Have you forgotten about the GLOBAL COOLING scare from the 1970's???

How often you heard/read this comment?

If I had a dime for every time a LTTE or op-ed had told me to remember that "scientists" were warning us about global cooling in the 70's, I'd have enough money for a good night out.

The implication being made is that scientists are climate flip-floppers who don't really know what's going on.

The evidence of this false 70's scare these enlightend skeptics of global warming provide?

A 1975 Newsweek article.

This single article by Newsweek is the common demonimator to all these denier claims that the 70's "global cooling" concern was akin to our current global warming concern.

In fact, if you read the article, there's nothing in there of the kind.

Here it is: http://www.resiliencetv.fr/uploads/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf

Notice that although there is reference to "massive" amounts of "evidence" concerning climate change, the only scientific authority the article references or quotes is a report from the NAS.

The quoted portion of that report states the following:

"Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climate change is at least as fragmentary as our data. Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

- Newsweek, 1975 (NAS report)

So there you have it.

The article the denial community uses to claim scientists in the 70's were warning about "global cooling" itself makes the point that the science of the time had little evidence of what was happening at the time.

A far cry from today, then the same NAS, as well as ALL the scientific academies and societies from ALL industrialized nations, agree that human activity is causing global warming.

to which warming has progressed.. the pollution is filtering out some sun light.. when the planes were grounded for the 911 attack temps rose 1 degree in weeks of having fewer contrails from jets

Yea, all you need are satellite images from 1975 and from 2005 of the Arctic ice sheets, I don't know WHY anyone thinks they can fool ANYONE with this information now. Then the depression sinks in.

I doubt we will be able to stop it. China is at 1950's or worse technology with regards to industrial pollution. I have seen very little on the China/Pollution issue, they want modernism without political freedom to voice against the super high levels of industrial pollution which WE get by means of the air-stream, (a Republicans wet dream)...... and they got it!-(

Sigh...

China is not the biggest criminal in this, the USA is.

Bush rightwingers like to talk about China, since it distracts from their own deny and delay tactics that have been going on for so long.

We've learned a lot on 30 yrs, in part because of the fears at that time that human actions were having adverse effects on the climate.

Atlantic Ocean currents, which would cause Northern Europe to get very much colder.

In general though, globally, the result of global warming is warming.

The poster is wrong, I believe. Climatologists are now thinking that global warming may actually DELAY the onset of the next ice age.

My personal search?

The denial community today cites this 1975 Newsweek article continuously as their evidence that there was a "global cooling" scare in the 70's.

That's a reality I'm sure you're aware of, and pretty much all you need to understand to appreciate the deception being employed here.

Why do you ask your question? Are you considering something else you haven't mentioned?

As a former member of the DAO part of the EOS (NASA program to study the Earth)... our ability to collect data using remote sensing instruments has gone from near zero to a pretty decent number amount (10s of Petabytes of data). This allows climate models to be refined over and over (till they match what we have measured). But the collection really didn't get underway until the late eighties.

Too bad we didn't have this level of detail for the last 200 or 300 years (or longer), but scientists have come up with all kinds of clever ways to determine the climate of the past.

Dredging up the 1975 Newsweek article is really lame... we are just soooo much better at it today, orders of magnitude better.

Of course, the reason Bushco wants to redo the Moon mission and start the Mars mission is to drain funds from this effort... thinking that if we stop collecting the data, they can kick this down the road and let our grandchildren or great grandchildren deal.

Numerical (computer-based) climate modeling was barely in its infancy in the 1970s. There were no supercomputers to speak of, and data storage media were still primitive by today's standards. Current technology, coupled with accurate datasets derived from a huge range of earth, airborne, and ocean sensors, gives an infinitely better baseline for prediction.

Add to that: From what I understand, no knowledgeable scientist in the 1970s published a paper in a refereed journal that predicted or even strongly suggested that global cooling was either occurring then or was indicative of a long-term trend. Based on a vastly better data sets and unimaginably better sensor and computing technology, however, plenty of atmospheric and climate scientists--the vast majority--are taking global warming as a given.

But then I'm preaching to the choir here, of course. :hi:

I should have stated that we also didn't have the modeling tools or computers (or storage devices) needed.

(I hope my 10 years at NASA helped to change that... I was one of the first people to build a RAID storage system... and I funded the Berkeley Group that gave it the name - well, acronym).

However, if we had (somehow) the data collected... even if we couldn't analyze it then, it would have been a great help now.

Of course, I guess that until the Greenland ice cap melts and seas rise not centimeters but meters, the denials will continue... sadly.

There was really no way to describe non-linear systems until the mid 70s, and even then it wasn't very well understood how exactly the math could be applied.

crisis and the turmoil it would bring, especially in the mid-east. Guess what. We were warned to find alternative fuel and improve mpg. So far we haven't progressed nearly enough. The big point about climate change is the man caused climate "change". "cooling or "warming isn't the point. the natural balance is thrown off with unpredictable but devastating results for humans. Back then we also used the more generic term "pollution"

The energy budget is actually very complicated: one must take into account the effects of solar reflection off the icecaps and off high clouds, the thermohaline circulation, the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, and any number of other things, known or unknown.

