different pattern. Where are the collective protests from scientists from those same eras? The time for them to say “it ain’t so,” was then, not now.

I suspect that most scientists, now and then, figured it didn't matter what the public perception was. Sadly, that turned out not to be true.

Of course, the global warming enthusiasts are protesting now. It exposes their scam. Any objective person knows that they want a piece of that $22.000,000,000 the government spends on the “problem of global warming,” which is not available to skeptics or deniers.

Where are the complainers you asked? Then you say when they complain it exposes their scam. Crazy.

You need to rephrase your question a little bit. Try it this way: “Do you think the mainstream media, dominated by Darwinists, anti-ID partisans, and proponents of man-made global warming, represent the science behind ID well?

So, the press does an accurate job of reporting climate issues but a very bad job reporting intelligent design issues. And that's given that lots and lots of the public are probabliy favourably leaning towards intelligent design. And probably anti-global warming. I find your position non-sensical, non-evidential and full of assumptions. But, you know what? Who cares what the press says? Go with the science. Read the last ICCC report. Find a flaw with it and use that as a basis for your argument. Jerad

SB I am trying to understand your argument. I think it goes: * It is possible to find articles in the popular press that vary from warnings about cooling to warnings about warming at different times. * Therefore, the majority of articles in the popular press about climate varied from warnings about cooling to warnings about warming at different times. * Therefore, scientific opinion varied from warnings about cooling to warnings about warming at different times. * These warnings proved to be unfounded. * Therefore, current scientific opinion which warns about warming should be ignored. Is that a fair summary? Mark Frank

Jerad

Here’s a question for you: do you think the mainstream press reports on intelligent design correctly? Do you think they represent the science behind ID well?

You need to rephrase your question a little bit. Try it this way: "Do you think the mainstream media, dominated by Darwinists, anti-ID partisans, and proponents of man-made global warming, represent the science behind ID well? StephenB

None of the responses to the facts in evidence are rational. The idea that these poor scientists have been consistently misrepresented from one era to the next, or that the information presented doesn't capture the scientific trends is not realistic. The collective flip flops are on the record. If it wasn't true, one of you, or someone from your side, would have provided evidence for a different pattern. Where are the collective protests from scientists from those same eras? The time for them to say "it ain't so," was then, not now. Of course, the global warming enthusiasts are protesting now. It exposes their scam. Any objective person knows that they want a piece of that $22.000,000,000 the government spends on the "problem of global warming," which is not available to skeptics or deniers. StephenB

StephenB Here's a question for you: do you think the mainstream press reports on intelligent design correctly? Do you think they represent the science behind ID well? I've been hearing for years and years from contributors to this forum that the mainstream press in America is in the materialist camp (because they don't want to rock the boat) so I'm curious to hear your opinion on this since you think they tend to get the main ideas correct. Jerad

SB #168

They do an inferior job of reporting the technical details and methodologies, but they do a superior job of explaining the context and meaning of scientific reports and conclusions. This is doubly true when it comes to accurately reporting on scientific trends and the social impact of what scientists say and do. That is why all those reports on global cooling in one era and global warming in another era were consistent. They were consistent because they were true. Sometimes scientists follow the evidence; usually they follow the herd. You can’t evade the facts by condemning the messenger of the facts. That strategy is doomed.

Did you even read the excerpts I gleaned from the article you posted? Even some of the journalists say they've done a bad job reporting the science!! You're opinion explains a lot actually. Like Denyse you trust the press over the actual, published research. You don't follow the real scientific debate, rather you take the popular press reports to be accurate when it's been pointed out time and time again that the press gets science wrong all the time. Susan Mazur is an excellent case in point. Almost no one thinks she gets it right except those who find her version bolstered their already-held opinion. Why do you have that bias? (You're not the only UD contributor who leans that way, not by a long shot.) Could it be because otherwise you'd have to admit that, like the journalists, you've gotten the science wrong? Think: the newspaper are NOT peer-reviewed. There are some excellence awards (like the Pulitzer Prise) but mostly newspapers and networks news agencies are judged based on how many viewers/readers they produce. It's about the money, not the science. Look at Fox News. Do you really think getting the science right is at the top of their list? In the era of 'if it bleeds it leads' journalism? Jerad

Please can we put those supposed sceptics out of their misery with actual verifiable information. I hope the following will allow them to reconsider their silly defence and look at the bigger picture, something the average atheist seem to be incapable of due to their incredible faith! In 1974 Global Cooling was blamed for the Polar Vortex that hit North America in 2013 it was global Warming that got blamed for the same natural phenomena...... https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/time-magazine-goes-both-ways-on-the-polar-vortex/ Seriously, Piotr, WD400, Mark Frank, Hrun and Aurelio you can stop this absolutely pointless defence of something that is conjured in the minds of men. The Earth has natural warming and cooling cycles, man's CO2 emission can do squat..... Also these papers show that the oceans and forests can soak up much more CO2 that we ever thought possible...... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/tropical-forests-soak-up-much-more-carbon-than-we-thought http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-may-absorb-more-carbon-dioxide/ If you ask me, there is some really amazing risk strategies and redundancy built into the system. Or how about the fact that one group's waste is another's fuel and vice versa? Coincidence or luck? I beg to differ! Andre

Piotr @ 163:

If our policies don’t change, the effect will not be apocalyptic. We will not all die from flooding or overheating. But there will be a lot of irreversible damage...

Thank you for this sober assessment. Which of our policies would you like to see changed? and how much impact would you expect those policy changes to have on the climate? steve4003

Stephen, The question you should ask yourself is whether you've set out to get a fair sample of opinion (and strength of opinion) over time, or if you've just googled up some links that support your preferred conclusion. Your track record on this thread (still not comment on #25....)makes that pretty easy for others to see. wd400

Piotr

Journalists reporting on science rarely do a good job of it.

They do an inferior job of reporting the technical details and methodologies, but they do a superior job of explaining the context and meaning of scientific reports and conclusions. This is doubly true when it comes to accurately reporting on scientific trends and the social impact of what scientists say and do. That is why all those reports on global cooling in one era and global warming in another era were consistent. They were consistent because they were true. Sometimes scientists follow the evidence; usually they follow the herd. You can't evade the facts by condemning the messenger of the facts. That strategy is doomed. StephenB

StephenB,

You are missing the point rather spectacularly. Warnings about global cooling, followed by warnings about global warming, followed by warnings about global cooling, followed by warnings about global warming are really nothing more than childish wolf cries over nothing. The inconsistency of the message makes that clear.

You say that as if the bulk of the scientific community has been flip flopping back and forth on whether the biggest worry is global cooling or warming. Of course one can set up any narrative they want by selectively listing headlines, but any review of the literature of the 1970s makes it clear that even then, in the heydey of global cooling concerns, that, by far, the larger concern was global warming. I don't know whether warming or cooling was the bigger concern in the very early 20th century and the late 19th century (although, even then there were scientists warning about global warming due to rising CO2 levels), but most likely during the lifetime of everyone reading this, the biggest concern, by far, has been global warming. I would say that that's pretty consistent. goodusername

Scientists follow the evidence. When the evidence was insufficient, opinions were more speculative and "all over the map". Now the evidence is clear, and opinions have converged. Do you know a now-successful scientific theory that was not contested during its formative stage? Journalists reporting on science rarely do a good job of it. They have to compete for mass attention (already desensitised), so extreme sensationality is their primary concern. If I'm interested in a news item concerning science, my first impulse is to trace the references and have a look at the original publication. I don't trust "science reporters" or "experts" without any scientific credentials. Piotr

piotr

We all know how to follow a link. No need to litter the comment space with copy-and-paste stuff.

I want onlookers to follow the end game.

Here’s the real story, in a nutshell....

Meaning no disrespect, but I've heard similar versions before. Your opinions, while worthwhile in themselves and edifying to you, are only your opinions. They do not speak to the inconsistency of the record, which makes it clear that none of these warnings are worthy of consideration. One can only cry wolf so many times. I think 120 years of this nonsense is enough. StephenB

Piotr

Shall we discuss someone’s selection of random sensational newspaper headlines, or the actual opinions of climate scientists?

We are discussing both. The opinions of scientists and the opinions of scientists as reported by journalists. The pattern of inconsistency is clear. Scientists, insofar as global cooling/warming are concerned, were all over the map as much as those who reported on them. StephenB

StephenB We all know how to follow a link. No need to litter the comment space with copy-and-paste stuff. Shall we discuss someone's selection of random sensational newspaper headlines, or the actual opinions of climate scientists? Here's the real story, in a nutshell. Increasing CO2 levels were detected in the late 1950s and the '60s. This pioneering research made some climatologists investigate the possible impact of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. By the '70s it became clear to a growing number of experts that the oceanic sinks of carbon dioxide could not absorb all the extra CO2 from anthropogenic emissions. Calculations using improved models of global heat flows predicted that temperatures would soon start to increase as the greenhouse effect trapped more and more heat, overriding the cooling effect of aerosol pollutions and the accumulation of heat in the oceans (delaying but not preventing a warming trend). Today only a tiny minority of climatologists oppose the general consensus on global warming. Meanwhile, CO2 levels are growing steadily, as we blithely burn more and more fossil fuels and denialists misunderstand science. If our policies don't change, the effect will not be apocalyptic. We will not all die from flooding or overheating. But there will be a lot of irreversible damage and unnecessary suffering. The last denialists will by that time have agreed that the warming is real, man-made and harmful, but they will insist that nothing could be done to prevent it ("... and it's too late now anyway"). Piotr

piotr, wd400, Aurelio Smith, Jerad You are missing the point rather spectacularly. Warnings about global cooling, followed by warnings about global warming, followed by warnings about global cooling, followed by warnings about global warming are really nothing more than childish wolf cries over nothing. The inconsistency of the message makes that clear. You can't escape the facts by trying to make it all about me. That makes you look both silly and desperate. Here are the facts. Deal with them like adults. We are at the end game. GLOBAL COOLING: 1890s-1930s The Times, February 24, 1895 "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again" Fears of a "second glacial period" brought on by increases in northern glaciers and the severity of Scandinavia's climate. New York Times, October 7, 1912 "Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age" Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923 "The possibility of another Ice Age already having started ... is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak." Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1923 "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada." Time Magazine, September 10, 1923 "The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age." New York Times, September 18, 1924 "MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age" GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1960s New York Times, March 27, 1933 "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise" Time Magazine, January 2, 1939 "Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right.... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer." Time Magazine, 1951 Noted that permafrost in Russia was receding northward at 100 yards per year. New York Times, 1952 Reported global warming studies citing the "trump card" as melting glaciers. All the great ice sheets stated to be in retreat. U.S. News and World Report, January 18, 1954 "[W]inters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing." GLOBAL COOLING: 1970s Time Magazine, June 24, 1974 "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1974 "Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect" Reported that "glaciers have begun to advance"; "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter"; and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool". Science News, March 1, 1975 "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the 'very extraordinary period of warmth' that preceded it." Newsweek, April 28, 1975 "The Cooling World" "There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now." International Wildlife, July-August, 1975 "But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetime." New York Times, May 21, 1975 "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable" GLOBAL WARMING: 1990s-? Earth in the Balance, Al Gore, 1992 "About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level due to global warming, in the next few decades." Time Magazine, April 19, 2001 "[S]cientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible." New York Times, December 27, 2005 "Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming" The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 2006 "Billions will die, says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not usually a gloomy type. Human civilization will be reduced to a 'broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords,' and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot where a few breeding couples will survive." StephenB

Smith at #146

UB: Can you derive which amino acid will be presented at the peptide binding site by the spatial arrangement of bases in a codon? AS: An aaRS has two templates so, in principle the codon binding template and the aa binding template are independent.

Good grief

In practice they are “frozen accidents”.

Assumption.

So, no I can’t.

Of course you can’t. It’s because the effect of translation is not physically determined by the arrangement of an informational medium, it determined by the arrangement of the translation apparatus that produces the effect.

Whether there are plausible pathways that have been suggested, I don’t know.

If you are suggesting that there may be a means to determine the product of translation from the arrangement of a medium, then what you are saying is that it is actually possible to predict the temporal event “this particular amino acid next” from nothing more than the arrangement of three nucleotides. Let that sink in. In actuality, you are betraying a complete misconception of how information and translation work in the natural world. Having a particular amino acid presented for binding at a certain point in time is not an effect that can be derived from the atomic properties of matter. It can only be derived from the contingent organization of the system that produces that effect. And in order to produce that effect, the system must preserve the natural discontinuity between that effect and the arrangement of the medium that eviokes it. This discontinuity is necessary so that the system is not locked into determinism. Instead, it establishes a local independence by virtue of the organization of the system. Thus, the translation of an informational medium can produce functional effects that obey the inexorable laws of physics, but are not determined them.

We may one day have sufficient computing power to predict emergent properties of large molecules, such as large proteins. We can’t do it yet. People are working on it. Here (paywalled).

Again, this is just incoherent with regard to the observations. Whether we can or cannot predict the function of a protein has nothing whatsoever to do with the operation of a translation system. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Smith, I know that none of this matters one wit to you. You are here to exercise your personal disdain, and certainly no material evidence can interfere with that. /thread jack Upright BiPed

No one is going to play the gish gallop with you. You have to defend the statements you make, not just throw up a cloud of ASCII then try to retreat. You still haven't dealt with your misrepresentation described in 25, which is telling demonstrates how you "research" these ideas. You also apparently haven't learned anything from the series of mistakes you've made here. wd400

SB #141 From the article you copy-and-pasted:

This isn’t a question of science. It’s a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science.

