Climate Change. Yes the science is settled.

by mavie 137 Replies latest social current

• 

  uninformed

  coffee

  I'll have a cup of what you're drinking!

  Great find--both posts.

  You sure about the Ozone?

  Brant
• 

  owenfieldreams

  Good points, Coffee_Black. The 'greens' that promote the whole global warming hoax are themselves nothing but a cult, in that they are not open to debating it in the arena of ideas and think that anybody that questions its legitimacy is a heretic.
• 

  coffee_black

  Thanks Uninformed and Owenfielddreams,

  And still no comment from the global warming apologists.... Isn't that amazing?

  Uninformed....I didn't say anything about the ozone.... I think that came from Mavie. I'm drinking plain black coffee... good stuff.

  Coffee
• 

  DanTheMan

  The op/ed piece by John Coleman is nothing but an ad hominem attack on academia and the media. *yawn*
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  DanTheMan

  Funny, though, how many of the same people in the mid '70's were predicting a " freeze" and the planet entering another "ice age"..

  Here's something to help readers understand what was predicted in the 1970's and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with the current debate on GW.
• 

  coffee_black

  Here's something to help readers understand what was predicted in the 1970's and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with the current debate on GW

  Oh....It's just the Global Warming religion's version of NEW LIGHT! It must be true then!

  And of course anything critical of the media and "academia" is apostacy and an ad Hominem attack. See # 6 from earlier post of the warning signs of a cult.

  6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances. Any scientist who disagrees with the "consensus" is vilified, minimalized and discredited by the believers, similar to being shunned by jws

  The email I received from Professor Lindzen, an MIT professor, and recognized expert in his field of meteorology, proves that not all of "academia" has fallen for the Global Warming Religious doctrine. John Coleman has the credentials and expertise to know what he's talking about. He is both a meteorologist and in the media. He's disfellowshipped from the Global Warming religion. That means he must be a liar, right?

  So in all of the information I posted....this is all you come up with to defend the Global Warming frenzy? Yawn.....

  Gotta give credit where credit is due though, Dan the man.... at least you tried. Your are the only apologist who has even attempted to defend your position in the last 24 hours.

  Coffee
• 

  coffee_black

  Dan the man,

  The article you cited reminds me of the watchtower saying "We never said Armageddon was coming in 1975"

  I'm 55 years old. I remember the 70s well. I was there... I remember the hype and the predictions of the scientists that we were about to enter an ice age.

  The more you look into all this the more the cultic parallels are scary!

  Coffee
• 

  DanTheMan

  I'm 55 years old. I remember the 70s well. I was there... I remember the hype and the predictions of the scientists that we were about to enter an ice age .

  Do you have any links to any articles that were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in the 1970's that predicted an imminent global ice age? I think you must be remembering the articles that were published in the popular press. The link I provided above addressed this.

  And I really don't appreciate your caricaturizing my position by referring to me as an apologist.
• 

  coffee_black

  I remember the newspaper articles and the news stories on tv. They all quoted prominent scientists who made the dire predictions of the impending ice age. We didn't have the internet back then...though some of these stories may have been preserved....I'll check around.

  It is the same scenario as today, however, with the media all jumping on the bandwagon to hype the "story"... only now it's the opposite message.

  Coffee
• 

  coffee_black

  Dan,

  Took a few minutes to search this and found the following timeline of predictions through the 70s and early 80s....straight from Wikipedia. Lots of links throughout that show that many scientists predicted an ice age coming and scans of some of the original articles. Of course the media got involved...and they always sensationalize everything...but you can easily see the what I was talking about, and why I remember it well. Enjoy.

  I'm hoping the links work... I'll check once this posts...and if not, I'll post the link to the wikipedia timeline

  [

  edit] 1970s Awareness

  /wiki/Image:DSCN4904-nas-a.6_crop.jpg/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.pngInstrumental record of global average temperatures.

  Concern peaked in the early 1970s, partly because of the cooling trend then apparent (a cooling period began in 1945, and two decades of a cooling trend suggested a trough had been reached after several decades of warming), and partly because much less was then known about world climate and causes of ice ages. Although there was a cooling trend then, it should be realised that climate scientists were perfectly well aware that predictions based on this trend were not possible - because the trend was poorly studied and not understood (for example see reference [5] ). However in the popular press the possibility of cooling was reported generally without the caveats present in the scientific reports.

  The term "global cooling" did not become attached to concerns about an impending glacial period until after the term "global warming" was popularized.[citation needed] In the 1970s the compilation of records to produce hemispheric, or global, temperature records had just begun.

  A history of the discovery of global warming states that: While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way. [6]

  In 1972 Emiliani warned "Man's activity may either precipitate this new ice age or lead to substantial or even total melting of the ice caps". [7] By 1972 a group of glacial-epoch experts at a conference agreed that "the natural end of our warm epoch is undoubtedly near"; [8] but the volume of Quaternary Research reporting on the meeting said that "the basic conclusion to be drawn from the discussions in this section is that the knowledge necessary for understanding the mechanism of climate change is still lamentably inadequate". Unless there were impacts from future human activity, they thought that serious cooling "must be expected within the next few millennia or even centuries"; but many other scientists doubted these conclusions. [9]HYPERLINK \l "_note-8"[10]

  [

  edit] 1970 SCEP report

  The 1970 "Study of Critical Environmental Problems" [11] reported the possibility of warming from increased carbon dioxide, but no concerns about cooling, setting a lower bound on the beginning of interest in "global cooling".