So the longterm effects of moderate warming or cooling were too complicated to predict: an initial trend might run away exponentially, it might result in a series of wild climate oscillations, or it might switch the climate system into into a new stable regime that was not intuitively obvious from the change that originally produced it.

Scientists weren't saying OMG! Another ice-age is coming! but rather What we're doing now may have major effects and we can't currently make reliable predictions about the outcome

I saw your "headline" subject line and was about to open up on you with a huge blunderbuss. Thanks for posting this. It doesn't quite tell the whole story, but it is factual and echos the same things I have been yelling ever since this madness began, with its surfeit of reality deniers and soothsayers.

Thanks, again. Ya' done good, kid!
:toast:

I was in my teens, so maybe I wasn't paying attention but frankly, I doubt it was the major scare our modern day global warming deniers make it out to be.

Like I said. I think this "remember when" business is revisionist history on the part of global warming deniers. There was no 'scare'. In other words, I am agreeing with you. :hi:

Unfortunately, Freepers have not been informed of this.

Fortunately, our understanding of computer science has grown since then, too.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

I had posted it in my Journal here a while back.

Edit: I see that you have the same link in your sig. line too.

Alas, I'm afraid they are without truth genes...

is part of a communist conspiracy (or something like that :eyes:).

I get so tired of hearing the same, oft-debunked climate myths being recycled by them. There are a couple on a few enviro lists I am on. Apparently the media has this huge "librul bias" -you know stuff like CNN and scientists are subject to group-think. Only Michael Crichton and Bjorn Lomborg are objective and on the right track. The fact that neither of them has any sort of background in the climate sciences does not appear to be a factor.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2983859

and besides that, it's mental weakness. Things that are overwhelming are hard for some people to accept, so rather than accept then they look for any/all excuses to not accept them.

I am telling everyone I know that conservatives/Republicans are the way they are due to defective brain processes, whether genetic or programmed into them by their RW parents!

Well I remember watching a 60 minutes type program that had a special on it. Freaked me about as I was under 10.

I was convinced for awhile that when I grew up we would be in the middle of an ice age.

We had a terrible winter in 75' and 76' I remember the parking lot of a local Kmart had this huge, huge pile of snow and I remember fearing that something like that could be the start of a glaciar if it didnt thraw before the end of summer. Kinda funny now in retrospect, but I was probably 6, maybe 7.

I don't recall much else, just that program on it..and the big honkin snowpile

I was around 7, but it was our teacher who told us. Scared the crap out of me.

One of the side-effects of nuclear fusion is the production of neutrinos. These are virtually massless, energy-less particles that rarely interact with other particles. In fact, the mass of the neutrino is too small to be measured even with today's advanced equipment.

As you read this, a billion neutrinos have sleeted through your eyeballs. It does not matter if it is night where you are. To a neutrino, the 8,000 miles of iron and rock that is Planet Earth stop neutrionos about as well as a spider web stops a semi. The odds of any of them stopping along the way are extraordinarily small.

Starting in the '60s, we began experiments to determine the neutrino output of the Sun. Everything the experiments gathered indicated that there was not enough nuclear fusion going on in the Sun. The so-called "Standard Solar Model" called for certain temperatures and pressures in the Sun's core, which were confirmed by direct observation of the Sun. Therefore, there should have been more nuclear fusion than the neutrino rate was indicated.

The neutrino rate indicated that the amount of nuclear fusion in the Sun was only a third of what observation and the Standard Solar Model said it should be.

This lead to speculation that the Sun might go through periodic 'slowdowns' of it's nuclear fusion process, which would lead to periodic variations in the Sun's output. Which would lead to, presumebly, periodic variations in Earth's climate. Like, say, Ice Ages.

A few hard sci-fi writers picked this up as well (see "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle), so among the serious sci-fi set this was seen as a real possibility.

However, astronomers were unable to modify the Standard Solar Model to account for the discrepency in neutrinos and also maintain compatability with recorded observations. It remained a mystery for quite some time.

About 5 years ago, scientists were able to confirm that there are three different types of neutrinos, only one of which would have been detectable on the equipment used 30 years ago. With new knowledge in hand, the Standard Solar Model and the neutrino measurements now jibe quite nicely.

So there you have it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem

predict that the global cooling will follow the global warming because the massive amounts of fresh water introduced into the ocean from the melting ice sheets will slow the ocean currents, something I saw on the Science Channel, which made a lot of sense to me the way it was explained. I hope enough of the polar bears survive the first phase so they can have the last laugh in the second.

if the Atlantic Ocean current shuts down.

And the Polar bears would not reap any benifit from that.

Global warming is a negative in almost all regards.

