Cooling down global warming

[shadron]

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the canard about how all the scientists in the 70s was saying the earth was cooling, and how they now say it's warming - can't they get their act together? Here's a YouTube video my Potholer54, a retired Australian reporter who specializes in science education. If you get a chance, check out his videos on youtube at potholer54 and potholer54debunks.



I once respected Wills (if not agreed with him), but this gives me pause.

 

[The Atheist]

Wow, excellent video, well-researched and well-said.

Thanks for letting me add him to my favourites. (Are you sure he's an Aussie?)

 

[arthwollipot]

There was an interview with him on (I think) the Skepticality podcast a while back, and he sounded like a Pom.

 

[The Atheist]

Going by the YT video, he's almost accentless, and there is the odd (very bloody odd, in most cases) Aussie who manages to come out of uni talking like that. It didn't sound quite plummy enough for a Pom, I thought.

 

[Geckko]

There is more than one canard here.

The original canard, as I understand it, was that there was widespread media reporting and political concern about the potential onset of a new ice age. As part of that contemporaneous "global crisis de jour" there were scientists involved in climate research who were willing t ovoice their support for these concerns. That was definitely the case, because I was younger and more impressionable then and it terrified the bejesus out of me.

There is the re-interpreted canard that says "there was no sicnetific consensus" etc. Of course there wasn't, that branch of science was a backwater, with little funding and a completely different motivation behind it (it was less political and policy driven). William Connolley has made it one of his personal objective to argue this point and makes his case pretty much on the fact that there isn't much in the way of climate research like we see it today, for the reason I outlined. Note Connolley isn't old enough to remember the 1970s. See Wiki for his own personal argument, which is as I outline it.

You can't get around the facts:

• There was a widespread reporting of a "climate crisis" in the 1970s to the extent that the pretty much every one accepted it was likely to be true.
• To flip William Connolley's "proof" on its head, there was no "scientific consensus" that CO2 would dominate all natural and other anthropogenic forcings (i.e. there was no warming consensus trying to tell poeople that AGW was the real threat).

Frankly, I don't understand why people like Connolley feel they need to rewrite history. It matters not a jot whether there was a genuine fear of a new ice age in the 1970s. All that matter sis what the research is telling us today.

 

[Wauthan]

Thanks for sharing the link Shadron. I asked a few local climatologists about global warming, after posting a thread about it here (always a good way to get a concise summary of a complicated topic). What I learned from them is very similar to what Potholer54 mentions in the video. Guess I can pin that down as confirmation from an independent source.

 

[mhaze]

There is more than one canard here.

The original canard, as I understand it, was that there was widespread media reporting and political concern about the potential onset of a new ice age. As part of that contemporaneous "global crisis de jour" there were scientists involved in climate research who were willing t ovoice their support for these concerns. That was definitely the case, because I was younger and more impressionable then and it terrified the bejesus out of me.

There is the re-interpreted canard that says "there was no sicnetific consensus" etc. Of course there wasn't, that branch of science was a backwater, with little funding and a completely different motivation behind it (it was less political and policy driven). William Connolley has made it one of his personal objective to argue this point and makes his case pretty much on the fact that there isn't much in the way of climate research like we see it today, for the reason I outlined. Note Connolley isn't old enough to remember the 1970s. See Wiki for his own personal argument, which is as I outline it.

You can't get around the facts:

• There was a widespread reporting of a "climate crisis" in the 1970s to the extent that the pretty much every one accepted it was likely to be true.
• To flip William Connolley's "proof" on its head, there was no "scientific consensus" that CO2 would dominate all natural and other anthropogenic forcings (i.e. there was no warming consensus trying to tell poeople that AGW was the real threat).

Frankly, I don't understand why people like Connolley feel they need to rewrite history. It matters not a jot whether there was a genuine fear of a new ice age in the 1970s. All that matter sis what the research is telling us today.

They think they need to rewrite history to destroy an argument that makes a laughingstock of radical alarmists.

 

[Megalodon]

The original canard, as I understand it, was that there was widespread media reporting and political concern about the potential onset of a new ice age.

Yes, that was a canard...

As part of that contemporaneous "global crisis de jour" there were scientists involved in climate research who were willing t ovoice their support for these concerns. That was definitely the case, because I was younger and more impressionable then and it terrified the bejesus out of me.

This doesn't follow from your earlier sentence. If you're saying that indeed there was a widespread media reporting that scared you, why do people have to fabricate quotes, instead of picking one of those widespread media reports?

There is the re-interpreted canard that says "there was no sicnetific consensus" etc. Of course there wasn't, that branch of science was a backwater, with little funding and a completely different motivation behind it (it was less political and policy driven).

How is it a canard if there wasn't in fact a scientific consensus? If there were many more papers predicting global warming than cooling, how can anyone say that there was a global cooling consensus?