Exactly. Also:

For ordinary Americans to judge the media’s version of current events about global warming, it is necessary to admit that journalists have misrepresented the story three other times. Yet no one in the media is owning up to that fact. Newspapers that pride themselves on correction policies for the smallest errors now find themselves facing a historical record that is enormous and unforgiving. It is time for the news media to admit a consistent failure to report this issue fairly or accurately, with due skepticism of scientific claims.

Yup. Nothing about the science at all.

It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage. Perhaps the most important suggestion would be to remember the basic rules about journalism and set aside biases — a simple suggestion, but far from easy given the overwhelming extent of the problem. Three of the guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists are especially appropriate: “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.”

So, was global cooling really an issue or just fear-mongering on the part of the media? Trying to sell papers? Listen to the scientists. Especially listen when an overwhelming majority have been saying for two decades that humans are causing catastrophic climate change. . Jerad

wd400

Look at 122. Try thinking before typing.

Here is what I wrote @143:

Then you can tell me if it was fairly represented by the longer article represented @141.

What is it about the words represented by the longer article that you do not understand. Try thinking before typing. StephenB

Here are a few more articles which our global warming friends don't want to face (added to the one already alluded to: The Times, February 24, 1895 "Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again" Fears of a "second glacial period" brought on by increases in northern glaciers and the severity of Scandinavia's climate. New York Times, October 7, 1912 "Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age" Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923 "The possibility of another Ice Age already having started ... is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak." Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1923 "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada." Time Magazine, September 10, 1923 "The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age." New York Times, September 18, 1924 "MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age" That should keep the doubters busy for a while. StephenB

Look at 122. Try thinking before typing. wd400

wd400

No claim of impending doom, no certainty, no “billions” marked to die.

The article doesn't associate those words with the NYT article. It simply says, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.” Try again. StephenB

Aurelio Smith

I did in comment 134

No, you didn't. If you people are having this much trouble with one small phase of the argument, what chance to you have of grasping the big picture. StephenB

wd400.

..the original source relates to glaciation, that had recently (starting mid-century) been proposed as an explanation for observations in the recently -developed science of geology and whether it could be cyclical as appeared to be demonstrated by geological evidence.

Wrong. That was not the point of the message. Try again. When all else fails, read the title and the subtitle. Would anyone else care to help wd400 out here. StephenB

Do try and keep up Stephen, I didn't write the quoted text in 143, but I've already described the contents of that NYT article (somewhere above the massively spammy post you copy-pasted). If you are really interested in talking about facts, then you need to do a better job of representing them (and perhaps apologize for misrepresenting someoneelse's words as your own memories a per #25). wd400

StephenB, You could have posted a link to the article instead of pasting it in entirety. You could have also mentioned that it was written by a third-rate economist Warren Anderson. Whose opinion on climate presumably carries a lot of weight. skram

Piotr

Why paste in such a lot of rubbish if a link would do? The blogosphere and pop journalism are not reliable sources of information

. Anyone can say that something is rubbish when they would prefer not to deal with it. Global warming science is rubbish. There, that was easy wasn't it? Scientists are just as prone to lying as journalists. Some of the most destructive lies ever invented were buried in a scientific report. So your insinuation falls flat. Now, do you have an answer to the arguments presented? StephenB

wd400

Have you read it? Does it say what you claimed?

I have a better idea. Since you don't like my summaries, why don't you tell me what it said. Then you can tell me if it was fairly represented by the longer article represented @141. That way we can make it about the facts and not about me. StephenB

StephenB Why paste in such a lot of rubbish if a link would do? The blogosphere and pop journalism are not reliable sources of information. Piotr

