The Global Cooling Fad

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. The current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but underwent global warming throughout the 20th century.

Introduction: General Awareness and Concern

In the 1970s, there was increasing awareness that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945, as well as the possibility of large scale warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases. Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, less than 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming. The general public had little awareness of carbon dioxide's effects on climate, but Science News in May 1959 forecast a 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000, with a consequent warming trend. The actual increase in this period was 29%. Paul R. Ehrlich mentioned climate change from greenhouse gases in 1968. By the time the idea of global cooling reached the public press in the mid-1970s temperatures had stopped falling, and there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide's warming effects. In response to such reports, the Word Meteorological Organization issued a warning in June 1976 that a very significant warming of global climate was probable.

Currently there are some concerns about the possible regional cooling effects of a slowdown or shutdown of thermohaline circulation, which might be provoked by an increase of fresh water mixing into the North Atlantic due to glacial melting. The probability of this occurring is generally considered to be very low, and the IPCC notes, "even in models where the THC weakens, there is still a warming over Europe. For example, in all AOGCM integrations where the radiative forcing is increasing, the sign of the temperature change over north-west Europe is positive."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Note by the Blog Author

The article above is an overly-convenient after-the-fact analysis of the global cooling fad of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The author managed to find a few references to global warming and inserted these as somehow superior references at the time.  Nonsense.  People genuinely believed in the inevitability of global cooling at the time, and even after the temperature stabilized and stopped falling in the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) began adding regulations and federal clout to the presumed imminent ice age.

Around 1978, the earth’s temperature went on a rampage of increases that lasted through about 1998.  Since 2002, the earth’s temperature has been hard to classify but appears to be slowly falling.  In 2003, IPCC correctly reported that it was unable to offer a long-term prognostication about future trends.  In 2007, IPCC notoriously asserted a certain and dangerous long-term warning trend without any explanation at all for why the 2003 conclusion had been dumped. The 2013 IPCC report reiterates the inevitability of global warming, although there is language that allows for a possibly slower rate of increase.

The blog author asserts that neither the global cooling fad nor the global warming fad are scientifically rigorous enough to be used to make policy decisions.  They are fads, not scientific certainties.  Long term temperature trends have at least 14 independent variables that are not all measured consistently over long periods of time.  The hottest temperature ever recorded was 136 degress Farenheit in Libya in 1922, itself the hottest year of the twentieth century.  That temperature has never been matched, anywhere, in over 90 years.  During this time there have been thousands of daily temperature readings.

IPCC 2007 also violated dozens of forecasting standards.  It should not be considered more reliable than the global cooling fad that preceded it.

Afterword by the Blog Author

The post above from Wikipedia is a sterling example of why Wikipedia cannot be trusted when the topic involves modern politicians or supposed “scientific consensus” that amounts to a fad.  Fortunately it is easy to audit Wikipedia for biases like these.  The free encyclopedia is often used in this blog – but not the biased posts that seek to confirm a political agenda.

In making long-term predictions, there is a strong tendency for the average to return to the mean.  A period of cooling died out and was replaced by a period of warming which also fizzled out into a period of temperature stagnation.  None of the models used in the 2007 IPCC respect that tendency; nor was a refutation offered for the correct 2003 conclusion that the problem was too difficult to be reliably forecast. Therefore the conclusions of 2007 and 2013 were probably biased.  Neither the 2007 study nor nthe 2013 study hypothecated extensive periods of temperature stagnation, even though such a period was well underway by 2007.  Further, carbon dioxide, a benign chemical essential to life, has been increasing through both the cooling trend and the warming trend and the current stagnant trend.  Carbon dioxide is a poor chemical for storing heat.

Carbon dioxide in a closed system such as a terrarium does increase the average temperature.  But the earth’s atmosphere is not a closed system – tons of atmospheric gases spin off into space every day.