I'll let the innuendo that climatology now is politically driven slide, or this conversation will not happen.

There was a widespread reporting of a "climate crisis" in the 1970s to the extent that the pretty much every one accepted it was likely to be true.

Then why the lies and fabricated quotes?

To flip William Connolley's "proof" on its head, there was no "scientific consensus" that CO2 would dominate all natural and other anthropogenic forcings (i.e. there was no warming consensus trying to tell poeople that AGW was the real threat).

And who exactly claimed that in the first place?

Frankly, I don't understand why people like Connolley feel they need to rewrite history. It matters not a jot whether there was a genuine fear of a new ice age in the 1970s. All that matter sis what the research is telling us today.

I don't understand why you are trying to re-write history... If there was a widespread coverage of global cooling, it should be easy to find. The same with the fictional scientific consensus on global cooling. Instead, people trying to manufacture doubt fabricate quotes. The objective is obviously that of discrediting the scientific consensus that now exists on anthropogenic global warming. Unfortunately, it did work to some extent...

 

[macdoc]

Global dimming is the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

It was a real phenomena and may be again in China were solar irradiance is down up to 25% in some heavily polluted cities.

A few poplar press pieces did their extrapolations based on the notion that indeed continued heavy aerosols could trigger significant global cooling over time. It is also the thinking behind geo-engineering with sulphates to offset AGW and also why volcanos can cool the globe for a short time.

If you think it has anything to do with a cessation of the on going energy gain from GHG you're a fool.
Aerosols are short lived and have complex interactions.
Carbon is forever.

 

[varwoche]

There is the re-interpreted canard that says "there was no sicnetific consensus" etc. Of course there wasn't, that branch of science was a backwater, with little funding and a completely different motivation behind it (it was less political and policy driven).

To say there was no consensus is an understatement. Global cooling was an extreme minority opinion, with almost nothing in the way of studies to back it up. But it did make a 'good' press story.

 

[Pixel42]

To say there was no consensus is an understatement. Global cooling was an extreme minority opinion, with almost nothing in the way of studies to back it up. But it did make a 'good' press story.

I remember watching the scary Horizon documentary Nigel Calder made about it in the early 70s and being puzzled because my geography teacher had told me any natural cooling would be more than cancelled out by the warming due to the CO2 we were dumping into the atmosphere. (I left school in 1969).

http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/FullComplaint/p62.htm

[Nigel Calder] In “The Weather Machine” we reported the mainstream opinion at the time, which was global cooling and the threat of a new ice age.

[Comment 68: Calder and the narrator are referring to discussion that took place in the 1970s about the possibility of future global cooling and a new ice age. This is often used by critics of global warming to imply that, since climate scientists were wrong before, they may be wrong now. However, this argument overstates the level that this was a mainstream opinion in the scientific community. William M. Connolley from the British Antarctic Survey (http://tinyurl.com/363urv) undertook a survey of the scientific publications in the 1970s, where the “experts” would have made their predictions. He found that there were two strands to the discussion of the global cooling: one which discussed it in terms of changes in the Earth’s orbit, and another that discussed the impacts that anthropogenic aerosols were having on the climate. Yet none suggested that a “catastrophic” cooling or new ice age was imminent and unease was expressed in the scientific literature about projecting any trend into the future. This idea of “catastrophic” cooling was only discussed in the popular media (such as in Nigel Calder’s Weather Machine programme, and in Newsweek, http://tinyurl.com/36779s); and not in the scientific literature).

There was never a scientific consensus on whether this cooling trend would continue (see the American Institute of Physics: http://tinyurl.com/2l874q, and Realclimate: http://tinyurl.com/mxlcr).

 

[lomiller]

To flip William Connolley's "proof" on its head, there was no "scientific consensus" that CO2 would dominate all natural and other anthropogenic forcings (i.e. there was no warming consensus trying to tell poeople that AGW was the real threat).

Connolley showed that at the height if the cooling scare papers claiming warming outnumbers papers claiming cooling by five to one, so please quite making up “facts”.

The reason the actual science was so one sided even then is that the greenhouse properties of CO2 were shown conclusively over 100 years ago, and man’s impact on atmospheric CO2 was proven conclusively 50 years ago. Despite your attempts to pretend otherwise, this isn’t new science.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

[OT]On his accent - sounds British to me, and on youtube describes himself as:

Semi-retired to sunny Australia,...

Which suggests he isn't australian, just lives there.[/OT]

 

[mhaze]

To say there was no consensus is an understatement. Global cooling was an extreme minority opinion, with almost nothing in the way of studies to back it up. But it did make a 'good' press story.

I think you are applying today's standards to yesterday's critical judgements.

 

[Lonewulf]

I'll do ya one better.

From 1958:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg