Science News - Cooling "Consensus" Of The 1970s Never Was; 7 Of 51 Papers 1965-1979 Claimed Cooling

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Now, new research also skewers the global warming skeptics’ claim that, in the 1970s, scientists believed that an ice age was imminent. Researchers of the day had discovered that Earth had been cooling since the 1940s. Some believed that continued increases in the amount of planet-cooling aerosols kicked up or emitted by human activity — dust and smog, for example —could easily tip the planet into an ever-deepening cycle of cooling, skeptics have repeatedly pointed out. That wave of concern was obviously a false alarm, the skeptics note, so maybe today’s scientists are equally mistaken about global warming.


Not true, climatologist Thomas C. Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and his colleagues report in the September Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The team’s survey of major journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 found that only seven articles predicted that global average temperature would continue to cool. During the same period, 44 journal papers indicated that the average temperature would rise and 20 were neutral or made no climate predictions.

The findings were “a surprise to us,” Peterson says. For decades the “skeptics had repeated their argument so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times.”

When these skeptics mention previous concerns about global cooling, they typically cite media reports from the 1970s rather than journal papers —“a part of their tremendous smoke screen on this issue,” says Peterson. Among major magazines, Time and Newsweek ran articles expressing concern about the previous decades’ cooling trend, juxtaposing the specter of decreased food production with rising global population.


But even a cursory review of 1970s media accounts shows that there was no consensus about global cooling among journalists, either, Peterson says. In May 1975, the headline of a New York Times article warned that “major cooling may be ahead.” Three months later, another headline in the same paper—atop a feature written by the same reporter—stated that two recent journal articles “counter view that cold period is due.”



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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37590/title/Cooling_climate_%E2%80%98consensus%E2%80%99_of_1970s_never_was

color me shocked.

The global cooling mole
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/langswitch_lang/ja

Whenever deniers tried to tell me about that I told them "cooling" was NOT anyone's consensus or even very seriously considered. (This was when I used to bother arguing, before I finally came to DU.) But I didn't have any proof.

Then last year I was going through a lot of articles from the 70's that my grandmother had cut out and saved and in the articles they were talking about WARMING, short AP articles from over 30 years ago were saying exactly what scientists are all saying today.

But since republicans have a problem with cause and effect, it takes double the work to get them to acknowledge the truth.