The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus
Posted by jennifer, September 27th, 2008 - under Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change, History
“A pervasive myth has taken hold in the public consciousness: That there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent.”
At least that is according to Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck writing in the proceedings of the 20th Conference on Climate Variability and Change, held in New Orleans in January this year. Their paper goes a long way to dispel that myth while at the same time providing a good overview of the development of current global warming theory including key milestones.
It did perhaps all begin with the Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 suggested that by doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide global temperature may rise 5-6C.
The establishment of the station atop Mauna Loa in the Pacific in 1957 was another key event. According to Peterson et al by 1965 this data was sufficient to show an unambiguous trend of increasing carbon dioxide and showed an increase that exceeded Arrthenius’s 70-year old estimate.
By 1967 the first seminal modelling results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Team were published concluding that a doubling of carbon dioxide would raise the temperature by 2C. By 1975 based on new modelling results Wallace Broecker asked “Are we on the brink of pronounced global warming?” in a paper published in the journal Science (Vol 189, pgs 460-463).
So, how did the myth of a consensus on global cooling take hold?
According to Peterson et al, when the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arise in contemporary discussion, it is not to citations in the scientific literature but to news and media coverage at that time. Furthermore they indicate that contemporary quoting of the media articles is often selective and out of context.
In their survey of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1983 Peterson et al found only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming.
It is a fascinating little paper, have a read:
http://ams.confex.com/ams/88Annual/techprogram/paper_131047.htm
[link from Luke Walker]
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101 Responses to “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus”
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Luke,
Is it true that James Hansen wrote the cooling program for a GCM in the ’70s?
“In their survey of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1983 they found only seven articles indicated cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. ”
This is a new metric that they’ve pulled out of there air. Scientists looking at themselves. Next it will be scientists looking at meta-studies of scientists doing meta-studies and no-one will get around to doing any work.
The consensus was there but it was just a matter of when. We’ve had twenty-something long glacial periods in the last three million years. And there was and is no reason to believe that this has changed.
This is just Connelly and his nutty friends being called on warming stupidity and doing some fancy footwork.
“Is it true that James Hansen wrote the cooling program for a GCM in the ’70s?”
I have no idea if he did or he didn’t, but a “Cooling program” doesn’t exist any more than a “CO2 model” does.
What does a “cooling program” for a GCM mean?
Ummm…let’s see. To ad hom or not to ad hom. Aw, what the heck, let’s ad hom.
One author, William Connolley, is a contributor to realclimate. He’s a computer programmer who works as a computer modeler. He moonlights at Wikipedia making sure any articles on climate follow the peculiar logic of RC. He talks down his nose at Fred Singer, a real scientist who knows far more about the climate than Connolley will ever dream of knowing.
Then there’s John Fleck. He’s a science writer for the Albuquerque Journal. That leaves us with Peterson, who seems to be a legitimate meteorologist. Why would he want to put out a paper with a computer programmer and a writer for a newspaper?
If you go to this URL:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2544
and insert Petersen in the browser’s ‘find’ facility, it will take you to an interesting bit on a paper Peterson did with Easterling et al. Apparently the NOAA had to withdraw it due to errors.
Maybe Peterson is a good scientist, I don’t know. I do know that Connolley and RC have an interest in the global cooling thing of the ’70’s going away.
This paper seems to indicate there was only a few ‘papers’ on global cooling, but they did not check books by scientists or articles by the media, it would seem. In this article Lindzen gives a good account of the history:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
and states:
“…the global cooling trend of the 1950s and 1960s led to a minor global cooling hysteria in the 1970s. All that was more or less normal scientific debate, although the cooling hysteria had certain striking analogues to the present warming hysteria including books such as The Genesis Strategy by Stephen Schneider and Climate Change and World Affairs by Crispin Tickell…”
Schneider, of course, is the scientist who suggests it’s OK to lie to the public in order to get them onside with AGW theory.
“What does a “cooling program” for a GCM mean?”
As opposed to a warming program.
Y’know Luke, experimenter’s bias?
luke; if your point is that some scientists and most of the msm can be venal, hysterical and disingenuous, then I would agree with you; if, however, your point is that just because a case can be made that the cooling earth scenario was a beat up then, because those allegedly doing the beating up are critical of AGW, they must also be wrong about AGW, I would say that was a beat up.
What Luke does not stress is the fact that every AGW climate model assumes asa starting point that doubling CO2 causes 2-5 degrees rise in global mean temperature. Factors are then applied to offset this inbuilt bias.
AGW is simply a technically sophisticated belief for which an enormous amount of evidence has been manufactured.
What we do know is that as co2 increases it sometimes cools for decades and then warms for decades.
Like warming from 1900 to 1944, then cooling to 1977, then warming to 1998 and cooling from 1998 to 2008.
Gee it’s a bit inconsistent this co2 forcing business isn’t it, up down, up down, up down.
Makes one think that the climate has a will of its own almost and can change direction whatever and whenever it chooses.
Meanwhile up to this latest cool phase we’ve only recovered .7c from the LIA and been bombarded with record solar radiation in the last 11,000 years.
Once again no hot spot and no positive feedback to co2 plus the above shows co2 to be a real BUMMER to the fantasists and fanatics of AGW.
It’s a multi billion dollar CON and not even a good con, because its so easy to to pull apart and disprove.
“the fact that every AGW climate model assumes asa starting point that doubling CO2 causes 2-5 degrees rise in global mean temperature” - err no it doesn’t actually