  [

  edit] 1971 Paper on Warming and Cooling Factors

  There was a paper by S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Stephen H. Schneider, published in the journal Science in July 1971. Titled "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate," the paper examined the possible future effects of two types of human environmental emissions:

  greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide;

  particulate pollution such as smog, some of which remains suspended in the atmosphere in aerosol form for years.

  Greenhouse gases were regarded as likely factors that could promote global warming, while particulate pollution blocks sunlight and contributes to cooling. In their paper, Rasool and Schneider theorized that aerosols were more likely to contribute to climate change in the foreseeable future than greenhouse gases, stating that quadrupling aerosols "could decrease the mean surface temperature (of Earth) by as much as 3.5 C. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!" As this passage demonstrates, however, Rasool and Schneider considered global cooling a possible future scenario, but they did not predict it.

  [

  edit] 1974 and 1972 National Science Board

  In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger wrote that in 1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, stated: [12]

  During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.

  This statement is correct (see Historical temperature record) although the Washington Post quotes it with disapproval. The Post says the Board had observed two years earlier:

  Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end . . . leading into the next glacial age.

  This quote is taken quite out of context, however, and is misleading as it stands. A more complete quote is:

  Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end ... leading into the next glacial age. However, it is possible, or even likely, than human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path. . .

  [

  edit] 1975 National Academy of Sciences report

  There also was a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences about issues that needed more research. [13] This heightened interest in the fact that climate can change. The 1975 NAS report titled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action" did not make predictions, stating in fact that "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." Its "program for action" consisted simply of a call for further research, because "it is only through the use of adequately calibrated numerical models that we can hope to acquire the information necessary for a quantitative assessment of the climatic impacts."

  The report further stated:

  The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know.

  .

  This is not consistent with the claims like the SEPP's (Science & Environmental Policy Project) that "the NAS "experts" exhibited ... hysterical fears" in the 1975 report [14] .

  [

  edit] 1975 Newsweek article

  While these discussions were ongoing in scientific circles, more dramatic accounts appeared in the popular media, notably an April 28, 1975 article in Newsweek magazine. [15] Titled "The Cooling World", it pointed to "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change" and pointed to "a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968." The article claimed "The evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." The Newsweek article did not state the cause of cooling; it stated that "what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery" and cited the NAS conclusion that "not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

  The article mentioned the alternative solutions of "melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting Arctic rivers" but conceded these were not feasible. The Newsweek article concluded by criticizing government leaders: "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 (politicians) delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." The article emphasized sensational and largely unsourced consequences - "resulting famines could be catastrophic", "drought and desolation," "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded", "droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons," "impossible for starving peoples to migrate," "the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age."

  On October 23, 2006, Newsweek issued a correction, over 31 years after the original article, stating that it had been "so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future" (though editor Jerry Adler claimed that 'the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate."') [16] .

  [

  edit] 1980 Cosmos series with Carl Sagan

  In the science series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, physicist Carl Sagan warned of catastrophic cooling through the burning and clear cutting of forests. He postulated that the increased albedo of the earth's surface might lead to a new ice age. He also mentioned that this may be counteracted and overcome by the release of greenhouse gases. Cosmos was a popular series on public television and was often shown in elementary, junior and senior high schools in the United States. [17]

  [

  edit] Other 1970s Sources

  In the late 1970s there were several popular (and melodramatic) books on the topic, including The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age. [18]

  In popular culture The Clash's song London Calling is probably still the most widespread example, the first chorus is:

  The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in

  
  Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
  Engines stop running, but I have no fear
  Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

  Other than indicating the emergence of the idea within pop culture, this song makes little sense: the sun zooming in would cause warming and an ice age lowers sea levels rather than raising them.

  [

  edit] 1979 WMO conference

  Later in the decade, at a WMO conference in 1979, F K Hare reported that:

  "Fig 8 shows [...] 1938 the warmest year. They [temperatures] have since fallen by about 0.4 °C. At the end there is a suggestion that the fall ceased in about 1964, and may even have reversed.

  Figure 9 challenges the view that the fall of temperature has ceased

  [...] the weight of evidence clearly favours cooling to the present date [...] The striking point, however, is that interannual variability of world temperatures is much larger than the trend [...] it is difficult to detect a genuine trend [...]

  It is questionable, moreover, whether the trend is truly global. Calculated variations in the 5-year mean air temperature over the southern hemisphere chiefly with respect to land areas show that temperatures generally rose between 1943 and 1975. Since the 1960-64 period this rise has been strong

  [...] the scattered SH data fail to support a hypothesis of continued global cooling since 1938. [p 65]" [19]

  [

  edit] Some other climate cooling catastrophes

  Concerns about nuclear winter arose in the early 1980s from several reports. Similar speculations have appeared over effects due to catastrophes such as asteroid impacts and massive volcanic eruptions. A prediction that massive oil well fires in Kuwait would cause significant effects on climate was quite incorrect. The idea of a global cooling as the result of global warming was already proposed in the 1990's. [20] The 2004 disaster filmThe Day After Tomorrow depicted a scientifically absurd assortment of climate disasters caused by global warming, including sudden freezing. Secret reports to the Pentagon in 2004 may have speculated on various catastrophes. [21]HYPERLINK \l "_note-18"[22] Posteriorly, those reports have been confirmed in some way. [23]

  Coffee