What of this claim that those who promote Global warming

are the same that claimed we were entering a new ice age in the 70's? I was born in 1979 so obviously I don't know enough about this. Are there any DU'ers who could shed some light on this?

...are pretty much the entire scientific community, many of whom were still in high school in the 1970's.

Those that bash it are for the most part payed shills, and their financing sources are easy enough to discover.

I was asking a question concerning this claim I've heard from conservatives that there were people in the 1970's claiming that there was going to be an ice-age.

"Those who promote global warming."

To me, that means, Exxon, BP, and millions of SUV drivers. :-)

There were people in the 1970's claiming that astronauts would die on the way to the moon, as well. But most of the scientists did not think that would happen. And it didn't.

Today there are people claiming that global warming is "just natural" or "inconsequential" but most of the scientists don't think that, and most likely, they will turn out to be right.

Back in the 1970's there were people claiming that acid rain would kill fish. Guess what? It did.

There's your rebuttal.

only exist because of US, and our endless appetite for obscene consumption?

p/s. Do you remember how the astronauts had to spend (3?) weeks in a decontamination chamber when they returned, in case they brought any space-herpes back with them?

I thought I covered the consumer's portion of the blame nicely by bringing up SUV drivers, no? At any rate, there's a point past which blaming stupid people for being stupid becomes an excercise in blaming the victim: our culture and commercialist society is set up to make us that way. It's only the lucky and/or gifted that manage to break out of that mental cage.

but I definitely remember the incredible sense of achievement and pride, it was palpable everywhere, neighbors that normally hated each other were greeting each other in the streets and nothing was impossible anymore. It is a shame that nobody younger than I has never experienced anything like it, for about a month (maybe, time is so subjective at that age) we were so united and awestruck and invincible, it just defies my poor ability to express it.

I intended no insult or slight regarding the SUV drivers, I just wanted to point out that it is all of us collectively that allowed this to happen. It doesn't matter if we are driving a GM penis extension (hummer) or Prius, if we live in a house that's too big and too far away from the places we must go (work, shopping, etc.), and we vote down proposals for mass transit, and we participate in the throw away consumer culture, etc. I am as guilty of this as anybody and desperately want an alternative, but where is it?

Furthermore, where is the will to change it? I read posts and replies here everyday from people that want to justify our enslavement of millions of people in far away lands because we "work hard" and "deserve" these things, none of which are possible without the shameless exploitation of others.

The single fastest way to deal with the energy and global warming problem is through energy conservation. It won't get us all the way there (there are planty of other things we need to do) but it is the low hanging fruit on the tree.

So you can use this as a barometer to assess the national willpower to addres these problems. Right now we can see that almost nobody cares how much power an electrical appliance uses if it is cheaper -- people pretty much ignore energystar labels and buy the silliest things and leave them plugged in and turned on. People know they "just can't stand" the light from a CF bulb even though they haven't even tried one in a decade, and it would be a small sacrifice to make considering how much power could be saved if incandescents just went away.

And people buy gas guzzlers.

Until this stops you know we are nowhere near a real solution.

In the meantime, though, if you would like some daily encouragement that there is indeed a leading edge to the solution, even if the population is lagging far behind, bookmark this. It's good for a pick-me-up:

http://renewableenergyaccess.com

the prevalent ocean currents will change and north america and europe will be covered by ice miles thick.

The year 1957 was named the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Scientists around the world collaborated on many things but foremost on their minds was the notion of an impending ice age. However no one was saying that it was man made, in fact the purpose of the named year was to find evidence to see if the ice age coming was a credible claim. It was not.

And that is what sensible people do. If a strong claim is made and it is possible to scientifically verify its validity, and if the claim includes dire consequences for man if he doesn't change his way, then it surly makes sense to investigate. Today many would rather pray and even more would just like to have the though go away so they can drive their SUV's into the sunset.

(Trouble is, I forget where I heard it.) By contrast to the atmpospheric/earth sciences community's many, many years of hard-core research and hundreds of published refereed scientific journal papers on the subject of global warming, not one published paper in the same journals ever predicted an incipient new ice age.

