The global cooling scare of a few decades ago is written off as a product of bad science, without much peer-reviewed support. But Maurizio Morabito went back and tracked down information on the 1961 meeting of the American Meteorological Association, which lamented … yes, the prospect of a cooling temperature.
Timely but alas flawed contribution by Thomas Peterson of NOAA, William Connolley of the British Antarctic survey and science reporter John Fleck, reporting on the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society” about the apparent lack of peer-reviewed papers predicting global cooling, between 1965 and 1979 (it’s reported here in Nature’s Climate Feedback blog).
Unfortunately, it really does look like Messrs Peterson, Connolley and Fleck simply have not looked well enough… or have conveniently restricted their search just enough to miss a 1961 article describing a Global Cooling consensus among scientists at a meeting supported also by…the American Metereological Association.
The article, written by Walter Sullivan for The New York Times (cited by Peterson et al. for his 1975 climate-related articles), refers to a 5-day Conference co-chaired by Rhodes W. Fairbridge of Columbia University and Charles G. Knudsen of the United States Weather Bureau, in the January of 1961.
The Sullivan article makes for a great read. The ongoing, decade-long temperature plateau may not be the equivalent of a new ice age, but it certainly deflates claims of rapid catastrophic warming. Forty years from now scientists might be similarly looking back in wonder at the unnecessary hysteria over expected warming that never materialized.
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Thank you Doug. If anybody comes back claiming again that there was no global cooling consensus in the 1970s, just ask them if it is true that all measurements at the time indicated a cooling in temperatures. Actually, even our own science says that up to the 1970s, temperatures were going down.
So if the GLOBE was COOLING and EVERYBODY knew that why can't we say that there was a global cooling consensus?
What Connolley and the others have done, is to redefine “global cooling consensus” as some kind of IPCC-equivalent, with long-term forecasts etc etc. Of course there was nothing of the sort. But it's like saying there was no democracy in ancient Athens because there were no political parties as we mean them.
Of course people can redefine terms any way they want: but shouldn't they at least acknowledge that?
I am not a scientist, but have read dozens of books and research papers and hundreds of articles on this subject — on both sides — and am still in search of any evidence to support the Man-Made Global Warming theory. If there was any evidence, I would believe it. There is no correlation between human-produced carbon dioxide emissions and normalized near-surface global air temperatures. In fact, the historical data refutes their theories. The correlation is positive only for a brief period after the mid 1970's up to 1998. CO2 levels have been increasing every year for the last 200 years, yet the temperatures do not follow the CO2. Global air and ocean temperatures are currently decreasing, yet the media will not report this and the public is unaware.
Global warming has morphed into a political issue, not a scientific issue, and as expected, the liberals who dominate the media have a huge advantage in swaying public opinion. But they cannot fool the people for much longer. The truth, eventually, will be learned. (Of course, Al Gore and James Hansen and the rest of their [consensus] will claim they were right all along!).
Their is a reward of $50,000 for anyone who can produce scientific evidence that Co2 causes runaway global warming. No one has claimed the reward yet. Of course Al Gore does not need to as his company Generation Investment Management, selling global warming credits, has taken in over 5 billion dollars already.