Question:

Did anyone happen to catch this article that appeared in Newsweek, of all places, called "The Cooling World"?

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Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling. It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels.

http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

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  1. Time magazine has been promoting Global Warming and Global Cooling since 1895.  And it was not "just a few misinformed scientists" as some alarmists would have you believe.  I was alive during 1975 and Global Cooling was all over.  I even learned about it in school, and not just based on one Newsweek article.

    If Global Warming is real, then why do all of the alarmist have to try and rewrite history in order to shove inconvenient truths under the rug?


  2. hey, this bit still rings true even today;

    "Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as [ insert techno-fix of choice here], might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality"

    but it's just a news story. where are the references?

  3. It's not backed by every major science group : http://www.oism.org/pproject/

  4. Quite familiar with it.  This was a tempest in a teapot stirred up mainly by one individual, and to a lesser degree, some others.  They were later found to have used some faulty data, and their theory was impossible without it.    He's the type who likes to buck the recognized authorities on everything and claims to be an expert on everything.  Lucky we don't have anybody like that in Yahoo Answers, huh?  National Geographic also wrote a small piece about this.  Newsweek likes to sensationalize.  With National Geographic  I think it was more of an equal time issue.  They didn't "endorse" Global Warming or Global Cooling.

    Its true most scientists were wedded to Global Warming theory right through the 1970's.  However, when this ruckus started up the National Research Council was directed to examine the topic and provide a report.  Their report was the only "official" publication about climate change during the 1970's.  It said there was not enough information at the time to predict global warming or global cooling, and detailed the steps that were needed to be able to give a scientific opinion.  That's basically the things we've done since, except we still have too few ground stations.

    So, there wasn't any big "flip flop" by the experts in the 70's, but there was a controversy.  I read the book when it was on the best seller list, and you can still find copies.  Some of the data has been discredited, but it's a heck of a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotal information.  The article by Schneider S. & Rasool S is based on some faulty data, as one of the links below discusses.

  5. This was not an isolated media story and there weren't any global warming media releases in the 1970's.

    Scientists sometimes go down the wrong track (actually every great scientist has been wrong about somethings) and sometimes the media does a beat up.  

    Apparently, some people would prefer to believe that it is impossible for scientists to get things wrong, so widespread belief in global cooling just couldn't have happened.  For those of us who are old enough to remember the 70's - it did happen.  

    The scientific papers which were written at the time would be politically unacceptable today.  Here's an extract from Schneider S. & Rasool S published in Science journal.  

    "We report here on the first results of a calculation in which separate estimates were made of the effects on global temperature of large increases in the amount of CO2 and dust in the atmosphere. It is found that even an increase by a factor of 8 in the amount of CO2, which is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years, will produce an increase in the surface temperature of less than 2 deg. K."

  6. yeah, isn't it funny how the global warming crowd wants us to forget about global cooling from the 70's?  now they are trying to change it again to "climate change" so that they can try to blame humans for anything they think is unpleasant.

    ken-- I love how you put a graph up to "prove" your point, but show no other data to back the graph.  typical

  7. Yeah, man-made global warming 'skeptics' mention this article all the time.  They say "look, 'they' were warning us about global cooling 30 years ago, so clearly 'they' don't know what they're talking about."

    Of course, scientists have been warning us about man-made global warming since the 1960s, as one study of the scientific literature showed.

    http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/...

    So basically the popular media was talking about one thing while the scientists were talking about another.  Now they're both on the same page for the most part.

  8. Sure.  This was an idea of a few guys, with no good data, who got a lot more attention in the media than they deserved.

    They were very much like the so-called "skeptics" of today.  If fact one of them is a "skeptic".  Can't give up on his old idea, I guess.

    They were nothing at all like today's vast numbers of global warming scientists, backed by a mountain of data, and by EVERY major scientific organization.  More here ("The Global Cooling Myth"):

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=9...

    And; we didn't cool, the rise in temperature leveled off, because of smoky pollution we've now cleaned up.

    Most of all, the "data" above is flat wrong.  The world is a lot warmer than it was in the 40s.  Here's the real data:

    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

    EDIT - "but it's just a news story. where are the references?"

    Exactly.

  9. I don't know where you got the idea that we are now "back to around the 1940 levels", but that's inaccurate (unless you're referring only to the continental US).  On a global land-sea surface temperature basis, we are significantly above those levels in the 40's.  You can see it clearly in this plot:

    http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/0...

    You should also know that even during the cooling phase (presumed to be caused by aerosols) there was still concern among climate scientists about global warming.  The aerosols were merely masking the effect.

    The Newsweek article is NOT representative of the view among the majority of the climate scientists during the 70's. It was simply a sensationalistic piece to see magazines, it wasn't even close to a scientific journal article.  You can read more on this subject here:

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

    http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/22/an...

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-...

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