Since no one will engage me in an intelligent discussion over my quick summary of the global cooling warming deception, I thought it would be useful to print the entire article. Those who are too lazy to do the work, should not complain about my previous attempt to make it easier for them. They can't have it both ways. Anyway, here is the article. "Fire and Ice." It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age. The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.” Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature. Following the ice age threats from the late 1800s, fears of an imminent and icy catastrophe were compounded in the 1920s by Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan and an obsession with the news of his polar expedition. As the Times put it on Feb. 24, 1895, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.” Those concerns lasted well into the late 1920s. But when the earth’s surface warmed less than half a degree, newspapers and magazines responded with stories about the new threat. Once again the Times was out in front, cautioning “the earth is steadily growing warmer.” After a while, that second phase of climate cautions began to fade. By 1954, Fortune magazine was warming to another cooling trend and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.” As the United States and the old Soviet Union faced off, the media joined them with reports of a more dangerous Cold War of Man vs. Nature. The New York Times ran warming stories into the late 1950s, but it too came around to the new fears. Just three decades ago, in 1975, the paper reported: “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable.” That trend, too, cooled off and was replaced by the current era of reporting on the dangers of global warming. Just six years later, on Aug. 22, 1981, the Times quoted seven government atmospheric scientists who predicted global warming of an “almost unprecedented magnitude.” In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming. Some current warming stories combine the concepts and claim the next ice age will be triggered by rising temperatures – the theme of the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” Recent global warming reports have continued that trend, morphing into a hybrid of both theories. News media that once touted the threat of “global warming” have moved on to the more flexible term “climate change.” As the Times described it, climate change can mean any major shift, making the earth cooler or warmer. In a March 30, 2006, piece on ExxonMobil’s approach to the environment, a reporter argued the firm’s chairman “has gone out of his way to soften Exxon’s public stance on climate change.” The effect of the idea of “climate change” means that any major climate event can be blamed on global warming, supposedly driven by mankind. Spring 2006 has been swamped with climate change hype in every type of media – books, newspapers, magazines, online, TV and even movies. One-time presidential candidate Al Gore, a patron saint of the environmental movement, is releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” in book and movie form, warning, “Our ability to live is what is at stake.” Despite all the historical shifting from one position to another, many in the media no longer welcome opposing views on the climate. CBS reporter Scott Pelley went so far as to compare climate change skeptics with Holocaust deniers. “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel,” Pelley asked, “am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” he said in an interview on March 23 with CBS News’s PublicEye blog. He added that the whole idea of impartial journalism just didn’t work for climate stories. “There becomes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible,” he said. Pelley’s comments ignored an essential point: that 30 years ago, the media were certain about the prospect of a new ice age. And that is only the most recent example of how much journalists have changed their minds on this essential debate. Some in the media would probably argue that they merely report what scientists tell them, but that would be only half true. Journalists decide not only what they cover; they also decide whether to include opposing viewpoints. That’s a balance lacking in the current “debate.” This isn’t a question of science. It’s a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science. Global Cooling: 1954-1976 The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin A nuclear era, but I have no fear ’Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river -- The Clash “London Calling,” released in 1979 The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s. Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend. Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974. “It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude,” the article continued. That article also emphasized Bryson’s extreme doomsday predictions. “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.” Bryson warned, “It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” However, the world population increased by 2.5 billion since that warning. Fortune had been emphasizing the cooling trend for 20 years. In 1954, it picked up on the idea of a frozen earth and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.” The story debunked the notion that “despite all you may have read, heard, or imagined, it’s been growing cooler – not warmer – since the Thirties.” The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming. “The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.” If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.” There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said. If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued. Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” A city in a snow globe illustrated that March 1, 1975, article, while the cover showed an ice age obliterating an unfortunate city. In 1975, cooling went from “one of the most important problems” to a first-place tie for “death and misery.” “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.” He claimed it was not his disposition to be a “doomsday man.” His analysis came from “the facts [that] have emerged” about past ice ages, according to the July/August International Wildlife Magazine. The idea of a worldwide deep freeze snowballed. Naturally, science fiction authors embraced the topic. Writer John Christopher delivered a book on the coming ice age in 1962 called “The World in Winter.” In Christopher’s novel, England and other “rich countries of the north” broke down under the icy onslaught. “The machines stopped, the land was dead and the people went south,” he explained. James Follett took a slightly different tack. His book “Ice” was about “a rogue Antarctic iceberg” that “becomes a major world menace.” Follett in his book conceived “the teeth chattering possibility of how Nature can punish those who foolishly believe they have mastered her.” Global Warming: 1929-1969 Today’s global warming advocates probably don’t even realize their claims aren’t original. Before the cooling worries of the ’70s, America went through global warming fever for several decades around World War II. The nation entered the “longest warm spell since 1776,” according to a March 27, 1933, New York Times headline. Shifting climate gears from ice to heat, the Associated Press article began “That next ice age, if one is coming … is still a long way off.” One year earlier, the paper reported that “the earth is steadily growing warmer” in its May 15 edition. The Washington Post felt the heat as well and titled an article simply “Hot weather” on August 2, 1930. That article, reminiscent of a stand-up comedy routine, told readers that the heat was so bad, people were going to be saying, “Ah, do you remember that torrid summer of 1930. It was so hot that * * *.” The Los Angeles Times beat both papers to the heat with the headline: “Is another ice age coming?” on March 11, 1929. Its answer to that question: “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.” Meteorologist J. B. Kincer of the federal weather bureau published a scholarly article on the warming world in the September 1933 “Monthly Weather Review.” The article began discussing the “wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather” and asked “Is our climate changing?” Kincer proceeded to document the warming trend. Out of 21 winters examined from 1912-33 in Washington, D.C., 18 were warmer than normal and all of the past 13 were mild. New Haven, Conn., experienced warmer temperatures, with evidence from records that went “back to near the close of the Revolutionary War,” claimed the analysis. Using records from various other cities, Kincer showed that the world was warming. British amateur meteorologist G. S. Callendar made a bold claim five years later that many would recognize now. He argued that man was responsible for heating up the planet with carbon dioxide emissions – in 1938. It wasn’t a common notion at the time, but he published an article in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society on the subject. “In the following paper I hope to show that such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring at the present time,” Callendar wrote. He went on the lecture circuit describing carbon-dioxide-induced global warming. But Callendar didn’t conclude his article with an apocalyptic forecast, as happens in today’s global warming stories. Instead he said the change “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.” Furthermore, it would allow for greater agriculture production and hold off the return of glaciers “indefinitely.” On November 6 the following year, The Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article titled “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise.” It began, “Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout [sic] the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades.” The rising mercury trend continued into the ’50s. The New York Times reported that “we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” on Aug. 10, 1952. According to the Times, the evidence was the introduction of cod in the Eskimo’s diet – a fish they had not encountered before 1920 or so. The following year, the paper reported that studies confirmed summers and winters were getting warmer. This warming gave the Eskimos more to handle than cod. “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures,” announced the Times during the middle of winter, on Feb. 15, 1959. Glaciers were melting in Alaska and the “ice in the Arctic ocean is about half as thick as it was in the late nineteenth century.” A decade later, the Times reaffirmed its position that “the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two,” according to polar explorer Col. Bernt Bachen in the Feb. 20, 1969, piece. One of the most surprising aspects of the global warming claims of the 20th Century is that they followed close behind similar theories of another major climate change – that one an ice age. Global Cooling: 1895-1932 The world knew all about cold weather in the 1800s. America and Europe had escaped a 500-year period of cooling, called the Little Ice Age, around 1850. So when the Times warned of new cooling in 1895, it was a serious prediction. On Feb. 24, 1895, the Times announced “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.” The article debated “whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period.” Those concerns were brought on by increases in northern glaciers and in the severity of Scandinavia’s climate. Fear spread through the print media over the next three decades. A few months after the sinking of the Titanic, on Oct. 7, 1912, page one of the Times reported, “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.” Scientists knew of four ice ages in the past, leading Professor Nathaniel Schmidt of Cornell University to conclude that one day we will need scientific knowledge “to combat the perils” of the next one. The same day the Los Angeles Times ran an article about Schmidt as well, entitled “Fifth ice age is on the way.” It was subtitled “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.” That end-of-the-world tone wasn’t unusual. “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada,” declared a front-page Chicago Tribune headline on Aug. 9, 1923. “Professor Gregory” of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” Gregory’s predictions went on and on. Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated,” and parts of South America would be “overrun.” The good news – “Australia has nothing to fear.” The Washington Post picked up on the story the following day, announcing “Ice Age Coming Here.” Talk of the ice age threat even reached France. In a New York Times article from Sept. 20, 1922, a penguin found in France was viewed as an “ice-age harbinger.” Even though the penguin probably escaped from the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, it “caused considerable consternation in the country.” Some of the sound of the Roaring ’20s was the noise of a coming ice age – prominently covered by The New York Times. Capt. Donald MacMillan began his Arctic expeditions in 1908 with Robert Peary. He was going to Greenland to test the “Menace of a new ice age,” as the Times reported on June 10, 1923. The menace was coming from “indications in Arctic that have caused some apprehension.” Two weeks later the Times reported that MacMillan would get data to help determine “whether there is any foundation for the theory which has been advanced in some quarters that another ice age is impending.” On July 4, 1923, the paper announced that the “Explorer Hopes to Determine Whether new ‘Ice Age’ is Coming.” The Atlanta Constitution also had commented on the impending ice age on July 21, 1923. MacMillan found the “biggest glacier” and reported on the great increase of glaciers in the Arctic as compared to earlier measures. Even allowing for “the provisional nature of the earlier surveys,” glacial activity had greatly augmented, “according to the men of science.” Not only was “the world of science” following MacMillan, so too were the “radio fans.” The Christian Science Monitor reported on the potential ice age as well, on July 3, 1923. “Captain MacMillan left Wicasset, Me., two weeks ago for Sydney, the jumping-off point for the north seas, announcing that one of the purposes of his cruise was to determine whether there is beginning another ‘ice age,’ as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would seem to indicate.” Then on Sept. 18, 1924, The New York Times declared the threat was real, saying “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age.” Concerns about global cooling continued. Swedish scientist Rutger Sernander also forecasted a new ice age. He headed a Swedish committee of scientists studying “climatic development” in the Scandinavian country. According to the LA Times on April 6, 1924, he claimed there was “scientific ground for believing” that the conditions “when all winds will bring snow, the sun cannot prevail against the clouds, and three winters will come in one, with no summer between,” had already begun. That ice age talk cooled in the early 1930s. But The Atlantic in 1932 puffed the last blast of Arctic air in the article “This Cold, Cold World.” Author W. J. Humphries compared the state of the earth to the state of the world before other ice ages. He wrote “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age.” Concluding the article he noted the uncertainty of such things, but closed with “we do know that the climatic gait of this our world is insecure and unsteady, teetering, indeed, on an ice age, however near or distant the inevitable fall.” Cooling and Warming Both Threats to Food Just like today, the news media were certain about the threat that an ice age posed. In the 1970s, as the world cooled down, the fear was that mankind couldn’t grow enough food with a longer winter. “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output,” declared a New York Times headline on Aug. 8, 1974, right in the heat of summer. “Bad weather this summer and the threat of more of it to come hang ominously over every estimate of the world food situation,” the article began. It continued saying the dire consequences of the cooling climate created a deadly risk of suffering and mass starvation. Various climatologists issued a statement that “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,” reported the Dec. 29, 1974, New York Times. If policy makers did not account for this oncoming doom, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result. Time magazine delivered its own gloomy outlook on the “World Food Crisis” on June 24 of that same year and followed with the article “Weather Change: Poorer Harvests” on November 11. According to the November story, the mean global surface temperature had fallen just 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1940s. Yet this small drop “trimmed a week to ten days from the growing season” in the earth’s breadbasket regions. The prior advances of the Green Revolution that bolstered world agriculture would be vulnerable to the lower temperatures and lead to “agricultural disasters.” Newsweek was equally downbeat in its article “The Cooling World.” “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” which would lead to drastically decreased food production, it said. “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now,” the magazine told readers on April 28 the following year. This, Newsweek said, was based on the “central fact” that “the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Despite some disagreement on the cause and extent of cooling, meteorologists were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.” Despite Newsweek’s claim, agricultural productivity didn’t drop for the rest of the century. It actually increased at an “annual rate of 1.76% over the period 1948 to 2002,” according to the Department of Agriculture. That didn’t deter the magazine from warning about declining agriculture once again 30 years later – this time because the earth was getting warmer. “Livestock are dying. Crops are withering,” it said in the Aug. 8, 2005, edition. It added that “extremely dry weather of recent months has spawned swarms of locusts” and they were destroying crops in France. Was global warming to blame? “Evidence is mounting to support just such fears,” determined the piece. U.S. News & World Report was agriculturally pessimistic as well. “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” That was just 13 years ago, in 1993. That wasn’t the first time warming was blamed for influencing agriculture. In 1953 William J. Baxter wrote the book “Today’s Revolution in Weather!” on the warming climate. His studies showed “that the heat zone is moving northward and the winters are getting milder with less snowfall.” Baxter titled a chapter in his book “Make Room For Trees, Grains, Vegetables and Bugs on the North Express!” The warming world led him to estimate that within 10 years Canada would produce more wheat than the United States, though he said America’s corn dominance would remain. It was more than just crops that were in trouble. Baxter also noted that fishermen in Maine could catch tropical and semi-tropical fish, which were just beginning to appear. The green crab, which also migrated north, was “slowly killing” the profitable industry of steamer clams. Ice, Ice Baby Another subject was prominent whether journalists were warning about global warming or an ice age: glaciers. For 110 years, scientists eyed the mammoth mountains of ice to determine the nature of the temperature shift. Reporters treated the glaciers like they were the ultimate predictors of climate. In 1895, geologists thought the world was freezing up again due to the “great masses of ice” that were frequently seen farther south than before. The New York Times reported that icebergs were so bad, and they decreased the temperature of Iceland so much, that inhabitants fearing a famine were “emigrating to North America.” In 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in a car, the Los Angeles Times delivered a story that should be familiar to modern readers. The paper’s story on “Disappearing Glaciers” in the Alps said the glaciers were not “running away,” but rather “deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation.” The melting led to alpine hotel owners having trouble keeping patrons. It was established that it was a “scientific fact” that the glaciers were “surely disappearing.” That didn’t happen. Instead they grew once more. More than 100 years after their “final annihilation” was declared, the LA Times was once again writing the same story. An Associated Press story in the Aug. 21, 2005, paper showed how glacier stories never really change. According to the article: “A sign on a sheer cliff wall nearby points to a mountain hut. It should have been at eye level but is more than 60 feet above visitors’ heads. That’s how much the glacier has shrunk since the sign went up 35 years ago.” But glacier stories didn’t always show them melting away like ice cubes in a warm drink. The Boston Daily Globe in 1923 reported one purpose of MacMillan’s Arctic expedition was to determine the beginning of the next ice age, “as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would indicate.” When that era of ice-age reports melted away, retreating glaciers were again highlighted. In 1953’s “Today’s Revolution in Weather!” William Baxter wrote that “the recession of glaciers over the whole earth affords the best proof that climate is warming,” despite the fact that the world had been in its cooling phase for more than a decade when he wrote it. He gave examples of glaciers melting in Lapland, the Alps, Mr. Rainer and Antarctica. Time magazine in 1951 noted permafrost in Russia was receding northward up to 100 yards per year. In 1952, The New York Times kept with the warming trend. It reported the global warming studies of climatologist Dr. Hans W. Ahlmann, whose “trump card” “has been the melting glaciers.” The next year the Times said “nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.” U.S. News and World Report agreed, noted that “winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” on Jan. 8, 1954. In the ’70s, glaciers did an about face. Ponte in “The Cooling” warned that “The rapid advance of some glaciers has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union.” Time contradicted its 1951 report and stated that the cooling trend was here to stay. The June 24, 1974, article was based on those omnipresent “telltale signs” such as the “unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland.” Even The Christian Science Monitor in the same year noted “glaciers which had been retreating until 1940 have begun to advance.” The article continued, “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” The New York Times noted that in 1972 the “mantle of polar ice increased by 12 percent” and had not returned to “normal” size. North Atlantic sea temperatures declined, and shipping routes were “cluttered with abnormal amounts of ice.” Furthermore, the permafrost in Russia and Canada was advancing southward, according to the December 29 article that closed out 1974. Decades later, the Times seemed confused by melting ice. On Dec. 8, 2002, the paper ran an article titled “Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say.” The first sentence read “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades.” Was the ice melting at record levels, as the headline stated, or at a level seen decades ago, as the first line mentioned? On Sept. 14, 2005, the Times reported the recession of glaciers “seen from Peru to Tibet to Greenland” could accelerate and become abrupt. This, in turn, could increase the rise of the sea level and block the Gulf Stream. Hence “a modern counterpart of the 18,000-year-old global-warming event could trigger a new ice age.” Government Comes to the Rescue Mankind managed to survive three phases of fear about global warming and cooling without massive bureaucracy and government intervention, but aggressive lobbying by environmental groups finally changed that reality. The Kyoto treaty, new emissions standards and foreign regulations are but a few examples. Getting the government involved to control the weather isn’t a new concept. When the earth was cooling, The New York Times reported on a panel that recommended a multimillion-dollar research program to combat the threat. That program was to start with $18 million a year in funding and increase to about $67 million by 1980, according to the Jan. 19, 1975, Times. That would be more than $200 million in today’s dollars. Weather warnings in the ’70s from “reputable researchers” worried policy-makers so much that scientists at a National Academy of Sciences meeting “proposed the evacuation of some six million people” from parts of Africa, reported the Times on Dec. 29, 1974. That article went on to tell of the costly and unnecessary plans of the old Soviet Union. It diverted time from Cold War activities to scheme about diverting the coming cold front. It had plans to reroute “large Siberian rivers, melting Arctic ice and damming the Bering Strait” to help warm the “frigid fringes of the Soviet Union.” Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” noted climatologists’ admission that “solutions” to global cooling “such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,” could result in more problems than they would solve. More recently, 27 European climatologists have become worried that the warming trend “may be irreversible, at least over most of the coming century,” according to Time magazine on Nov. 13, 2000. The obvious solution? Bigger government. They “should start planning immediately to adapt to the new extremes of weather that their citizens will face – with bans on building in potential flood plains in the north, for example, and water conservation measures in the south.” Almost 50 policy and research recommendations came with the report. The news media have given space to numerous alleged solutions to our climate problems. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh had some unusual ideas to repel an effect of global warming. In 2002 he had the notion of creating a rainmaker, “which looks like a giant egg whisk,” according to the Evening News of Edinburgh on Dec. 2, 2002. The Atlantic edition of Newsweek on June 30, 2003, reported on the whisk. The British government gave him 105,000 pounds to research it. Besides promoting greater prosperity and peace, it could “lift enough seawater to lower sea levels by a meter, stemming the rise of the oceans – one of the most troublesome consequences of global warming.” The rain created would be redirected toward land using the wind’s direction. Instead of just fixing a symptom of global warming, Salter now wants to head it off. He wants to spray water droplets into low altitude clouds to increase their whiteness and block out more sunlight. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has considered other ways to lower temperatures and the media were there to give them credence. Newsweek on May 20, 1991, reported on five ways to fight warming from the National Research Council, the operating arm of the NAS. The first idea was to release “billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons” to reflect sunlight. To reflect more sunlight, “fire one-ton shells filled with dust into the upper atmosphere.” Airplane engines could pollute more in order to release a “layer of soot” to block the sun. Should any sunlight remain, 50,000 orbiting mirrors, 39 square miles each, could block it out. With any heat left, “infrared lasers on mountains” could be used “to zap rising CFCs,” rendering them harmless. Global Warming: 1981-Present and Beyond The media have bombarded Americans almost daily with the most recent version of the climate apocalypse. Global warming has replaced the media’s ice age claims, but the results somehow have stayed the same – the deaths of millions or even billions of people, widespread devastation and starvation. The recent slight increase in temperature could “quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet” argued the Jan. 18, 2006, Washington Post. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times wrote a column that lamented the lack of federal spending on global warming. “We spend about $500 billion a year on a military budget, yet we don’t want to spend peanuts to protect against climate change,” he said in a Sept. 27, 2005, piece. Kristof’s words were noteworthy, not for his argument about spending, but for his obvious use of the term “climate change.” While his column was filled with references to “global warming,” it also reflected the latest trend as the coverage has morphed once again. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but can mean something entirely different. The latest threat has little to do with global warming and has everything to do with … everything. The latest predictions claim that warming might well trigger another ice age. The warm currents of the Gulf Stream, according to a 2005 study by the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, U.K., have decreased 30 percent. This has raised “fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age,” as the Gulf Stream regulates temperatures in Europe and the eastern United States. This has “long been predicted” as a potential ramification of global warming. Hollywood picked up on this notion before the study and produced “The Day After Tomorrow.” In the movie global warming triggered an immediate ice age. People had to dodge oncoming ice. Americans were fleeing to Mexico. Wolves were on the prowl. Meanwhile our hero, a government paleoclimatologist, had to go to New York City to save his son from the catastrophe. But it’s not just a potential ice age. Every major weather event becomes somehow linked to “climate change.” Numerous news reports connected Hurricane Katrina with changing global temperatures. Droughts, floods and more have received similar media treatment. Even The New York Times doesn’t go that far – yet. In an April 23, 2006, piece, reporter Andrew C. Revkin gave no credence to that coverage. “At the same time, few scientists agree with the idea that the recent spate of potent hurricanes, European heat waves, African drought and other weather extremes are, in essence, our fault. There is more than enough natural variability in nature to mask a direct connection, they say.” Unfortunately, that brief brush with caution hasn’t touched the rest of the media. Time magazine’s recent cover story included this terrifying headline: “Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More; Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon —and what we can do about it” That attitude reflects far more of the current media climate. As the magazine claimed, many of today’s weather problems can be blamed on the changing climate. “Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast — when the emergency becomes commonplace —something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming,” Time said. Methodology The Business & Media Institute (BMI) examined how the major media have covered the issue of climate change over a long period of time. Because television only gained importance in the post-World War II period, BMI looked at major print outlets. There were limitations with that approach because some major publications lack the lengthy history that others enjoy. However, the search covered more than 30 publications from the 1850s to 2006 — including newspapers, magazines, journals and books. Recent newspaper and magazine articles were obtained from Lexis-Nexis. All other magazine articles were acquired from the Library of Congress either in print or microfilm. Older newspapers were obtained from ProQuest. The extensive bibliography includes every publication cited in this report. BMI looked through thousands of headlines and chose hundreds of stories to analyze. Dates on the time periods for cooling and warming reporting phases are approximate, and are derived from the stories that BMI analyzed. Conclusion What can one conclude from 110 years of conflicting climate coverage except that the weather changes and the media are just as capricious? Certainly, their record speaks for itself. Four separate and distinct climate theories targeted at a public taught to believe the news. Only all four versions of the truth can’t possibly be accurate. For ordinary Americans to judge the media’s version of current events about global warming, it is necessary to admit that journalists have misrepresented the story three other times. Yet no one in the media is owning up to that fact. Newspapers that pride themselves on correction policies for the smallest errors now find themselves facing a historical record that is enormous and unforgiving. It is time for the news media to admit a consistent failure to report this issue fairly or accurately, with due skepticism of scientific claims. Recommendations It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage. Perhaps the most important suggestion would be to remember the basic rules about journalism and set aside biases — a simple suggestion, but far from easy given the overwhelming extent of the problem. Three of the guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists are especially appropriate: “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.” That last bullet point could apply to almost any major news outlet in the United States. They could all learn something and take into account the historical context of media coverage of climate change. Some other important points include: Don’t Stifle Debate: Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn’t mean that scientists concur mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear. People in northern climes might enjoy improved weather and longer growing seasons. Don’t Ignore the Cost: Global warming solutions pushed by environmental groups are notoriously expensive. Just signing on to the Kyoto treaty would have cost the United States several hundred billion dollars each year, according to estimates from the U.S. government generated during President Bill Clinton’s term. Every story that talks about new regulations or forced cutbacks on emissions should discuss the cost of those proposals. Report Accurately on Statistics: Accurate temperature records have been kept only since the end of the 19th Century, shortly after the world left the Little Ice Age. So while recorded temperatures are increasing, they are not the warmest ever. A 2003 study by Harvard and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “20th Century Climate Not So Hot,” “determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years. StephenB