Granted much speculation went around on the subject during the 1970s, but that was generally within either the non-scientific popular press or the non-refereed pseudo-scientific journals that were mostly either tinfoil hatters or early New Age vaporheads. To my knowledge, no responsible scientist ever suggested that a new ice age was impending; quite a few looked into the fossil and temperature records and developed some valuable insight into ice-age dynamics, but that was not the same as predicting that a new ice age was imminent.

By the way, we are almost certainly headed for another ice age one of these millennia, just as we're undoubtedly headed for the day when the sun turns into a dead dwarf star, but no one with any knowledge of the subject has set dates (for either of these events).

Hope this helps!

computers were virtually non-existant, we had no satellites, and the transistor had barely been invented - it was very difficult to predict the weather 24 hours in advance (and to disseminate what WAGs they had.)

Actually, we are ALL "promoting" warming, although I suppose you really meant "support the theory of GW) and by the way, "theory" in science doesn't mean to scientists what it often does to laymen, i.e. a "guess."

Not many scientists who were working in the 1950s are still around, so in general the answer to your question is a simple 'no.'

Global warming (ocean warming) slows the great ocean streams which are driven by the temperature differential between warm equatorial waters and the frigid arctic waters, which in turn drive the weather patterns.

As the temperatures rise in the arctic/antarctic, this diminishes the temperature differential, which slows the stream, which raises the temperature, and so on, until the streams stop and cloud cover increases due to the mega-storms that are created.

Once the ocean streams have slowed/stopped the cooling begins again causing the re-formation of the ice caps, bringing on the next ice age. Eventually the ice progresses toward the equator, where it runs into the warm waters and the cycle begins again.

What we have done with our reckless spewing of particulates and greenhouse gasses, is to accelerate this process. So, now we are looking at another ice age a few thousand years ahead of schedule, but we have to go through the warming process first, which is all any of us will see.

The theory of the dinosaurs die-off is, last I heard, that the earth was struck by a mother-huge asteroid (believed by many to have created the Gulf of Mexico) which blew a gazillion tons of particulates and water vapor into the atmosphere, and increased earth's albedo blocking Sol's radiation and rapidly cooling the planet, so it can/does happen either way (warming or cooling).

who are making the claim for their evidence?

This debunks the claims you are referring to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

We are currently in an inter-glacial period called the Holocene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene

My numbers are probally wrong, but this is the general idea.

Over the last million years, ice-ages have been more common than non-ice-ages. Its been a repeating cycle with 100,000 years of ice and 10,000 years of warmth. The last ice age was around 10,000 years ago and was 100,000 years long. That would suggest that sometime, soon (geologically), we should be heading into an ice age. Now, the geological record doesn't pin ice ages down too close and the variance is over a thousand years for these events. Further, the transitions are not short, with over a thousand years between a warm and cold period.

Anyways, the geological trend suggest that we should be cooling, but at an inperceptibly slow rate. Actual measurements indicate that we are warming at a perceptible rate.

The claim in the 70s was that we were heading into an ice age over the next few thousand years and has not been proven wrong.

One thing is they have done core samples from Antartica that go back six hundred thousand years and have been able to ascertain exact amounts of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere throughout all that time. The amounts in the atmosphere now are way way off the chart and has not been even close to being equaled in six hundred thousand years. There were very obvious cycles that were demonstrated in those core samples but things are so different now than at any other time that one can not rely on those recurring cycles. There is going to be hell to pay and all that money the Republicans devote their lives to will do them not one bit of good. I will not shed any tears for them either..

Lots of references.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

and had no support from the climate science community.

The Morans use this all the time to "debunk" the "fraud" of global warming.

typical freepish blather...

"back in 1975 the problem was global cooling, now THEY say it's global warming...why can't THEY get it right????

Computers can't predict the weather 14 days from now so how can THEY predict the weather 50 years from now...."

(or words to that effect)

He's scanned in pages from National Geographic etc,
showing how these claims are taking quotes out of context.

"Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No"
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/