Debunking the 'Global Cooling' myth

"Cover story" on Global Cooling George Will mentioned.

Perhaps the most-often cited proof of the supposed scientific consensus about a coming Ice Age was the1975 Newsweek article by Peter Gwynne. (We interviewed him about the article here.) The issue with what George Will referred to as a "Newsweek cover story" on cooling can be seen right).

But Newsweek is not a scholarly journal – reporters working on deadline have been known to get things wrong from time to time. The best way to determine what scientists were worrying about at the time is to review the peer reviewed literature and see how many times the issue pops up. Thankfully for us, someone has already done that:

The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

 The survey was done by William Connolley and John Fleck, along with Tom Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center. Here’s what they found:

During the period we analyzed, climate science was very different from what you see today. There was far less integration among the various sub-disciplines that make up the enterprise. Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

·     7 articles predicting cooling

·     44 predicting warming

·     20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.

Connolley, who has done remarkable work on this subject, also culled together all the articles at the time predicting an imminent ice age, or at least pondering the possibility, and discusses how well they did. At the time, Gwynne’s was one of the most alarmist. 

In fact, there was a drop in temperature from about 1940 to the 1970s. 

However, the general trend over the last century is quite clear, and one year after Gwynne’s article appeared in Newsweek, the World Meteorological Organization said “a very significant warming of global climate” was probable. 

To sum: the Earth was getting cooler from 1940-1970, yet most scientists were concerned about global warming even then, but admitted they didn’t yet have the tools or research together yet to know for sure.

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