Smith, we can certainly test your interest. Can you derive which amino acid will be presented at the peptide binding site by the spatial arrangement of bases in a codon? If not, why not. Upright BiPed

I Googled the first of your claims.

So, you didn't read the article or analyze the argument. Thank you for your admission.

The point of my post was to allow you to check the source of other claims before someone else checks them out and maybe finds them wanting, misrepresented or exaggerated, thus further reducing your credibility as a reliable discussant.

No, the point of your post was to change the subject from the argument I presented to me, as if was even possible to make a broad argument without using second hand sources. The subject is the entire history of deception by Global alarmists in the 20th Century. I am not surprised that you found excuses not to read it.

StephenB

Geez Smith, I thought overt character assassination was just your means for dealing with physical evidence that you don't like and can't refute. Now we find its also the means by which you pay no attention to someone. Upright BiPed

Good grief, Smith at #126 I showed Radio exactly from whom I became aquantied with using the term (note: it's very much a physicist's term in this context, explained to me directly by Howard Pattee) ... and so in response, you actually take the time to go find someone else who uses the term, and have done this for the express purpose of conducting more character assassignation. Upright BiPed

It's easy enough to find the NYT artcle. No claim of impending doom, no certainty, no "billions" marked to die. just a discussion about the possibility of another glacial period (a natural enough thing wonder only ~40 years after the fact of the ice age was established)

Meanwhile, do you have anything of substance to say about the pattern of deception that I outlined?

There is none. You have consistently been wrong and at the very least sloppy in presenting evidence (including misrepresenting a near-direct quote from a "skeptic" blog as your own memory, as I pointed out in 25). Given your own history of mistakes and sloppiness in this thread, I'd be very careful about casting aspersions on others. wd400

SB I try to build bridges but you seem determined to keep a gap. I actually accepted my error in the very first comment I made on this thread. I then presented evidence that there was much more media coverage of global warming than global cooling in the 70s. But really I am tired of endless bickering. I leave it to the others. At least we have corrected two of your errors. Mark Frank

StephenB: “The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.” That's very nice, but we just found it interesting that billions would die when the world's human population was only a billion or so. Perhaps they meant to include the cattle.

Jonah 4,11: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

StephenB: Meanwhile, do you have anything of substance to say about the pattern of deception that I outlined? Don't see a pattern of deception, unless you are still going on about Nimoy and "In Search of", and headlines that end in question marks. Zachriel

Aurelio Smith

I guess there’s no chance StephenB will consider checking out his sources before posting in future.

Wow. I must have hit a nerve. The global warming enthusiasts are becoming all unglued.. All you have to do is investigate the last link that Kairosfocus provided @1. If you would care to address the substance of the argument, I am available. Was the history of the deception misrepresented? Make you case. StephenB

Zachriel

That’s interesting as the world’s human population was then less than two billion

From MRC Business: "Fire and Ice." "The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.” Meanwhile, do you have anything of substance to say about the pattern of deception that I outlined? Do you deny the inconsistency at every turn? StephenB

Mark Frank

I had hoped the fact that we were able to point in detail where you were wrong would be evidence that these “alarmists” at least were not “benighted opponents of scientific endeavour” and you might be a little less sure of your beliefs about climate scientists.

Irrelevant. If you want to revisit past errors, all we need to do is point to your error that prompted this very post. We are discussing the historical record of the global cooling and heating deception. Please stay on topic and address the point. If you think the history is substantially different from what I have summarized, have at it. StephenB

Stephen B: 1895—The Ice Age is coming. “Billions will die.” That's interesting as the world's human population was then less than two billion. Zachriel

SB This is a real disappointment. We had a civilised, objective, detailed discussion of the facts and now you revert to strap lines and caricatures. I had hoped the fact that we were able to point in detail where you were wrong would be evidence that these "alarmists" at least were not "benighted opponents of scientific endeavour" and you might be a little less sure of your beliefs about climate scientists. Mark Frank

Mark Frank

Can I once more tie this back to Barry’s previous thread which asserted that sceptics were “sober-minded champions of dispassionate science” while alarmists were “benighted opponents of scientific endeavour”. Do you think he was fair? I am particularly annoyed by Pav’s comment about the “the childish level of scientific rigor that is employed by the alarmists.”

So, you think they are being unfair? Let's think back. This is not the first time around the block: Here’s a quick history of attitudes and comments from some scientists (yes scientists) and journalists: (Dates are approximated) 1895—The Ice Age is coming. “Billions will die.” 1920---The Ice Age is here. The world may be “frozen up again.” 1950---Forget about what we said in 1920, things are heating up—big time. 1975---Forget about what we said in 1950, its’ going to get cold, cold, cold! 1995---Forget about what we said in 1975, it’s going to get hot, hot, hot! 2010---Forget about what we said in 1990. It will get hot, hot, hot and that may cause things to get cold, cold, cold. It’s called “climate change.” If it gets too hot or if it gets too cold, man-made emissions caused it. No matter what happens, we can’t lose. Further, there is nothing to debate. If you disagree, you are anti-science. StephenB

No Mark, it is not an "assertion" of mine. It is a prediction from logical necessity, borne out by biology and physics. If the physics won't do it for you... You have "clearly made an error" and it isn't subject to change. Period. cheers... Upright BiPed

#119 UB As you know that is a much disputed assertion of yours. I am talking about instances where I have clearly made an error. Mark Frank

Mark, you are wrong about the representative nature of the spatial arrangement of nucleotides in a codon. Upright BiPed

Andre We weren't talking about my errors until you raised the subject and accused me of hypocrisy. I responded. Now I am raising the subject of your errors to allow you to refute any implications of hypocrisy. Mark Frank

Mark We are not talking about me or my errors. Andre

#133 Andre

So when will you sorry lot admit it when you’re wrong? You’ve been on numerous occasions and not a blip from your mouths………

How about my first comment on this thread? Having posted here for about 10 years I am sure there are numerous other places I have been proved to be wrong. I hope I have admitted it (it is emotionally a difficult thing to do - hence the hats-off to SB). If I have failed to do this please point them out to me. While you are at it you might want to show us how it is done by linking to places where you have admitted your errors. Mark Frank

#133 Andre, I'm ready to admit I'm wrong when I'm shown to be so. I may add that I much prefer being wrong to being not even wrong. Piotr

Seversky @ 43: It's pretty petty of you to focus on whether or not someone is in *an exact subspecialty* (e.g., climatology). If you have scientific training at all, you will know that many physical scientists, mathematicians, even economists have highly advanced training in mathematical modelling, and skills in mathematical modelling are in principle transferable from one science to another. I know of a statistician whose mathematical modelling talents are respected (and used professionally) by geneticists and all kinds of other scientists. They apparently don't think he is too incompetent to understand the difference between a good model and a lousy model in their various fields of science, even though he has a Ph.D. in none of them. The issue in the global warming debate is how good the models are, and it is not *only* climatologists who are capable of giving input on that. Physicists know a great deal about heating and cooling, for example, and astronomers/astrophysicists may know a great deal about sunspot activity, geologists may know a lot about the relationship of earth, sea, and air interaction, etc. The other point to be made is that you seem to have a double standard. If you are going to say that only climatologists, not physicists, geologists, etc. have any right to comment on global warming models and predictions etc., then you should also be saying that only narrowly *evolutionary biologists* have any right to comment on evolutionary theory, evolutionary mechanisms, etc. But look at who some of the leading commenters in the public debates have been: Larry Moran (biochemist by training, evolutionary biologist apparently only by self-proclamation, since in the last ten years his contributions to evolutionary theory have appeared in blogs rather than in peer-reviewed journals of evolutionary science) Nick Matzke (when he first started public debates on evolution, had as his highest degree an M.A. in Geography -- not evolutionary biology -- but was cited as an expert on the bacterial flagellum by all the Darwinists) Ken Miller (cell biologist, not evolutionary biologist) Francis Collins (geneticist, not evolutionary biologist) Dan Dennett (philosopher, not evolutionary biologist) Rob Pennock (computer programmer and philosopher, not evolutionary biologist) Barbara Forrest (philosopher, not evolutionary biologist) Dennis Venema and Darrel Falk (geneticists, not evolutionary biologists) Elizabeth Liddle (degrees in music performance, architecture, and psychology/neurology, not evolutionary biology) Jeffrey Shallit (degrees in Mathematics, not evolutionary biology) Sam Harris (degrees in Psychology, not evolutionary biology) Weinberg, Krauss, Hawking, Stenger, etc. (degrees in physics/cosmology, not evolutionary biology) Christopher Hitchens (controversial journalist, not scientist at all) Michael Shermer (degrees in religious studies, not evolutionary biology) Alan Fox (degree in biochemistry, not evolutionary biology) Most of your pals at the Skeptical Zone, Panda's Thumb, etc. (few degrees in specifically evolutionary biology, many of them with no biological training at all, mere pop-science geeks who spend a lot of time on the internet) So what is the rule here? That no one is allowed to comment on any scientific subject, even if they have a very high level of training in a related subject, unless they are in the subspecialty that allegedly has monopoly expertise in that subject? Or is the rule to be that anyone who can demonstrate knowledge regarding the issues at stake -- no matter what their degree or formal training was in -- has a right to be at the discussion table? If it's the former, then I want to see some posts by Seversky telling Liz Liddle, Larry Moran, Ken Miller, etc. to shut up about evolutionary theory because they aren't competent to argue about it. If it's the latter, then I want to see petty arguments that "he's not a climatologist, so he can't know anything about global warming" abandoned. Are you capable of intellectual consistency here, Seversky? Or only of partisanship? Timaeus

Piotr & Mark Frank... So when will you sorry lot admit it when you're wrong? You've been on numerous occasions and not a blip from your mouths......... You're not on some higher moral plain, in fact your hypocrisy shows what you really are..... Andre

StephenB, I add my congratulations to Mark's; I mean it. Mark Frank @111: My sentiments, exactly. Piotr

SB I congratulate you on twice admitting errors in this debate - "only 1% of scientists believe in global warming" and "the earth has cooled 1.08 degrees since 1998". I know this is not easy. Can I once more tie this back to Barry's previous thread which asserted that sceptics were “sober-minded champions of dispassionate science” while alarmists were “benighted opponents of scientific endeavour”. Do you think he was fair? I am particularly annoyed by Pav's comment about the "the childish level of scientific rigor that is employed by the alarmists." Mark Frank

We needn't jack this thread to have this conversation. Nothing will come of it anyway. -cheers Upright BiPed

Radio at 107

Uprights argument is based on the assumption that the genetic translation system is irreducible

This is not true. The core of my argument is not about irreducibility, but about the necessary function of the system. Even so, I do not assume that genetic translation is irreducible. The notion that translation is irreducible to a representation and interpretant was a prediction of logical necessity, and as it turns out, our universal observation of the natural world has borne this out to be true - without exception. People who question this generally seem to do so without addressing the physics involved. Typically the first thing to go is translation itself. Upright BiPed

Radio at 103,

Why do you continually use the phrase “dynamic properties?”

