Why was "global cooling" in the 70s at all similar to global warming science today?

Question

Global cooling was just a few guys, mostly in America, with no good data, and no backing from any major scientific organization.

Global warming science is many thousands of scientists all around the world (the vast majority), with massive amounts of data, and backing from EVERY major scientific organization.

How can you say they're the same?

Answer 1

Well...many of the same scientists (there are actually more left-wing politicians than scientists) who preach global warming are the ones who preached global cooling in the 70s.  

Actually, the Pacific Ocean IS in a cooling phase, now it's 2 degrees cooler in the south part than it was a few years ago.

Sorry, EVERY major scientific organization does not back up the theory of global warming.  Probably most don't.  The scientists who support global warming all share some basic similarities, notably that they are all left-minded politically, and seek to cause economic chaos.  In Canada, David Suzuki is the guy, and he is on record of saying that he hoped the 'Y2K bug' (remember that? from 1999 when people realized that computers may fail worldwide when we struck 2000) would happen, and cause world chaos.  He told a group of students in Montreal a couple of weeks ago that politicians who don't agree with and support him must be imprisoned.  So with a big group of wacko's like this running our 'global warming' scare...wow!  These guys will mislead you and scare the h**l out of you and not give a d**n.  Meanwhile, their tactics are causing multiple billions of dollars to be spent worldwide on useless projects.  This money would be better spent on other things.

They should all be in jail for fraud.

Answer 2

the problem is that they got allot of press coverage at the time. lets face it an ice age sounds allot worse then global warming and the media will always go for the one that will get them better ratings.

Answer 3

Thousands of scientists and massive amounts of data, you always say that. The AGW theory may be supported by thousands of scientists but the majority did not postulate or probably even fully understand the radiative transfer theory. As far as massive amounts of data, that is not true, all data used as a climate indicator, is plagued with discrepancies and noise from natural climate variation that has yet to be untangled.

Most of the warming occurred before 1940, which is natural, a plot of the GISS surface data of the last thirty years is contaminated by volcanics, Enso effects, urbanization heat island effects, ozone depletion and changes in albedo. Global warming advocates have jumped on a warming trend and foolishly extrapolated into the future just as the global cooling advocates did in the sixties and seventies. Consensus means nothing in science, you either have data to support a theory or you do not. Because you cannot explain the warming by any other means does not constitute science, it is a common judiciary process called circumstantial evidence.

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Answer 4

One thing of interest,is the naturally-occurring phenomena associated with the Great Pacific Climate Shift.These seem to be used in conjunction for current PDO and AMO decadle variability grafts.

But just to keep things fair, the decadle grafts as comparisons do show unexplained anomalies for Jan-Dec,07... noted by the  warming in Asia for that time frame.

I feel most climatologist of public reputation are caught in a crossfire of scrutiny whether they are supporters or not.

Answer 5

well all this talking wont help so get off your bums and help out by conserving power and all the other little things we can do to help stop it ,talk talk talk ! you do go on !

Answer 6

The only similarity between the 70's "global cooling" and the current global warming is in the realm of the popular press.  Articles were published on both subjects where scientific accuracy wasn't as important as attention grabbing headlines.

This, of course, doesn't affect actual scientists or those who read the scientific literature.  But for the skeptical non-scientists in the public, they often jump to the following conclusion:

Either press reports about science are always accurate or we cannot trust science.

Clearly, this is a false dilemma (classic logical fallacy).  Yet that's exactly what's occurring in the case of the "global cooling" in the 70's argument put forth by doubters.

The truth of the matter is that the popular press is often inaccurate or misleading when reporting on science (most Journalists never take anything above a 101 level science class).  Peer reviewed scientific journals even occasionally publish things that turn out to be in error or misleading.  To non-scientists, that's confusing and they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  The advantage of the scientific journals are that many errors will be caught by reviewers before they are published and those that might be missed will be caught by their highly specialized and knowledgeable readership, whereas the popular press (and their readers) may remain ignorant for a long time.  Another advantage is that the authors of the scientific journal articles are the actual experts in the subject matter (not Journalists summarizing or interpreting other peoples views).

Those who don't make a distinction between the popular press (or worse, editorials and anonymous Internet postings) and scientific journals are destined to remain ignorant to what science actually knows.

Answer 7

I can't and won't say they are similar.

Answer 8

The main similarity is that the media sensationalized both as 'doomsday scenarios' and misled the public about the actual scientific consensus.

For example, the term 'global warming' in and of itself is a vast oversimplification or buzzword used to describe a complex change in the climate of the entire earth.  When you hear people step outside, say 'it's cold, so global warming must be fake', you know that the general public is seriously misinformed.  

Along with that, the media is happy to use the predictions of any scientist to make the story of the day - without context, without peer review, and without any information on the credentials of the scientist.  That's what got us the 'Scientists Predict Worst Hurricane Season Ever Next Year' headlines after Katrina that supposedly discredit the entire scientific community.  Of course, the disrespect given to the scientific community only extends to the scientists who accept Global Warming is a legitimate theory.  The scientists who object to it couldn't be doing it for money or attention.

Most people aren't going to take the time to learn about any subject, and most people consider themselves to be well informed and on a par with experts in the field if they took 5 minutes to read the Wikipedia page on it.

You are right on though.  Nobody ever considered Global Cooling to be a legitimate concern, and there was never mountains of evidence showing Global Cooling was taking place.  It was just a theory that was thrown out there, and never held up to its models.

