[Coral-List] Climate talks in the 1970s

Bill Allison allison.billiam at gmail.com
Fri Dec 25 12:07:21 EST 2009


fyi: the link below,
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
corresponds to:
Peterson, T. C., W. M. Connolley, et al. (2008). "The myth of the 1970s
global cooling scientific consensus." Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society 89(9): 1325-1337.
    There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed
into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming
dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.



On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Lenny Antonelli
<thevillagegreen at gmail.com>wrote:

> The whole "they said there would be global cooling in the 70s" seems to
> proportion by the media and that's why this story still endures, not because
> of the science, as far as I can tell.
>
> Ben is right to ask about what the peer reviewed research from the time
> said. According to New Scientist: "A survey of the scientific literature has
> found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20
> were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling
> got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming
> even then."
>
> That's from this debunking of the 'global cooling myth' by New Scientist:
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s.html
>
> I think this is the review paper (it's a PDF):
> http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
>
> Here's a series of links to further discussions on this from
> RealClimate.org:
> http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=They_predicted_global_cooling_in_the_1970s
>
> Real Climate's own discussion of the topic
>
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
>
> I think it's also worth noting that the few predictions of cooling there
> were were based on the assumption that warming caused by CO2 would be offset
> to a greater degree by cooling caused by air pollution, so there was still
> an implicit assumption that human CO2 emissions cause warming. According to
> the New Scientist link above, one of the main sources of the cooling notion
> was a 1971 paper by NASA's Stephen Schneider, but soon afterwards Schneider
> realised he had overestimated the cooling effect and underestimated the
> warming potential of CO2.
>
> Lenny Antonelli
> thelongfielder.wordpress.com
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