Firstly, I do not believe that I "continually use the phrase". I think if you did a search of my name and that phrase together you'd not get much in return. Even so, I think it is a fitting term to use. It is a term that I have found in use among accomplished physicists and others who concern themselves with the physical issues surround the epistemic cut between energy/rate/time-dependent chemical reactions and energy/rate/time-independent controls. ”This is as far as von Neumann’s logic takes us. The main point of his logic is that open-ended evolution requires more than a complex time-dependent dynamics and complex chemical reactions. There must be a time-independent passive memory that by means of a coded description controls the dynamical rates of specific constructions or chemical syntheses … The physical conditions necessary for memory storage are relatively simple to state as contrasted to the conditions for writing and reading of memory. The first condition is that there exist many inherently equiprobable constraint structures with adequate stability. Equiprobable means that the structures are energy degenerate or the energy of each state is the same. These states need not be exactly the same energy as long as the energy differences do not significantly affect the setting of the state by writing or the communication of the state by reading.” – Physicists, HH Pattee

Wouldn’t “chemical properties” be a better fit in the three examples you used?

You can think of it in “chemical properties” if you wish. I think the chasing around of words is mostly a waste of time beyond a certain point. In my experience, it is often the low-hanging fruit for those who want to ignore the core issues. People can question words to no end, and after all, who can be against “clarity”. It’s an effective diversion. Upright BiPed

The phrase "chemical properties," I think, would be a much better description. Water boiling, iron and oxygen interacting, and the series of interactions that lead to genetic translation are controlled by the chemical properties of the molecules involved. Uprights argument is based on the assumption that the genetic translation system is irreducible: that a much simpler system can't carry out protein synthesis in a much less controlled, albeit biologically relevant, way. Radioaction

Radioaction: Upright, apparently you have fans. LoL! Radioaction: Why do you continually use the phrase “dynamic properties?” Because the properties are dynamic, not static. Was that really so difficult? Radioaction: Wouldn’t “chemical properties” be a better fit in the three examples you used? Why? Are they static, as opposed to dynamic? Mung

StephenB:

Still, there are a number of scientists who hold that there has been some cooling since 1998. In addition to Lovejoy, we also have Judith Curry, chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Neither of the two says what you ascribe to them. As I mentioned above, Lovejoy's number for the temperature difference between 1998 and 2013 is −0.01 K. The figure you ascribe to him, −0.37 K, is not the cooling but the natural contribution offsetting the expected anthropogenic warming of +0.36 K. Curry argues that we are in a pause, not in a cooling phase. Here is her definition of a pause:

Further, addressing these questions requires an unambiguous definition of ‘warming’, ‘stopped’, and ‘paused’. ‘Warming’ means a rate of change of temperature that is greater than zero. Here I define “stopped” to mean a rate of change of temperature that is less than or equal to zero. Here I define “pause” to mean a rate of increase of temperature that is less than 0.17 – 0.2 C/decade.

So a pause, per Curry, is a slight warming, not cooling, trend! skram

Piotr

OK, if you took the number from Mr Worthington, you didn’t make it up. He did...

It appears that someone did. I checked the RSS website and found nothing there to support Worthington's claim. So the case is closed on that one. I was wrong about that number. Still, there are a number of scientists who hold that there has been some cooling since 1998. In addition to Lovejoy, we also have Judith Curry, chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Attention in the public debate seems to be moving away from the 15-17 year ‘pause’ to the cooling since 2002 (note: I am receiving inquiries about this from journalists). This period since 2002 is scientifically interesting, since it coincides with the ‘climate shift’ circa 2001/2002 posited by Tsonis and others. This shift and the subsequent slight cooling trend provides a rationale for inferring a slight cooling trend over the next decade or so, rather than a flat trend from the 15 yr ‘pause’.” Interestingly, a great many people are discussing this "pause," which is based on the proposition that global warming stopped just before at at the turn of the century and that a cooling trend will follow. I won't give the names of all the scientists who hold that position since it would take up too much space. StephenB

Upright, apparently you have fans. But I’ll humor you and play along for now. Why do you continually use the phrase “dynamic properties?” Wouldn’t “chemical properties” be a better fit in the three examples you used? And doing this, in the third example, I think I would disagree with you. The chemical properties of nucleotides and amino acids control genetic translation. Yes this is a very specific series of interactions between molecules that are well suited to the job, but no one claims this system appeared out of nowhere. Radioaction

I wrote: (see the caption of the graph paraded by your “layman”) Oops, my mistake -- he doesn't even link to the graph, he only mentions it. But it's in all likelihood this one, judging from the description: http://heartland.org/issues/environment http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/06/satellites-show-no-global-warming-for-17-years-5-months/ Piotr

SB

I didn’t just make up the number 1.08, no matter how often Piotr and others falsely accuse me of it. As I said, I picked it up from more than one source. I noticed a chart from “Remote Sensing Systems” that provides information to NASA. Several writers have alluded to it, showing the appropriate graphs.

I am sure you didn’t make it up. I expect you got it from sceptical blogs and such like.  Of course without references I cannot be sure what they are referring to but as I said back in #87:

1998 was a freak year and if you take that as your base, take the very lowest of the subsequent years (2007 I think), and look only at the RSS satellite measurements (which measure the upper atmosphere) then you can find this difference.

(This is in Celsius incidentally not Fahrenheit. Where did your comment “You forgot to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.” come from? You really don’t seem to be too familiar with the material you are quoting.) Such a move is obviously not a reasonable way to measure a trend and does not refer to a drop between 1998 and now – but sounds good. It is easy to check. Just look at the  global temperature record. It is easy to see that the only way you can get a difference of over a degree is by using the green (RSS) line and taking the peak of 1998 and the trough just before 2010. (It is also marked in Centigrade).

Here is just one example from a layman who writes for the Pensacola Journal: “NASA’s data proves there has been “no” atmospheric or oceanic global warming for the last 18 years. And that the earth warmed only 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit over the 35 years since NASA started measuring the data in 1979. The bulk of that warming occurred between 1979 and 1998, with temperatures actually dropping ever since. In fact, data from NASA’s and NOAA’s “Remote Sensing Systems Chart” show the world is 1.08 degrees cooler than in 1998. Additionally, the world’s oceans have been cooling for the last 11 years. More than 200 SSRC scientific researchers have validated the earth has entered a 30-year cooling cycle caused by solar hibernation with potentially catastrophic cold.”

As you say he is a layman. He seems to be falling for exactly what I described above. In addition there are some even more straightforward errors. It is not true that temperatures have been dropping ever since or that the world’s oceans have been cooling for the last 11 years.  I have no idea where he got the last sentence from but given the other sentences I very much doubt it is true. But please – there is a limit to how many sceptical quotes I am prepared to debunk. It takes too long and gets boring. I think the point is made. The 1.08 cooling figure is complete rubbish (I would have used a different word but KF might be looking). Mark Frank

StephenB, A layman writing for a newspaper (and not bothering to provide a reference for the 1.08 figure) is not a credible source of scientific information. Some of the diagrams circulated on the Internet to show "global cooling" can be traced back to sources such as Christopher Monckton (see the caption of the graph paraded by your "layman"). Now, Monckton may be various things: he is the 3rd Viscount of Brenchley; a former High Sheriff of Kent; he is a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta; a UKIP activist, etc. But he is not a climatologist. In his youth he studied Classics and journalism, and being a hereditary peer doesn't make him a universal guru. When he takes arms against a professional, the outcome looks like this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jul/14/monckton-john-abraham OK, if you took the number from Mr Worthington, you didn't make it up. He did, and you only accepted the figure uncritically, without thinking for yourself. Nevertheless, you are in a hole, so you'd better stop digging. Piotr

StephenB, Lovejoy doesn't claim that the world has cooled down by 0.37 K. If you look at Table I in his paper you will see that the net temperature change was −0.01 K. He says that the expected change from anthropogenic warming is +0.36 K and thus attributes the difference of −0.37 K to natural cooling. So −0.37 K is not the observed cooling since 1998. That would be −0.01 K. skram

Mark Frank

0.37 C is 0.67 F – still way short of 1.08. When you quoted the 1.08 you never gave indication it was Fahrenheit (which would have been rather bizarre in a scientific context).

I didn't just make up the number 1.08, no matter how often Piotr and others falsely accuse me of it. As I said, I picked it up from more than one source. I noticed a chart from "Remote Sensing Systems" that provides information to NASA. Several writers have alluded to it, showing the appropriate graphs. Here is just one example from a layman who writes for the Pensacola Journal: "NASA's data proves there has been "no" atmospheric or oceanic global warming for the last 18 years. And that the earth warmed only 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit over the 35 years since NASA started measuring the data in 1979. The bulk of that warming occurred between 1979 and 1998, with temperatures actually dropping ever since. In fact, data from NASA's and NOAA's "Remote Sensing Systems Chart" show the world is 1.08 degrees cooler than in 1998. Additionally, the world's oceans have been cooling for the last 11 years. More than 200 SSRC scientific researchers have validated the earth has entered a 30-year cooling cycle caused by solar hibernation with potentially catastrophic cold." — Kenny Worthington

However, I did actually consider whether you might have been using Fahrenheit for some reason but when I saw that Fahrenheit also was miles away from 1.08 I decided that couldn’t be what you meant. I know you are honest enough to retract your statement.

I won't retract as long as I have credible information that I am right. Will you retract? StephenB

This fragment is also worth quoting (emphasis added):

The reality of the climate system is that, due to natural climate variability, it is entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of "cooling" superimposed on the longer-term warming trend due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Climate scientists pay little attention to these short-term fluctuations as the short term "cooling trends" mentioned above are statistically insignificant and fitting trends to such short periods is not very meaningful in the context of long-term climate change. On the other hand, segments of the general public do pay attention to these fluctuations and some critics cite the most recent period as evidence against anthropogenic-forced climate change.

Full text here (Easterling & Wehner 2009). Piotr

SB: Claim I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Evidence Here is my interpretation: only 1% of those expressing an opinion endorsed the claim that human activity is the main cause of global warming. Your evidence does not support your claim, your evidence is that 1 % of those expressing an opinion say human activity is the main cause, Your claim requires using this one piece of evidence to show 99% of those who expressed an opinion say that human activity played or could play no role Then you might modify your claim that" while we cannot know what all scientists think but in this one instance in the unknown percentage of papers which expressed an opinion on human activity being the main cause 1% expressed that opinion, as for the remaining 99%.....( listing the appropriate %)" , perhaps also some level of confidence in the findings. velikovskys

SB #92

I know that you are honest enough to retract that statement. You forgot to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

0.37 C is 0.67 F – still way short of 1.08. When you quoted the 1.08 you never gave indication it was Fahrenheit (which would have been rather bizarre in a scientific context). However, I did actually consider whether you might have been using Fahrenheit for some reason but when I saw that Fahrenheit also was miles away from 1.08 I decided that couldn’t be what you meant. I  know you are honest enough to retract your statement.

Lovejoy is not the only person to say that there was a natural cooling event in 1998.

To be pedantic 1998 was outstandingly warm. I guess you meant since 1998. As I explained – if you take that as a start point and deliberately finish on a low point you can show a small amount of cooling. Needless to say that is not the way trends are explored statistically. Lovejoy did not describe any cooling event (as far as I can see). He only talked about how natural cooling fluctuations might slow down the rate of increase.

I have also read other reports that use the number 1.08 and others which indicate a cooling trend without assigning a number.

I think you will understand that I would like to see the references. You have not demonstrated a very firm grasp of the papers you have used as references to date.

None of that changes the overall warming trend of .7 degrees in 135 years, which is insignificant. It will go the other direction in time.

Reference please.

Yes, I read the paper. A natural cooling fluctuation sometimes involves a temporary decrease in temperature, not simply a slower rise in the temperature.

It does sometimes – but Lovejoy is not saying this happened since 1998 and certainly not by 1.08 (F or C).

From NASA: “In their recently published research paper2 entitled “Is the climate warming or cooling?”, David Easterling of the U.S. National Climate Data Center and Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that naturally occurring periods of no warming or even slight cooling can easily be part of a longer-term pattern of global warming.

Yes. So what. That is not the same as saying a period of cooling actually occurred. It is only saying that if happens that is consistent with long term global warming. This is what Easterling and Wehner actually wrote (my emphasis): It is true that if we fit a linear trend line to the annual global land-ocean surface  air temperature (Smith et al. 2005) shown in Figure 1 for the period 1998 to 2008 there is  no real trend, even though global temperatures remain well above the long-term average.  The unusually strong 1997-1998 El Niño contributed to unusual warmth in the global  temperature for 1998 at the start of this period resulting in only a small, statistically  insignificant positive trend. However, if we fit a trend line to the same annual global  land-ocean temperatures for the 1977-1985 period or the 1981-1989 period we also get no trend, even though these periods are embedded in the 1975-2008 period showing a  substantial overall warming. Furthermore, if we drop 1998 and fit the trend to the period  1999-2008 we indeed get a strong, statistically significant positive trend. There is a another significance to this. Barry’s previous post was about how sceptics were “sober-minded champions of dispassionate science” while alarmists were “benighted opponents of scientific endeavour”. I hope, at least, that this dialogue will convince you that my opinion is based on a detailed and objective reading of the available material – even if you disagree with the conclusions. Mark Frank

#93 StephenB, I didn't because it isn't available online for free, but I can share a copy with anyone who's interested (see #82). Piotr

Piotr

I hope any genuinely interested onlookers will find the time to check up the sources for themselves.

You provided links to Cook's report. Did you provide links to Legates' report? StephenB

SB: “Shaun Lovejoy, professor of physics, concludes that there has been a natural cooling fluctuation of about 0.28 to 0.37 degrees Celsius since 1998.” Mark

Well 0.37 is a lot less than 1.08.