Answer 9

Global cooling never got off the drawing board.  Just as the theory started to take off temperatures started to rise.  If it had lasted another decade, you would of saw more support for the theory.

But I am glad you agree that there is not scientific validity to global cooling.  That means that sulphates causing mid century global dimming also has no scientific validity.

Answer 10

I can't say that they are the same for the reasons you've already stated.  Also, I'd imagine that there's been some scientific progress made in the past 30 years, although, I suppose I could be wrong.  lol

Answer 11

"The scientific consensus in the 1970s about "global cooling" is a beloved argument of global-warming skeptics -- and little more, says a survey of scientific literature between 1965 and 1979. During that time period, seven peer-reviewed articles supported global cooling, while 44 predicted global warming. "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age," says coauthor Thomas Peterson. "A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Glad that got cleared up."

Answer 12

The global cooling scare was perpetrated for essentially the same reason as the current 'sky is falling' cry..IT'S ABOUT THE MONEY FOLKS!

We the people did not buy into the cooling scare so they rearranged things so that the term 'climate change' is being used to cover their behinds when global 'warming' is proved to be just another part of the cycle.

Here's a 'wall of text' with reports from _reputable_ scientists who are debunking the AGW scam.(but the AGW religionists won't read it).

Washington DC – An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming “bites the dust” and the scientific underpinnings for alarm may be “falling apart.”  The latest study to cast doubt on climate fears finds that even a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would not have the previously predicted dire impacts on global temperatures. This new study is not unique, as a host of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast a chill on global warming fears.

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research.  Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK)

“Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.” Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007.  Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

“Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 – 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2,” he added.

Climate fears reduced to ‘children’s games’

Other scientists are echoing Wilson’s analysis. Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl said the new study has reduced proponents of man-made climate fears to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

“Recall that most of the 1.1 degree - about 0.7 degrees - has already occurred since the beginning of the industrial era. This fact itself is an indication that the climate sensitivity is unlikely to be much greater than 1 Celsius degree: the effect of most of the doubling has already been made and it led to 0.7 K of warming,” Motl wrote in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)

“By the end of the (CO2) doubling i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 -- assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time -- Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only - a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to,” Motl explained.

“As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children's game to scare each other, as [MIT climate scientist] Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity,” Motl concluded.

Overturning IPCC consensus ‘in one fell swoop’

The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC 'consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK)  

“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.

The study’s “result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5 degrees C, 2SD range). Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6 degrees C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming,” AEI’s Schwartz explained.

“In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added.

“Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus’, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded.

UK officially admits: Global warming has stopped!

Recent scientific studies may make 2007 go down in history as the "tipping point" of man-made global warming fears. A progression of peer-reviewed studies have been published which serve to debunk the United Nations, former Vice President Al Gore, and the media engineered “consensus” on climate change.

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (LINK), noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped.  

“The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 %),” (LINK)

In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. (LINK)  The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict “global warming will begin in earnest in 2009” because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.

Southern Hemisphere is COOLING

UN scientist Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist and an expert IPCC reviewer in 2007, explained on August 6, 2007 that the Southern Hemisphere is cooling. “In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-area mean temperature has slowly but surely declined in the last few years. The city of Buenos Aires in Argentina received several centimeters of snowfall in early July, and the last time it snowed in Buenos Aires was in 1918! Most of Australia experienced one of its coldest months of June this year. Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have experienced lower temperatures in the last few years. Further, the sea surface temperatures over world oceans are slowly declining since mid-1998, according to a recent world-wide analysis of ocean surface temperatures," Dr. Khandekar explained. (LINK)

Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, who launched the skeptical website www.ClimatePolice.com  in 2007, recently declared the “global warming movement [is] falling apart.”

“A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off.  But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009,” Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post on his website. (LINK)

Climate models made by unlicensed 'software engineers'

But the credibility of these computer model predictions took a significant hit in June 2007 when Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well," Renwick conceded. (LINK)  

Another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, recently echoed Renwick’s sentiments about climate models by referring to them as “story lines.”

“In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain e

Answer 13

No, it wasn't similar.

Some scientists based their global cooling conclusions on a combination of a lack of understanding of the Milankovitch cycles and an incomplete surface temperature record.

"Milankovitch's theory suggested Earth should be just beginning to head into its next ice age cycle. The surface temperature data gathered by Mitchell seemed to agree...Mitchell was only collecting data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere...Still, the result drew public attention and a number of speculative articles about Earth's coming ice age appeared in newspapers and magazines."

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/featur...

Others based their global cooling projections on the fact that human sulfur emissions (which block sunlight and cause global dimming and thus cooling) were increasing at a rapid rate up until 1970, until governments passed Clean Air Acts which resulted in SO2 emissions decreasing worldwide since 1980 (see pages 12-14 below).

http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/ext...

Since these emissions had helped cause the global cooling from 1940-1970, it was reasonable to assume they would continue to do so had they remained unchecked.  But they didn't.  We would see the same result if we reduced worldwide CO2 emissions - global warming projections would become invalid and inaccurate.

However, the main difference is that most scientists at the time predicted global warming.

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

For example, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko predicted the cooling would soon switch to warming due to rising human emissions of carbon dioxide.

In 1967 James Hansen concluded:

“It became clear that human-produced greenhouse gases should become a dominant forcing and even exceed other climate forcings"

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/featur...

In other words there was clearly no consensus on the issue, unlike today's scientific consensus with regards to AGW.

http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/...