Remember the fear of Global Cooling?

Big Matt

Big Matt

All The Whey Nutrition
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(For those of you who are old enough, you might remember a very similar fear campaign that was conducted "back in the day" that compares with the fear campaign that is going on now....... Remember, at one time it was "an inconvenient truth" that the world was flat and if you sailed too far you'd fall off the edge....it was a scientific consensus! It must have been true!)
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Is it true that there was a global cooling scare in the 1970s?

Yes it is true but, like the little ice age and the mediaeval warm period (when Co2 levels were higher than they are now! Check the ice records!), it is dismissed by the eco-theological propagandists as having never happened. In this case, however, there is not only extensive documentation but also the memories of those old enough to have experienced the scare, to whom the claim is a gratuitous insult.

Is there a familiar ring about this opening passage?

(newspaper clip)


There ought to be, as it is typical of what we see today. Yet, it is from a magazine article of 1975 hyping the then well-known threat of global cooling. It has all the features that we have come to know and love about the modern version – deductions from a recent random fluctuation in the temperature trend, accounts of increases in tornadoes, economic and social disasters including crop failures and much more.

Such apocalyptic warnings continued until 1983, when the scaremongers did an about turn, allegedly as a result of the prompting of the green civil servant Sir Crispin Tickel, who persuaded his boss, Margaret Thatcher, that she could use her political uniqueness in holding a science qualification to promote a new scenario, which was attractive to her as she was at war with the coal miners and the oil sheiks.

Although global warming via carbon dioxide had been mooted, it was then fashionable to believe that it was more than countered by the negative effects of pollution. The fantastic engineering solutions being promoted at the time were remarkable, only to be superseded by the economic suicide pact that was Kyoto.

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Here is an articel from Newsweek in 1975>>>>
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"The Cooling World" - by Peter Gwynne

April 28, 1975 Newsweek


There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that 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.


The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.


To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies. “The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

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 melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, 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.

(Newsweek: The Cooling World -04.28.75)
 
riskarb

riskarb

Ron Paul... phuck yeah!
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Cyclical climatic oscillations do occur, and could be exascerbating the current CO2 trends.
 
spatch

spatch

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Cyclical climatic oscillations do occur, and could be exascerbating the current CO2 trends.
Alps at their warmest since AD 800 - earth - 07 December 2006 - New Scientist Environment

"Warmest since AD 800" sounds scary, but think about it. They obviously didn’t have factories releasing CO2 back then, but the earth was WARMER in 800. I think this is the biggest over hyped thing since the Redskins a few years back.

PS- It says that the cooling caused a decrease in food production in Big Matt's study. Wouldnt increased temps allow for longer growing seasons, and thus feed hungry children all over the world?
 

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