My recounting of the falsehoolds in George Will’s two recent columns on global warming (here) was incomplete, as guest blogger Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, makes clear in a post first published by Wonk Room. The NYT excerpts below show that climate science coverage in the 1970s reflected the lack of consensus among scientists.
In “Climate Science in a Tornado,” George F. Will has completely misrepresented the historical New York Times coverage of the “global cooling” issue. Despite Will’s claim that the New York Times was a “megaphone for the alarmed” during “1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling,” its coverage was actually nuanced and prescient.
On December 21, 1969, the New York Times ran a UPI wire story, “Scientists Caution on Changes In Climate as Result of Pollution,” which reported that scientists discussed the possible threat of manmade global warming at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, with calls for greater monitoring of the climate:
J.O. Fletcher, a physical scientist for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., said that “man had only a few decades to solve the problem of global warming caused by pollution.” Global warming could cause further melting of the polar ice caps and affect the earth’s climate.
On December 29, 1974, the New York Times ran the story, “Forecast for Forecasting: Cloudy.” This article is a long discussion of the state of climate forecasting, and has an extensive discussion of the process of global cooling due to aerosols, and the contrary impact of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and the great difficulty in developing valid and reliable climate forecasting models. The lead paragraph:
In the long term, climate is cooling off — or is it warming up? As for tomorrow’s weather, even the world’s biggest computer can’t say for sure what it will be.
On May 21, 1975, the New York Times ran the story, “Scientists Ask Why the Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead.” This article begins with a clear statement of uncertainty:
The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.
On August 14, 1975, the New York Times ran, “Warming Trend Seen in Climate.” In this article, the New York Times discusses two scientific articles that focus on the overall climate patterns. It covers the debate over global cooling due to aerosols and global warming due to CO2 increases:
Dr. [Wally] Broecker’s argument is that the present cooling trend in the north will be reversed as more and more carbon dioxide is introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of fuels.
In the decades since, of course, scientists have come to the consensus that our continued burning of fossil fuels are tied to the warming of the planet. It is not the New York Times that is dishonest in its coverage, it is George F. Will.
Update: Andy Alexander, in his first column as the Washington Post ombudsman, takes on George Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers.” He reviews one of the many factual errors in Will’s column and finds Will misrepresented the Arctic Climate Research Center:
The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will’s assertion that global sea ice levels “now equal those of 1979.” I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.
Alexander did not address any of the other lies.
See also “The Post ombudsman whitewashes George Will’s columns, the editors, and his own role.”
The NYT’s entire August 22, 1981 story, “Study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels,” is reprinted here: “Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels.”
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I just put up the first part of an interview with Peter Gwynne, who wrote the 1975 Newsweek article, “The Cooling World”.
http://www.examiner.com/ x-4112-Skepticism-Examiner~y2009m3d2-Peter-Gwynne-author-of-the-The-Cooling-World-Newsweek-1975
This Will must be an odd fellow. Why doesn´t he read some science but makes himself a ridiculous character? The science is settled, as somebody said.
Would it be better not to take any notice of this kind of fools? And let them be pure clowns, as they are.
The thing that always puzzles me is why some scientists thought there would be significant cooling. I understand that it was only a few and that deniers like to take articles that say “we think an ice age will appear sometime in the next 10,000 years” to prove that there was a global cooling scare.
But the fact is a few people did think that we would slowly cool over the next several decades, but I have no idea why. Did they think pollution would blot out the sun? Did the think the calculations of the Earth’s orbit were wrong?
By the 1970s I think the temperatures were already moving up again.
If the deniers weren’t trying to fool people into believing their crap it would only be of historic interest, but still – whenever I hear about it I always wonder why anybody thought we were going to cool.
They must have had a reason.
I wonder if the idea of “nuclear winter” hasn’t been a part of some people’s memories of how the discussions were running back in the ’70s.
There was serious public discussion about how a wide range nuclear conflict might cause severe global dimming and even blow out the ozone layer.
To paraphrase a line from the movie “Trixie,” George Will wouldn’t let the truth touch him with a ten foot pole.
The interest in cooling was during the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s; by the second half interest focused more warming. This makes sense in that by the early 70s the climate had been cooling for three decades. As this article from Time in 1972 notes, “Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F”
http://www.time.com/ time/ magazine/ article/ 0,9171,944914-1,00.html
Here is an interesting talk by Robert Reeves presented at the International Commission on the History of Meteorology, July 8, 2004
http://www.meteohistory.org/ 2004polling_preprints/ docs/ abstracts/ reeves&etal_abstract.pdf
He notes that concern reached up to the White House:
n the other hand, the global surface temperature record from the 1940s through the 1960s, revealing a gradual cooling, led others to believe this might be the early indications of a longer-term effect. This attracted the interests of other scientists, including glaciologists. In January 1972 a working conference of top European and American investigators was convened at Brown University to discuss “The Present Interglacial, How and When Will it End?”
