Arguments
At a glance - What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?
Posted on 21 February 2023 by John Mason, BaerbelW
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.
At a glance
If you are aged 60 or over, you may remember this particular myth first-hand. For a brief time in the early to mid-1970s, certain sections of the popular media ran articles describing how we were heading for a renewed ice-age. Such silliness endures to the present day, just with a different gloss: as an example, for the UK tabloid the Daily Express, October just wouldn't be October without it publishing at least one made-up account of the impending 100-day snow-apocalypse.
There were even books written on the subject, such as Nigel Calder's mischievously-entitled The Weather Machine (1974), originally published by the BBC and accompanying a “documentary” of the same name, which was nothing of the sort. A shame, because the same author's previous effort, The Restless Earth (1972), about plate tectonics, was very good indeed.
Thomas Peterson and colleagues did a very neat job of obliterating all of this nonsense. In a 2008 paper titled The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus, they dared do what the popular press dared not to. They had a look at what was actually going on. Obtaining copies of the peer-reviewed papers on climate, archived in the collections of Nature, JSTOR and the American Meteorological Society and published between 1965 and 1979, they examined and rated them. Would there be a consensus on global cooling? Alas! - no.
Results showed that despite the media claims, just ten per cent of papers predicted a cooling trend. On the other hand, 62% predicted global warming and 28% made no comment either way. The take-home from this one? It's the old media adage, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”
Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "at a glance" section. Read a more technical version via the link below!
Click for Further details
In case you'd like to explore more of our recently updated rebuttals, here are the links to all of them:
| Myths with link to rebuttal | Short URLs |
| Ice age predicted in the 1970s | sks.to/1970s |
| It hasn't warmed since 1998 | sks.to/1998 |
| Antarctica is gaining ice | sks.to/antarctica |
| CRU emails suggest conspiracy | sks.to/climategate |
| What evidence is there for the hockey stick | sks.to/hockey |
| CO2 lags temperature | sks.to/lag |
| Climate's changed before | sks.to/past |
| It's the sun | sks.to/sun |
| Temperature records are unreliable | sks.to/temp |
| The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics | sks.to/thermo |
John Mason & Baerbel:
I suggest a protocol be adopted to bold the title of all books (see second paragraph of OP) and embed a link to a publisher and/or online seller of the book into the title of each book.
I also suggest a protocol to use italics for the title of all published papers (as was done in the third paragraph of the OP) and embed a link to the journal in which the paper appears.
I kinda agree with that, John. Italics are typical in most media outlets. However, you'd do well to find second-hand copies of the books mentioned in this case since they were published almost 50 years ago.
In the at-a-glance versions we avoid all things that could distract the reader: a link may break the flow of concentration as someone stops to think about clicking it or not. These are after all aimed at being inclusive and hopefully should be understandable to folk regardless of previous experience (or not) in the sciences.
John M @ #2:
Taking into account what you said, I would bold the titles of the two books and put the date of publication for each in parenthesis immediately after the title. Doing so would let the reader know how old the books are.
Good points there, John. Thanks.