I know that you are honest enough to retract that statement. You forgot to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. Lovejoy is not the only person to say that there was a natural cooling event in 1998. I just cited him because his name is memorable. I have also read other reports that use the number 1.08 and others which indicate a cooling trend without assigning a number. None of that changes the overall warming trend of .7 degrees in 135 years, which is insignificant. It will go the other direction in time.

However, if you read the paper you will see that they are not saying the world has cooled that much. They are saying a natural cooling fluctuation accounts for the fact that temperatures have not risen as fast as they did in the preceding 20 years.

Yes, I read the paper. A natural cooling fluctuation sometimes involves a temporary decrease in temperature, not simply a slower rise in the temperature. From NASA: "In their recently published research paper2 entitled "Is the climate warming or cooling?", David Easterling of the U.S. National Climate Data Center and Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that naturally occurring periods of no warming or even slight cooling can easily be part of a longer-term pattern of global warming. StephenB

SB: To sum things up. One argument holds that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is man made. It is clearly false and made up. Piotr

You haven’t had a look at the article by Cook et al. (2013), have you?

I didn't associate that position to Cook. I said "one argument that is made,".. (When all else fails, read the sentence) It is a commonly held lie. From the NASA website: "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities." Will you retract your misrepresentation of my position? Of course, you won't. I can predict it from your behavior.. Meanwhile, I asked you for a summary of Legates' conclusions that exposes the lie. You did not answer the challenge. Mark Frank did answer the challenge and I accepted his formulation: “Only 1% explicitly endorsed the clain that man-made activity was the main cause of global warming.” I adopted that formulation. The relationship between that commonly-held lie and Cook's dubious research is unclear. Meanwhile, you are much better at issuing challenges than you are at responding to them.

Go have your way, and thanks for your demonstration of denialism in action.

Another misrepresentation and another example of your inability to engage in an honest dialogue. StephenB

To sum things up. One argument holds that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is man made. It is clearly false and made up. You haven't had a look at the article by Cook et al. (2013), have you? (cf. the link in #83). If you had, you would not be misrepresenting its conclusions again (actually making stuff up yourself). All right, I've had enough of your weasel tricks. Go have your way, and thanks for your demonstration of denialism in action. I hope any genuinely interested onlookers will find the time to check up the sources for themselves. Piotr

#85 SB I am not sure how you got to: "One argument holds that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is man made. It is clearly false and made up." There is evidence for this as 97% of the scientists endorsed global warming explicitly or implicitly - although I would share reservations about Cook's methods. Anyhow you have inspired me to  look through this thread and the previous one. I see a couple of other statements that you never justified. While you are on a roll you might want to look at these as well. goodusername claimed that only 3 or 4 articles on global cooling existed You only have to look at what he actually wrote to see this is false. The world is 1.08 degrees cooler than it was in 1998. This is more complicated. Although you provided some references referring to global cooling none of them supported this particular statement (see below for specifics). In fact the explanation is quite easy to see. 1998 was a freak year and if you take that as your base, take the very lowest of the subsequent years (2007 I think), and look only at the RSS satellite measurements (which measure the upper atmosphere) then you can find this difference. However, this doesn’t mean the world is 1.08 degrees cooler. It means it was 1.08 degrees cooler one year in the upper atmosphere. I assume you agree this is a different statement. It differs both in spirit (measuring a trend by selecting two extremes is a very well-known fraud) and in letter (now is not 2007). Your quotes which are intended to support your claim. The first two appear to be from this NASA article

–…”some information sources — blogs, websites, media articles and other voices — highlight that the planet has been cooling since a peak in global temperature in 1998. This cooling is only part of the picture, according to a recent study that has looked at the world’s temperature record over the past century or more.

As explained above you can show a slight cooling if you carefully select the beginning and end points. However, to get it to amount to anything close to 1.08 degrees you have to be highly selective and choose the set of measurements and stop about 7 years ago.

In their recently published research paper2 entitled “Is the climate warming or cooling?”, David Easterling of the U.S. National Climate Data Center and Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that naturally occurring periods of no warming or even slight cooling can easily be part of a longer-term pattern of global warming.

Yes. But that is not the same as saying that there has been a period of slight cooling and it certainly does not support the rather dramatic figures of 1.08 degrees. and again,

“Shaun Lovejoy, professor of physics, concludes that there has been a natural cooling fluctuation of about 0.28 to 0.37 degrees Celsius since 1998.”

Well 0.37 is a lot less than 1.08. However, if you read the paper you will see that they are not saying the world has cooled that much. They are saying a natural cooling fluctuation accounts for the fact that temperatures have not risen as fast as they did in the preceding 20 years. Mark Frank

Mark Frank

"Only 1% explicitly endorsed the clain that man-made activity was the main cause of global warming."

Done. So it is; so shall it be. StephenB

Piotr

Why should I interpret a snippet scissored out from its context when I have access to the full article?

To sum things up. One argument holds that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is man made. It is clearly false and made up. Even so, it is a clean, concise summary that can be used for propaganda purposes. To counter it, another summary must be made based on empirical evidence. Hence, my (amended) formulation [based on Mark Frank's summary, which I like] "Only 1% explicitly endorsed the claim that man-made activity was the main cause of global warming." That's fair and accurate. StephenB

Aurelio Smith, So I get it. Unable to actually articulate a flaw in the observations, your response is to conduct a passive form of character assassination. Is this your third or fourth time at this? It's quite a compliment. Upright BiPed

By the way, here's Cook et al. (2013): http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/pdf/1748-9326_8_2_024024.pdf Piotr

StephenB

Now give me your interpretation.

Why should I interpret a snippet scissored out from its context when I have access to the full article? Science and Education is behind a paywall, but I have downloaded both the paper by Bedford & Cook and the rejoinder by Legates et al., and can e-mail you the PDFs if you are interested. If you really want to discuss Legates's calculations, you should read the bloody paper first. Legates et al. engage into a lot of nitpicking as to what constitutes "genuine" endorsement. It isn't enough if the abstract says, in so may words, "We strongly believe that the warming trend is anthropogenic and its results will be catastrophic in the long term." No, no, it's unquantified, scientifically valueless, and doesn't guarantee that the authors aren't merely bowing down to authority. They have to quanitify their support -- prove it with numbers already in the abstract (it doesn't count if they do so in the article), otherwise it won't qualify as full endorsement in Legates's book. Using a similar trick it's easy to "prove" that no scientist on earth endorses intelligent design. How many serious journal papers express quantified explicit endorsement of intelligent design in the abstract (no matter what they say in the body of the article or what their results imply)? I'm sure you would protest if anyone used such a method to assess scholarly support for an idea you like. So please, no double standards. Piotr

Jerad @78, The Rebel Speech project has grown into something much bigger than I anticipated. My understanding of the architecture and operating principles of cortical memory has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Think stuff like, "cocktail party effect", noise tolerance, unsupervised learning, etc. These things alone would be extraordinary in their own right but the really big surprise is something else altogether, something that will knock everyone's socks off. That's all I can say and, besides, this is neither the place nor the time for it. Wait for it. Mapou

Mapou #77

As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I just happen to believe that the proof should precede the claim or at least accompany it. It won’t be too long now.

The Rebel Speech demo? And accompanying document. Or so it would appear from your September 19th blog entry.

Briefly, Rebel Speech is a biologically plausible, spiking neural network. It is a novel machine learning program that can learn to recognize speech in any language just like we do, by listening. Unlike most speech recognition systems which use either a Bayesian or a supervised deep learning model or both, Rebel Speech has a winner-take-all mechanism. Essentially, during learning, the program compiles as many pattern sequences as possible and then allows them to compete for activation. During recognition, the sequence with the highest number of hits is the winner. There is magic in the air.

Jerad

Jerad:

If we have to wait I guess we’ll just have to wait. How come you can’t talk about it?

As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I just happen to believe that the proof should precede the claim or at least accompany it. It won't be too long now. Mapou

Mapou #75

Sorry. It’s not yet ready for public release. All I can say right now is that it’s about intelligence and the brain, and something else that I can’t talk about. Don’t worry, though. You will know when it comes out. And you won’t like it.

If we have to wait I guess we'll just have to wait. How come you can't talk about it? Jerad

Jerad:

Mapou #42

If you only knew what I have been working on, you’d defecate in your pants and go into an apoplectic fit.

Go on then, tell us what you have been working on. Links to any of your publications much appreciated.

Sorry. It's not yet ready for public consumption. All I can say right now is that it's about intelligence and the brain, and something else that I can't talk about. Don't worry, though. You will know when it comes out. And you won't like it. Mapou

SB Thanks for retracting your claim. I don't quite accept: only 1% explicitly endorsed the claim that man-made activity causes global warming. About 25% fell into that category. Only 1% explicitly endorsed the clain that man-mde activity was the main cause of global warming. Having said that, all but 3% gave some kind of endorsement. They didn't deny that mad-made activity was the main cause and they weren't asked if it was the main cause so there is no particular reason why they should explicitly say so in the abstract. Mark Frank

Mapou #42

If you only knew what I have been working on, you’d defecate in your pants and go into an apoplectic fit.

Go on then, tell us what you have been working on. Links to any of your publications much appreciated. Jerad

The Revelle & Gore story http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939326_283.pdf Andre

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. Carl Sagan There is no such thing as man-made global warming or cooling, The temperature variations are natural fluxuations that have been documented since the 12th century, what we have are scare mongers, and the latest global warming scare from Al Gore was based on what Revelle assumed in the 50's that man made CO2 could cause global warming. Revelle later retracted his claim but Gore saw dollar signs. Andre

Radioaction, The recorded temperature that water molecules boil into steam is based on observed regularities. Those regularities stem from the dynamic properties of water molecules. When oxygen reacts with iron to form rust (iron-oxide), that product is based on the dynamic properties of iron and oxygen. The mapping of nucleic acids to amino acids is also based on observed regularities. Those regularities do not stem from the dynamic properties of nucleic acids. In order to organize the cell, the mapping between nucleotides and amino acids must be established in the translation system while preserving the physicochemical discontinuity between them. Otherwise, the system could not function. Upright BiPed

Mapou, I was just drawing a simple parallel in response to posts from you and others. You can question all you want, but when you are provided with scientific evidence and you choose to ignore it simply because it disagrees with your own preconceived notions; that is science-denial. Radioaction

You lost me at “non-dynamic regularities,” Upright. This seems a little redundant to me actually, but either way I have no idea what you are talking about. We are talking about biology, right? Maybe I’m “anti-intellectual,” who knows. Radioaction

Want to know what I remember from the '70's? Hal Lindsey. What a fraud. IMO "Jesus is coming back any day now alarmism" trumps "global cooling alarmism." Mung

1% of papers, which you must admit is quite different than your first claim? wd400

wd400. You are using the wrong quote. Reread the proper quote. Even so, I am willing to amend my claim as follows: ..."only 1% explicitly endorsed the claim that man-made activity causes global warming." I think that accurately captures the spirit of the quote using my own words. StephenB

A simple questionnaire for StephenB: 1. What is a greenhouse gas? 2. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? 3. Has atmospheric CO2 been increasing for the past century? If he answers those questions, there are follow-up questions. Daniel King

Stephen B, There isn't much to interpret, is there? 41 of ~12k papers explicitly state something like "the world has warmed over the 20th century, and most of this warming is attributable to human activities". That's pretty obviously not the same thing as 1% of scientists (not papers) "believe" in man-made warming (rather than have explicitly stated in the abstract of a paper that most recent warming is the result of human activities). That retraction is now well and truly overdue wd400

Piotr I issue the same challenge to you that I presented to Mark Frank: Give me your interpretation of the following quote: …”only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.” Here is my interpretation: only 1% of those expressing an opinion endorsed the claim that human activity is the main cause of global warming. Now give me your interpretation. StephenB

I really hope that the climate scientologists go with the spin that it was all a big CIA conspiracy. BartM

This information was copied from my website, please add a source link in the article thank you. http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html Poptech

The 71 is all the papers in AMS, Nature and discoverable in JSTOR and references therein. That fact alone should tell you how different the scientific understanding of long term climate change (be it warmer or cooler) was in the 70s than today. Your list of papers above further underlines the point -- the CIA reports are the only ones that come close to a consensus in an organisation. Most are one or a few researchers talking about an hypothesis, one of them is someone talking about the glacial-interglacial cycle and the establishment of a new ice age in the next 10,000 years! wd400

The News desk is signing off for a few hours, which will enable naturalists/Darwinists to pile up abuse. But if only global warming were true. Vast areas of the planet would become habitable and cultivable. Why isn't that good? News

Ok here's the math being used for the claim that there was NO global cooling consensus in the 60s and 70s: Total papers reviewed: 71 over 15 years Yes, that's the grand total. 71. Even John Cook's refuted "97% consensus" paper claims to have reviewed over 12,000 of which 4,000 were used in the study. Sorry, but 71 papers over 15 years is waaay too small a sample size to make the claim that there was no global cooling consensus. BartM

@53 BartM See the link above: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/66785/#comment-543816 Piotr

Radioaction:

I called the anti-vaccine movement “science-deniers” because that is exactly what they are doing: denying the scientific evidence continually provided to them that showed vaccines do not cause autism.