Its organizers were geologists George Kukla of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences and Robert Matthews of Brown….In a rather bold move, Kukla and Matthews wrote to President Nixon in December 1972 with the main conclusion of the study and a call for action at the national level. “…a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. This is a surprising result based largely on recent studies of deep sea sediments.”
Good heavens. This “all the climatologists said there would be global cooling” thing just won’t die. This was examined at length and demolished at length in a peer-reviewed article published last fall that reviewed the spectrum of scholarly and popular writings on the cooling vs. warming topic in the 1970s: Peterson, Thomas C.; William M. Connolley, and John Fleck. “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 89 (9): 1325–1337. On line at
http://ams.allenpress.com/ perlserv/ ?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008BAMS2370.1
and available for download as a PDF
Bottom line: even in the 1970’s there was much more scientific interest and concern over global warming than global cooling.
One must separate the two halves of the decade. As Peterson so simply puts it
“By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work
(Mitchell 1972), the notion of a global cooling trend
was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood. The
first satellite records showed increasing snow and ice
cover across the Northern Hemisphere from the late
1960s to the early 1970s.”
So the point of this article is that there was no consensu in the 70’s. Science doesn’t work on consensus, religion does. Wake up please. Of course below is from a recent article from the web, that lets us know that today there is more of a consensus against AGW than for AGW.
” Skepticism over human-caused global warming was also raised as recently as February 25th at a U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing hosted by Senators Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe. There, Dr. William Happer, Princeton University professor and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (1990-1993), presented some of his key findings on climate change. One of just four scientists invited to address the forum, Dr. Happer, who supervised all DOE work on climate change, is a climate crisis skeptic. In his presentation, he noted that 650 prominent international scientists, including both former and current IPCC participants, have challenged the claims made by the 52 scientists who authorized the U.N. panel’s report. He also called CO2, a compound singled out by the IPCC as a major contributor to global warming, as, in fact, a beneficial compound essential for life on earth.”
Shorter Flat Earther:
I must post some FUD to distract away from the debunking of my ideology!
Best,
D
Dano your post is a distraction or do you think you contributed to the debunking of my ideology? If I did have an ideology, do you think it would rely on whether scientist in the 60’s or 70’s did or did not come to a consensus on global cooling? The article seems to say there wasn’t a consensus on global cooling all to reaffirm the current consensus on global warming. My ideology is that a “Scientific Consensus has absolutely nothing to do with the Scientific Method”. This you cannot debunk, this is FACT. The more we talk about a consensus one way or another, the less we talk about the facts.
here, Dr. William Happer, Princeton University professor and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (1990-1993), presented some of his key findings on climate change…
Here’s a fun way to waste a bit of time: run Dr. Happer’s name through scholar.google.com and check out all the peer-reviewed papers relevant to global-warming that he’s authored.
You’re right, Princeton University professor should have gave it away. He obviously doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about and the 650 prominent international scientist he noted: clueless or paid off. What the heck was I thinking? The sun doesn’t warm the planet, my breath does. It’s all so simple now.
Just got done going over those 650 scientists. They are morons.
http://epw.senate.gov/ public/ index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9
Gee, if we’re going to have trolls, can’t we at least have better ones, please?
I’m not so concerned what a few articles claimed in the 70’s. There are articles in the press on climate that say much more dubious things today. The scientific community has reached a general consensus today.
Regarding Will Happer, he made one of the more weird contrarian arguments in front of the Senate recently. This video is fine comedy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2009/ 02/ 27/ co2-famine-exxon-paid-sci_n_170473.html
Flat Earther (very appropriate name, BTW),
No one here is interested in “debating” long debunked garbage. So while the “debate” goes on, California and multiple other states are attacking the problem. President Obama and his advisers and department heads (including Nobel laureate Chu) are focused on the problem and have already taken some positive steps in the first month in office. It is time for serious action at all levels of government, and hopefully by individuals as well.
The main point of the 1960s science debates was the realization that there was not enough data or understanding to offer sound climate predictions.
“Things are worse than they can possibly be.”
I think Will was referring to the state of the media reporting on Climate Change.
“Climate Denial Crock of the Week – I Love the Seventies”
now up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nTw0KneNLg