One of the claims people sceptical towards climate science often repeat is the one that 'back in the 70ies they predicted a cooling' where the argument should suggest 'them' predict no matter what, as long as 'them' can claim the end of the world is near.
Besides the logical problems with the argument itself (scientifical knowledge accumulates, which can result in a paradigm shift) there's something even more problematic with the argument : it seems it simply isn't correct.
Peterson, Connolly & Fleck had a closer look at the publications made in the 70ies and presented the result of their investigation in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Their conclusion leaves no doubt :
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.Co-auther William Connolly runs an (excellent) blog called Stoat where the entire paper can be found (pdf). Simply a must read !
My grandfather, Charles Tenney, was a university professor whose library comprised some 13,000 books, one of which was a book published in the 1970s of a collection of scientific articles concerning the idea of a cooling (I think -- but I did not read them). I wish I had read them, but the book now forms part of the library of a state university in California.
ReplyDeleteOf course, new research has superceded the old research.
Tenney