Yeah but what does it have to do with criticizing the science behind global warming and ice age predictions that never pan out?

I would assume that anyone else who uses the term “science-deniers” has a similar reason: they are describing someone who denies scientific evidence from an unscientific standpoint.

Sure. But everybody who's a taxpayer has the right to question, not just the evidence, but also the interpretation of the evidence and the motivation of the interpreters. There is a lot of room for conflicts of interest in this business, not the least of which is that it employs a lot of people who would not be employed if the science was shown to be shoddy. Mapou

For those of you claiming that global cooling was NOT the consensus in the 70s, please help me out with the following: (1) How many papers were reviewed to make this determination? I need the total and the range of years these papers cover. (2) What is the breakdown of the numbers for each position (global cooling, neutral, global warming)? Please no links. Just give me the numbers. BartM

StephenB, If you still can't grasp the difference between "believe in man-made global warming" and "have explicitly declared properly quantified endorsement in their abstracts", despite all the explanations given so far, and despite being shown Legates's own table (which breaks down "endorsement" into several degrees) -- you are beyond help. You already owe us a couple of retractions. If they are not forthcoming, your credibility as an honest discussant is gone. Like Mark, I'm not going to waste any more of my time addressing your posts. Piotr

I would assume that anyone else who uses the term “science-deniers” has a similar reason: they are describing someone who denies scientific evidence from an unscientific standpoint.

Hmm. So this would include materialists who deny the simple fact that genetic translation requires non-dynamic regularities in order to organize the cell. Actually, I prefer "anti-intellectual" over "science denier". Upright BiPed

Mark Frank

My dispute is simply with your original claim that you have evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Until you admit that was an error I am not going to bother addressing anything else.

OK. Tell me how you interpret these words? What do you think Legates is saying: ...”only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.” Perhaps I will agree with your interpretation. If so, I will amend my claim accordingly. So tell me what you think he is saying. StephenB

I just came across this interesting site, which seems a brother-in-arms of Uncommon Descent : http://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science I noticed the name of Rupert Sheldrake among its principles. Axel

I called the anti-vaccine movement "science-deniers" because that is exactly what they are doing: denying the scientific evidence continually provided to them that showed vaccines do not cause autism. I would assume that anyone else who uses the term "science-deniers" has a similar reason: they are describing someone who denies scientific evidence from an unscientific standpoint. Radioaction

Why is it that nobody can criticise the scientific community without being called a "science denier"? Is the scientific community immune to public scrutiny? Can we trust the foxes to guard the chicken coop? I don't think so. The mainstream AI research community took the entire world to the cleaners for half a century. Their main idea that intelligence was all about symbol processing turned out to be a complete dud, wasting billions of dollars and fifty years of chasing a red herring. The few critics of symbolic AI, e.g., the Dreyfus brothers, were blacklisted and accused of being anti-science dualists or worse. Even after that embarrassing debacle, not one of those people offered an apology. PS. Did anybody in this thread come out against vaccination? Why the stupid strawman? Mapou

The science-deniers that skipped vaccines didn't think their choice would lead to catastrophe. Just take a look at the ongoing measles outbreak in California to see how that went. Maybe not the same scale of catastrophe, but tell that to the 70+ people who were infected by a disease that was considered to be eradicated from the US. Radioaction

SB

We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.”

Neat switch. My dispute is simply with your original claim that you have evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Until you admit that was an error I am not going to bother addressing anything else. Mark Frank

SB #34

”only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming.”

You have slightly simplified the quote but not significantly. However, it is a very long way from your ridiculous assertion that

I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming.

As shown in the table by far the majority of scientists (97%) did implicitly or explicitly endorse global warming - they just didn't happen to explicitly say that mankind was responsible for most it in the abstract. There is no reason to suppose that these scientists did not believe in global warming and good reason to suppose they did. Remember these were just the abstracts of papers that mentioned global warming. There is no reason why they should specifically say mankind was responsible for most of it in the abstract. If you will not accept that your conclusion does not remotely follow from Legate's paper than I despair of you ever admitting an error about anything. Mark Frank

Well, luckily there is an easy way to check on the claims for antibiotics, vaccines, and catastrophic anthropogenic climate change: Check the predictions against the real world results. Which is why I believe in vaccines and antibiotics, but doubt that human contributions to CO2 are going to lead to catastrophe. anthropic

From HuffPo

The 30,000 Global Warming Petition Is Easily-Debunked Propaganda [...] .1% of Signers Have a Background in Climatology The Petition Project website offers a breakdown of the areas of expertise of those who have signed the petition. In the realm of climate science it breaks it breaks down as such: Atmospheric Science (113) Climatology (39) Meteorology (341) Astronomy (59) Astrophysics (26) So only .1% of the individuals on the list of 30,000 signatures have a scientific background in Climatology. To be fair, we can add in those who claim to have a background in Atmospheric Science, which brings the total percentage of signatories with a background in climate change science to a whopping .5%.

Seversky

Jerad:

Amazing that science ever came up with lasers, GPS, vaccines, capacitors, integrated circuits, jet engines, solid state drives, etc. You do realise that GPS systems work because we understand relativistic effects on clocks? And that we can make semi-conductors because we understand quantum mechanics?

LOL. Most of this work was done decades and even centuries ago and mostly by non-materialists, non-atheists and non-Darwinists. The current usurpers/pretenders are just riding on the coattails of their predecessors and using that bully pulpit to spread their lies. Nobody's fooled.

Odd that Mapou, with his greater knowledge and understanding isn’t filthy rich, running some large corporation, creating lots and lots of valuable devices, medical techniques, analytic tools, etc that would greatly benefit all of mankind. Maybe he’s just too busy posting slanderous comments on this blog.

If you only knew what I have been working on, you'd defecate in your pants and go into an apoplectic fit. :-D

Sad too that his kind of rancorous comments is now allowed to be posted without any kind of moderating comment from the editors. But I guess if it’s a way then all’s fair eh?

Crybaby. Mapou

Not the most reliable of sources, granted, but this is from Wikipedia

Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Germany, conducted an online survey in August 2008, of 2,059 climate scientists from 34 different countries, the third survey on this topic by these authors.[11] A web link with a unique identifier was given to each respondent to eliminate multiple responses. A total of 375 responses were received giving an overall response rate of 18%. The climate change consensus results were published by Bray,[12] and another paper has also been published based on the survey.[13] The survey was composed of 76 questions split into a number of sections. There were sections on the demographics of the respondents, their assessment of the state of climate science, how good the science is, climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation, their opinion of the IPCC, and how well climate science was being communicated to the public. Most of the answers were on a scale from 1 to 7 from 'not at all' to 'very much'.[11] In the section on climate change impacts, questions 20 and 21 were relevant to scientific opinion on climate change. Question 20, "How convinced are you that climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, is occurring now?" Answers: 67.1% very much convinced (7), 26.7% to some large extent (5–6), 6.2% said to some small extent (2–4), none said not at all. Question 21, "How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?" Answers: 34.6% very much convinced (7), 48.9% being convinced to a large extent (5–6), 15.1% to a small extent (2–4), and 1.35% not convinced at all (1).[11]<

[My bold] Seversky

Radioaction @ 37

Don’t forget how scientists lie about the effectiveness of vaccines and antibiotics too!

Not as much as anti-vaxers have lied about them lying. Seversky

Mapou #30

The scientific community cannot be trusted to tell the truth. There is no honor among scientists. They lie about the climate. They lie about the origin of the species. They lie about the brain and consciousness. They lie about health care. They lie about multiple universes, time travel, black holes, wormholes, Big Bang, universal accelerated expansion, etc. They even lie about infinity. It’s all politics, lies and propaganda. The public at large is beginning to sense this. It will get ugly. Scientists brought this on themselves.

Amazing that science ever came up with lasers, GPS, vaccines, capacitors, integrated circuits, jet engines, solid state drives, etc. You do realise that GPS systems work because we understand relativistic effects on clocks? And that we can make semi-conductors because we understand quantum mechanics? Odd that Mapou, with his greater knowledge and understanding isn't filthy rich, running some large corporation, creating lots and lots of valuable devices, medical techniques, analytic tools, etc that would greatly benefit all of mankind. Maybe he's just too busy posting slanderous comments on this blog. Sad too that his kind of rancorous comment is now allowed to be posted without any kind of moderating comment from the editors. But I guess if it's a war then all's fair eh? Jerad

Don't forget how scientists lie about the effectiveness of vaccines and antibiotics too! Radioaction

PS: History. Paid for in blood and tears. But, if we refuse to learn or heed sound history we doom ourselves to pay the same price over and over again. KF kairosfocus

F/N: One last thing. Way back, I learned in school that climate was a 33 year average of weather, i.e. a moving average. Wiki concurs: >> a measure of the average pattern of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time. Climate is different from weather, in that weather only describes the short-term conditions of these variables in a given region. >> It is thus a mathematical fiction that captures a "typical" value, dependent on the observations put into it. It will change and will be pulled by extreme values, means have those known properties . . . as opposed to medians for instance. The issue is whether there is variability beyond the "normal" patterns and if so whether we collectively are influencing to a destructive extent, i.e. whether stabilising interactions are being overwhelmed by human forcings. On fair comment, we don't know enough to be overly definitive, but should be concerned and prudent. And in any case we should seek to moderate impacts of extreme weather, e.g. it is folly to invest so much on hurricane coasts, with New Orleans as case study no. 1 regardless of what and who you believe on Katrina. But then, here, with volcanic eruptions ramping up for two years many were in denial until people needlessly and horribly died. March of folly. Now, THAT'S a real concern that does not get anywhere the headlines it should. KF kairosfocus

Piotr Mark Frank, Read Legates's own words and weep: ...."only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming." Here is a little more for you: "Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work. Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch —most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change. Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous. Finally, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that "human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems." Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing "anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing." Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem." It's not looking too good for your side. StephenB

WD et al, What I pointed to at 1 seems to be happening. The clear evidence is that there WAS a widely publicised perception of global cooling and a call for major actions to address it in the '60's and '70's; appearing in leading publications of widespread influence. [U/D: BartM in 28, thanks: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/66785/#comment-543874 ] Influence that was much higher than now because of concentration of media power. Which, corresponds with my recall of the times; indeed, speculation on oncoming ice ages was even in the comics and on various TV shows as a given or almost as a given. But, there was no big global this is problem no 1 push. That was reserved for population and pollution bomb stories and/or nuke war fears; then, nuke winter fears early in the '80's along with panics over that madman right-wing cowboy fundy ignoramus in the White House, Reagan. At points in the 80's HIV-AIDS came up for serious mention and projections that simply have not panned out. With 7 bn here, the pop bomb/ Club of Rome etc projections did not come to pass either. Sometime between the 80's and '90's the crisis of the day that demands response shifted to global warming; much of the energy on it coming once the cold war was off the table. As in, Reagan's determination to stand did much to win the cold war (The trend in the later '70's was much the other way . . . ), in cooperation with a few other key figures. And, the cold war didn't just peter out, it was won. After that, climate became the big push. Then, since '98, it seems the trend line has been on average flat; with hints of slightly down. For years that was sidelined or pooh poohed, but it looks solid now. And as fair comment, there is no solid understanding of why. And from the late 00's we have had whistle blowing, which probably has had more impact than is acknowledged. There have been recent rewrites on the '70's that now try to suggest the publicised view was unrepresentative of that of scientists. That does not change the fact of what was pushed at the time, even if it could be shown so. Likewise, the Medieval and Roman warm periods seem to have been occasionally dismissed. On the whole, the earth is in a warming trend since the last ice age with a fair amount of ice sheets still in evidence. As for causal analyses and heavy reliance on computer sims, the latter is not the same as empirical observation. I won't say much on the very bad practices of too many stations and the gaps between actual values as measured and as calibrated to feed models. Just, I am not too comfortable with such. Then, there are many issues on proxies. A little humility about limitations would go a long way. And, a little less of speaking with disregard to duties of care to truth and prudence in light of uncertainties would help also.* There is a physical atmosphere warming effect, and it has water vapour (very variable component) as a big contributor with CO2 as a much smaller part, net effect ratio is what, 100:1 or so maybe, IIRC. The real issue is on feedback trends between components, circumstances and drivers, which are not well understood. I also have long taken note that the PATTERN of warming in the models does not fit well with the observed atmosphere structure patterns. A bit of a caution that we don't understand as deeply as we -- especially the somewhat educated, media and classroom conventional wisdom influenced public -- too often imagine. In the '70's, in the '90's and now. After 9/11 there was a hiatus as we went back to WW 0 since the 700's, but there has been an attempt to backburner that. Looks like the Iranians and Israelis will have something to say about that within a few years. So, we don't know enough about things more than we are willing to face, too often. And so, caution would help on a lot of topics. Including, of course imagining we know ever so much about the unobserved deep past of origins and about the creative powers of forces and factors never shown on actual observation to create FSCO/I. (But then when things calm down a bit I have to get around to getting some folks to be willing to actually face the simple reality that it exists; not to mention its routine cause.) There is enough evidence that there was a cooling perception in the '70's, which was definitely widely reported and taken for granted. Since then the big push has been warming and the argument we dunit. And remedies have been proposed that put a lot of concentrated power in hands we would be well advised to take second thoughts about. Likewise, on impacts on economies due to energy-economy links painfully evident from the '70's oil price hikes to the '08/09 surge on. And, it's the oil, stupid . . . I won't say much on nuke power panics, save that I think we need to take a serious 2nd look. Including on Thorium and pebble bed reactors. These make reasonable sense from multiple angles. As does continued investigation into fusion. If algae oil or the like biofuel can be made to work, that too would have significant positive impact. (I don't particularly like the geopolitics of oil.) From my angle, whoever it was said that measures taken to address climate concerns should be separately valid has a point. If we get energy right, a lot can be done and we can move towards Sol system colonisation. But, the point the there was a widespread perception of cooling in the 70's and some familiar sounding remedies and power concentrations put forth as ways forward, is clearly valid. Let's face it. KF * PS: A key definition of lying is to speak with disregard to truth, in hope that one will profit from what is said or suggested being taken as true. In cases where there is a significant uncertainty, the duty of truth and prudence is to acknowledge that uncertainty. Something, that has been all too often missing on too many topics. kairosfocus

At present my comment in 25 says

In the mean time, Barry repeatedly claimed there has been so statistically significant warming for the last 18 ( or sometimes 17) years. He has acknowledged this error.

