The “Science News” (15 Nov. 1969) quoted the worries of meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell about global cooling: “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization.”
He continued that if the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into another ice age.
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst a building alarm about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but the alarms grew louder in the 1970s.
On 11 January 1970, three months before this first Earth Day, 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 entitled “Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age” climatologist Reid Bryson wrote about the cooling trend: “there’s no relief in sight”.
Journalists took this threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger. It announced in February 1974: “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed.”
The article continued: “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 also emphasized extreme doomsday predictions: “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. .. .. 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.”
In 1974 “Science News” reported: “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
The Christian Science Monitor (27 August 1974) continued in the same tone: "Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect. .. .. glaciers have begun to advance .. .. growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter .. .. the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool".
A few months later a New York Times article (29 December 1974) reported on global cooling by pointing out that climatologists believed "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." There was a warning that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe "mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence" would result.
In 1975, the same newspaper reported that "A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable."Further articles warned of this coming ice age.
Newsweek reported on 28 April 1975: "There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and .. .. 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. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon."
At about the same time as this article was published in 1975 a headline in the New York Times read: 'Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output.'"
Time Magazine also raised fears of an ice age: "As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval."
“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.”
Here's my take on the world temperature cooling or raising a degree. Big fucking deal. Is it possible life as we know it isn't ending? That if you ask IPCC scientists if a crisis is serious enough to let them manage a trillion dollars in carbon tax funds they will say yes every time? Hot, cold, whatever.
On another note, can't polar bears swim?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508132549.htm
Text from John A Furgusons "Scary Climate Change" pdf.
I personally took screen captures of the satelite artic ice which anyone can do and confirm that artic ice in Jan 09 is the same as Jan 00. But I'll leave you with the boogeyman himself:
But none of that really matters. We wont be around much longer to warm the planet. We'll all be dead of swine flu.
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Scientific studies in the 1970's re global cooling
Most predictions of an impending ice age came from the popular press (eg - Newsweek, NY Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine). As far as peer reviewed scientific papers in the 1970s, very few papers (7 in total) predicted global cooling. Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming due to CO2. More on 1970s science..."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
The scientific consensus in the '70s favored warming, not cooling. This is just another lazy, easily disproven denialist canard.
BTW, I used to Lowell Ponte on left wing KPFK radio in he '70s. Ponte isn't a scientist. While an educated layman can understand his subject, his book is hardly auhoritative. Ponte is a libertarian champion of laissez faire capitalism who now, not surprisingly, denies global warming.
Unlike other atmospheric gases, CO2 traps heat. Without the CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth would not retain much of the infrared radiation from the Sun that warms the Earth's surface. CO2 is hardly negligble, whatever its percentage of the total composition of the atmosphere.
This is simple science. C02 traps heat - We're generating rising levels of atmospheric CO2 - the Earth's temperature is rising.
There's another reason not to increase atmospheric CO2. The ocean acts as a carbon sink. The increase in atmospheric CO2 is acidifying the oceans. Fragile green plankton near the ocean's surface generate most of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Those plankton, as well as all life forms, exist in a narrow range of environmental conditions. We are altering those conditions at our peril.
We are gambling with our future and the continued existence of an ecosphere needed to keep the Earth habitable for humans.
http://open.salon.com/blog/jimgalt/2009/12/28/the_end_is_near
I simply took the first month they showed with an equivalent month in 2009. Ice gain and drops drastically between seasons as the video demonstrates. But compare them on the same month and you get a realistic picture.
Satellite Observation of Arctic Sea Ice Concentration, Sensor: SSM/I 85 GHz. Visualized on the visualization server of the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) by Carmen Ulmen/KlimaCampus Hamburg.
What I find amusing is nature demonstrating the silliness of the global warming scare even without catching the top scientists fixing data and defrauding the public. The drops in temperature the past few years have almost made up for the gains the past 100. How sad. The world isnt ending. Oh well. People will have to find another windmill to tilt at. New data to fudge. New crusades to take up. New scams to pull, trying to get at billions of dollars, while keeping the poorest countries poor and unable to compete, while developing countries do whatever they please anyway. The third world has to modernize. The corealation between solar activity and temp is obviously much greater than C02 and temp.
Global warming in its purest sense refers to glacier and heavy snow areas and certainly can cause and New Ice Age. The last Ice Age wiped out many of the large mammals but did not affect Homo Sapiens as much. Man may survive Global warming Floods Followed by and New Ice Age, but it will result in land wars south near the Equator as those in the barren North of Europe, Asia and North America try to migrate away from the Cold.
The may, however, be reduced to snowball and icicle spears, which could be a lark for guys like me who throw baseballs in the mid-90 mph range. So, let's see how that goes.