John's Blog

Didn't scientists try to scare us with Global Cooling in the 70s?

In a word? No.

[blockquote]
The scientific community predicted nothing of the sort. This myth emerges from three sources. First, global temperatures did cool slightly from the 1940s until approximately 1970, but the scientific literature cautioned against interpreting anything from short temperature records (e.g., a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report recommended further research). Second, during the 1970s there were a number of studies and publications investigating the mechanisms responsible for past Ice Ages. These papers suggested that such climatological events were cyclical in nature and, as a consequence, another ice age was possible on time-scales of ~20,000 years (i.e., not in the near future). More recent research indicates that there is potential for another ice age, but on a time scale on the order of 50,000 years – making it an even more distant proposition than suggested during the 1970s. Third, research was also being conducted on the potential for atmospheric aerosols to have a cooling influence on the global climate. Since then, research has confirmed that sulfate aerosols do indeed have a cooling effect and largely account for the cooling observed during the 1940s-1970. However, the magnitude of their influence has been revised downward, and thus warming from CO2 now outweighs the effects of aerosol cooling. In any case, the published literature from scientists during the 1970s does not reflect alarmist predictions of an impeding ice age, and, in fact the research conducted at the time has proven to be robust. The myth of ice age predictions stems largely from the popular press, which extrapolated legitimate scientific findings such as those listed above to arrive at more alarming, but erroneous, conclusions.[/blockquote]
from http://www.pewclimate.org/state_of_fear.cfm

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