I'm almost certain that I wrote

In the mean time, Barry repeatedly claimed there has been so statistically significant warming for the last 18 ( or sometimes 17) years. This is simply not true. He has not acknowledged this error."

It's possible my brain got ahead of my fingers and a missed the middle sentence then mucked up the last one. Whether my commented was edited or I mucked it up, I don't think Barry has admitted this error and I hope what I intended to say is now clear. wd400

#29 Mark Frank, Yep, one can estimate how long it takes to trace such revelations to their source and verify them: half an hour max. What prevented StephenB from doing likewise? Piotr

The scientific community cannot be trusted to tell the truth. There is no honor among scientists. They lie about the climate. They lie about the origin of the species. They lie about the brain and consciousness. They lie about health care. They lie about multiple universes, time travel, black holes, wormholes, Big Bang, universal accelerated expansion, etc. They even lie about infinity. It's all politics, lies and propaganda. The public at large is beginning to sense this. It will get ugly. Scientists brought this on themselves. Mapou

#27 Piotr Looks like we found the same thing at the same time. Mark Frank

The First Global Revolution (1990 Club Of Rome) "New enemies therefore have to be identified. New strategies imagined, new weapons devised. The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself. The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.” CoR members include Al Gore, Maurice Strong, Anne Ehrlich, David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, & Henry Kissinger. humanati

"Every major climate organization endorsed the ice age scare, including NCAR, CRU, NAS, NASA – as did the CIA." NCAR 1974: Global Cooling And Extreme Weather Is The New Normal http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/02/24/ncar-1974-global-cooling-and-extreme-weather-is-the-new-normal-national-center-for-atmospheric-research/ CRU 1972: Director Says A New Ice Age Is Coming http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lzI_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=PlEMAAAAIBAJ&dq=climate%20expert%20new%20ice%20age%20coming%20hubert%20lamb&pg=4365%2C2786655 NAS 1974: Climate experts at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) wanted to evacuate six million people, to save them from global cooling https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/climate-experts-to-the-rescue-in-1974/ NASA: Washington Post, July 9, 1971 - A NASA scientist using a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen" predicted an ice age would occur within 50-60 years. According to Hansen's computer model, "they found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere." http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/05/flashback-hansens-climate-model-says.html CIA 1974: Shock Report: The western world’s leading climatologists Warn Of A Return To The Little Ice Age http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf CIA 1976 : Warned That Global Cooling Will Bring Drought, Starvation, Social Unrest And Political Upheaval http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/110818238 CIA NY Times 1977: CIA warned us that global cooling was going to kill us all https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5SxmJNCQAAejjH.png BartM

StephenB, OK, so you mean this paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9 Here's the breakdown of Cook et al.'s data from Legates et al.'s own publication Look at the table itself, not at what your fellow denialists make of it. Almost every abstract of those that do express a position endorses man-made global warming, at least implicitly. About 2% reject it at least implicitly. Why, then, have some commenters called it a "rebuttal"? Legates et al. are only playing a language game ("What is the strict definition of consensus?"), not raising fair criticism. Their own numbers show that climatic denial is extremely rare among specialists. Piotr

SB I tracked down the Legates paper. Read it. In no way does it come remotely close to supporting your claim that "less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming". It quite rightly questions Cook's methodology and points out that only 1.59% (more than 1% as it happens) of the abstracts that express an opinion explicitly endorse in a quantified way the "standard" definition of global warming. 97% either explicitly endorse or implicitly endorse some version of global warming. Legates, who is clearly a sceptic, points out that there are errors in Cook's assessment and the limited meaning of an implicit endorsement. This is a very different thing from your claim. Retraction please. Mark Frank

Interestingly, the only support I can find for this claim

Every major climate organization endorsed the ice age scare, including NCAR, CRU, NAS, NASA, and CIA.

Is an astonishing similar sentence on Steve Goddard's blog:

Every major climate organization endorsed the ice age scare, including NCAR, CRU, NAS, NASA – as did the CIA.

wd400

So, to recap. Barry, seeing a headline that didn't fit with his world view so waited for that bastion of journalistic integrity the Daily Mail to report on it. Taking the Mail's reporting at face value he decided here was only a 38% chance of 2014 being the hottest (true in one dataset, not the other which the Mail ignored), and claimed NASA has lied about this fact when in fact it was included in the press briefing that is the basis of those stories. Bizarrely, he also claimed that a probability 62% was equivalent to "almost certain". Rather than simple correct this mistake, he twisted himself in knots talking about p-values and making the even more bizarre claim that terms like "almost certain" and "overwhelming probable" are "relative". In the mean time, Barry repeatedly claimed there has been so statistically significant warming for the last 18 ( or sometimes 17) years. He has acknowledged this error. Now her has presented a list of popular press articles discussing (the once perfectly plausible) idea of global cooling during the 1970s. The idea, I guess, being that the mere existance of these articles was evidence for global cooling being the predominant scientific hypothesis of the time. In fact, to test that idea you have to do more than compile a list of articles that support your view, you have to look at all the evidence including that which goes against what you'd like to be true. As others have shown, global cooling was not the dominant hypothesis in the 1970s, and it was certainly never as well supported as global warming is in the 21st century. Noone of these misteps appear to have chastened Barry in the least. In fact, between making and compounding these errors he's become increasingly more fervent in dismissing anyone who disgarees with him (and thus agrees with the Royal Society, NAS, AGU ....) as a liar or someone blinded to evidence by their political views. It's hard to imagine a more perfect example of confirmation bias in action. wd400

Piotr

Scientific problems are not resolved by signing a petition, especially if less than 1% of the signataries specialise in climatology or atmospheric science, and their credentials are hard to verify.

The question about how many scientists believe in man-made global warming is a sociological question, not a climatology problem. StephenB

Even skeptics are included as part of the "97%" in cartoonist John Cook's paper: "97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them" http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/05/97-study-falsely-classifies-scientists.html "...Is this an accurate representation of your paper? Idso: "That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere's seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion's share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming." BartM

Piotr

You offered some unverifiable second-hand info (no references, no details) on David R. Legates allegedly refuting a claim by a blogger named John Cook (of whom I know nothing). It’s hearsay, not evidence. Did Legates publish his observations? Where?

It was reported in many places. Check the Wall Street Journal. May 26, 2014, (Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer). Or, check out objectivescience.net, or the Tampa Tribune August 28. It's all over the place. StephenB

BartM: “All ’97% Consensus’ Studies Refuted by Peer-Review” http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/12/all-97-consensus-studies-refuted-by.html Reading the abstracts, most of the citations do no such thing. The first citation is a rejected letter to Science, not a good start. Many of the rest don't directly address the claimed consensus. ETA, * Rejected by Science * Finds 6% reject the consensus. * The meaning of "significant". * The meaning of "major" vs "significant". * The meaning of "skeptic". * Argues relevance. * Argues over whether publication is a good measure of expertise. * Solipsism. * Questions data quality. * Doesn't like Cook's methodology, but agrees with the conclusion. Zachriel

"Scientific problems are not resolved by signing a petition, especially if less than 1% of the signataries specialise in climatology or atmospheric science, and their credentials are hard to verify" Piotr, the head of the UN IPCC is a railroad engineer, not a scientist. And the author of the "97% consensus" paper, John Cook, is a cartoonist: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213042858/http://www.skepticalscience.com/page.php?p=3 Here's another useful link: "All '97% Consensus' Studies Refuted by Peer-Review" http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/12/all-97-consensus-studies-refuted-by.html BartM

I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? No, you haven't provided any. You offered some unverifiable second-hand info (no references, no details) on David R. Legates allegedly refuting a claim by a blogger named John Cook (of whom I know nothing). It's hearsay, not evidence. Did Legates publish his observations? Where? Piotr

velikovskys 84% agreed that “human-induced greenhouse warming is now occurring,” StephenB “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” I say, Are the two claims mutually exclusive? peace fifthmonarchyman

StephenB Scientific problems are not resolved by signing a petition, especially if less than 1% of the signataries specialise in climatology or atmospheric science, and their credentials are hard to verify. Piotr

I just explained what I know about climate change in this comment floating around in a long thread to wade through for it: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/the-credulity-of-the-champions-of-science/#comment-543834 Gary S. Gaulin

SB: I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? James L. Powell, a former member of the National Science Board and current executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, analyzed published research on global warming and climate change between 1991 and 2012 and found that of the 13,950 articles in peer-reviewed journals, only 24 rejected anthropogenic global warming. In an October 2011 paper published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, researchers from George Mason University analyzed the results of a survey of 998 scientists working in academia, government, and industry. The scientists polled were members of the American Geophysical Union or the American Meteorological Society and listed in the 23rd edition of American Men and Women of Science, a biographical reference work on leading American scientists, and 489 returned completed questionnaires. Of those who replied, 97% agreed that global temperatures have risen over the past century. 84% agreed that "human-induced greenhouse warming is now occurring," 5% disagreed, and 12% didn't know. velikovskys

SB

I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Do you have any evidence to the contrary

I missed that - where did you give it? Mark Frank

Here's more: "Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." StephenB

OK. I was wrong to phrase it as a non-event.I will restate it as "not-comparable to global warming". Jerad has already pointed out that the number of scientific papers about global warming in the period far outnumber the ones about global cooling. But what about the fuss being made in the press etc? Listing 100 items over 10 years, although it looks dramatic, proves nothing and provides no basis for comparison. Luckily I have access to the NEXIS database which is the recognised source for academic research into press coverage. It doesn't contain anything like all press items (especially that long ago) but it is a fair spread and an unbaised sample for comparing coverage of different things. I searched on "global cooling" and "global warming" in the period 1/1/70 to 1/1/80. I got 32 hits on global warming. I got one hit on global cooling. Mark Frank

Piotr

Climate scientists haven’t changed their minds. The dominant opinion of experts was the same as now.

I have provided evidence that less than 1% of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? StephenB

Piotr, that graph indicates about 10 cumulative papers for cooling and 40 for warming were written in that 15 year period. Is that data really complete? Anyway, the dominant hype was definitely cooling hype. ppolish

@#6: Leonard Nimoy! Nice touch. In all fairness, he's at least as credible as nut-job Al Gore cantor

Barry Arrington: 1978 – The Coming Ice Age (In Search Of TV Show, Season 2, Episode 23, Host: Leonard Nimoy, May 1978) Leonard Nimoy! Nice touch. Other episodes include "Haunted Castles", "In Search of Ancient Astronauts", and "The Loch Ness Monster". Zachriel

See also this review of the climatological research published in the 1970s: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 Climate scientists haven't changed their minds. The dominant opinion of experts was the same as now. Piotr

There's an interesting graph in the Wikipedia article on the Cooling hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling wherein the number of peer-reviewed papers predicting cooling is compared with the number of papers predicting warming published during the 60s and 70s. Guess what? There were a lot more papers predicting warming. A 4-to-1 ratio. Looks like there were only about 10 peer-reviewed research papers that supported cooling. Jerad

Here are some links to screenshots of NY Times global cooling articles: NY Times : In 1961, there was 100% consensus that the world was cooling. https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/erasing-the-100-consensus/ NY Times 1974 : Climate experts at the National Academy of Sciences wanted to evacuate six million people, to save them from global cooling https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/climate-experts-to-the-rescue-in-1974/ NY Times 1976: Skeptics say that global cooling is nonsense https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/time-to-silence-the-skeptics/ BartM

I don't think MF is deliberately lying about this, I think this is just an example of one's perceptions (including memory) being adjusted to fit ones current narrative. However, I do think that there are those who must know better that cannot be doing anything other than deliberately attempting to rewrite history to protect the current narrative's credibility. William J Murray

BA: WUWT gives a very useful onward link from the original site, with discussion at a leading blog discussing climate: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compilation/ The original: http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html Of course, the issue is where the facts & logic warrant vs where the conventional wisdom points. A familiar theme at UD. Dismissal (or vanishing the problem and switching the subject, alternatively) in 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 . . . KF PS, a WUWT commenter has a compilation of cycles of alarm since 1895: http://www.mrc.org/node/30586 kairosfocus