It’s a shame that the scientific evidence (which should be the more compelling evidence) is overlooked, or not understood exactly, and instead, the anecdotal evidence (which should be the less compelling evidence) is pushed forward as being more important somehow. But here is a brief recount, by my estimation, of some of the more salient facts:



Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) first noted the “greenhouse effect”

http://www.enotes.com/science-experiment/greenhouse-effect




Some folks also argue that what is being observed is only a correlation between greenhouse gasses and a rise in global temperature, and that there is no real, demonstrated, cause-effect relationship.

The cause-effect relationship was shown first, long before any correlation could be made.

snip>

Arrhenius’ 1896 model of the influence of carbonic acid (CO2) in the air on the temperature on the ground arose from debates concerning the causes of the Ice Ages in the Stockholm Physics Society. The calculation of the absorption-coefficients of H2O and CO2, which were the key to the construction of the model, was made possible through Arrhenius’s use of Samuel P. Langley’s measurements of heat emission in the lunar spectrum. The model enabled Arrhenius to show variations in mean temperature in sectors from 70°N to 60°S during four different seasons given five different levels of CO2. The immediate reactions to the model concerned the question which Arrhenius had attempted to answer, i.e., the causes of the Ice Ages. Since the 1970s Arrhenius’s work has received much wider attention due to the concern with global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

http://www.ambio.kva.se/1997/Nr1_97/feb97_2.html





But what really changed things since the early seventies is an entire new field of mathematics.

Edward Lorenz ( born 1917) discovered the “butterfly effect”

http://perso.orange.fr/jean-pierre.moreau/Pascal/lorentz_pas.txt




Here is a very brief (but somewhat comprehensible) description of what happens in a non-linear system.

Imagine a water-wheel turning a mill. The water going into the thing is constant. The frictional load is linear, depending on the speed of the wheel. Now, create some same-sized holes in all of the buckets to allow just a portion of the water to escape as the thing turns.

It might seem that if you let this thing turn long enough, it would eventually settle into a constant speed of rotation, and also it might seem that mathematically you could have enough information to try and determine precisely what this ultimate speed would be. Each of the functions involved is linear and can be accurately defined.

What the thing actually does, though, if you were to really build such a device, is that it continually hunts for a steady speed but it never achieves it. You will have created a non-linear machine, and its speed will vary around two different steady-stated points, but it will never settle in.

This is the simplest example that I know of. I don't really have the skills to be able to determine much more than the overview, but I can accept the concept and there is much, much more already written about this stuff.

http://brain.cc.kogakuin.ac.jp/~kanamaru/Chaos/e/Lorenz/

was the threat of nuclear winter.

Ah, the good ol' Cold War days...

And I read scientific magazines voraciously back then. I don't remember any "scare" about "global cooling".

One Newsweek article does not a scientific consensus make.

And they surely do not have science on their side either. Recommended.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x306420

I find that troubling, but I'll let it inform how I go after the deniers from now on. Less focus on the BS they're spilling and more on the simple truth. It'll make for better LTTE's....no need to recap and address what the op-ed is saying wrong, just give the facts.

But we have truth, and as you stated replying with that is sure to get them everytime. And you know, I have been wondering if sites like this have seen a little influx of "skeptics" creeping in trying to persuade people that CO2 is not a cause of global warming. It is subtle but nevertheless it is there. So I am sure they have their minions signing onm to sites like this as well, but again, they don't have truth.

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics?source=most_popular

I find that this has helped me on a couple of occassions as well. Good source.

See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

Did we have plasma tvs? DVD players? home computers? the internet?

Scientific knowledge has come a long sway since then too :)

and the issue is climate CHANGE.. "warming" sets in motion a whole bunch of bad outcomes...even an eventual cooling ..go figure...there's a reason why it takes a long time to become a real scientist..

Who says history is useless?

a series of reports on the coming ice-age back in the late seventies. According to his report many Meteorologists actually believed it and he made a pretty convincing case for it.

The greenhouse effect of increased CO₂ was recognized, but particulate pollution was rising so quickly that there was concern that the resultant blocking out of a significant fraction of the sun's radiation would result in cooling. The 1975 Newsweek article was basically a "what if" scenario, but also included honest statements of uncertaintly. The most prominent scientists quoted in the article also recognized the dangers of global warming but felt that the cooling was the most imminent threat.

It's now difficult to tell if these dire predictions would have been correct because during this same decade, President Nixon created the US EPA and signed the Clean Air Act that had a huge impact on reducing particulate pollution.

It might also be worth noting that today's climate change/global warming models all consider the impact of particulates.

:evilgrin:

Which could lead to global cooling. I don't remember where I read the article

Ironically, global cooling would be caused by global warming.

Basically, with all the ice melting from the polar regions, it would put zillions of gallons of water in the oceans, and relieve the weight of the ice from places like Greenland.

The shifts in mass caused by the icecaps melting would cause an increase of seismic activity. In short, a whole bunch of volcanic eruptions, which would spew ash and sulfur compounds into the air and cool the planet significantly.

But it's just a hypothesis.