David recites the usual denier crap on his blog. The ice age scare never happened, the CIA didn’t know what they were talking about, blah blah blah ….
But wait. There was that little thing about the directors of NCAR and CRU …..
Hubert Lamb CRU Director : “The last twenty years of this century will be progressively colder”
John Firor NCAR director : “it appears we are going into a period where temperatures will be low and variable”
http://news.google.com/newspapers/
http://news.google.com/newspapers/
Before Hansen tampered with the data, this is what NCAR showed :
This is what the National Academy of Sciences showed :
Then David makes this hilarious comment
The state of scientific knowledge in 2012 is far better than it was in the 1970s.
In the 1970s NASA sent men to the moon. Now we have morons at NASA predicting the imminent drowning of Manhattan, and super El Ninos every other year.
We can expect then that David Appell will update his blog entry with this 🙂
In reality there has been little progress. Our state of understanding is still primative.
…touches finger to nose
One thing I’ve noticed that the BS Artists do, if you reference a certain article, is try to denigrate the publication as a “skeptic blog” or say that it’s dubious in some other way. What bs.
But it’s very important that we don’t allow them to get away with references to warmist publications or sites, or sites that are clearly in the tank for the warmists: like ScienceDaily, LiveScience, “SkepticalScience,” Physorg, Nat Geo, Scientific American, ad infinitum. Rule of thumb: if it hasn’t even once published anything even just slightly supportive of the anti-warmists, then it’s no good. Someone could compile a more comprehensive list of suspect sites and publications.
Its an appellation, there’s whine to go with his cheese.
…..LOL
I don’t see how anyone who was alive and not comatose during the 1970s could be unaware that scientists were pushing this idea.
I was a teenager at the time and clearly recall talk of an impending ice age. I’m just glad they got it wrong just like with runaway CAGW. 😉
“The state of scientific knowledge in 2012 is far better than it was in the 1970s.”
Back then they came out with the idea that a flat disc continuously illuminated by a dim sun was a good model for the earth. How remarkable stupid was that idea?
Oh wait, that’s how they still model the earth today!
40 years later and the same broken method – it didn’t work for Venus, it doesn’t work for earth now Mr. Hansen and Mr Appell.
I know the seventies. I was a very young adult in those times. I remember quite well that you found the assertion that we were entering a new ice age almost every week, in scientific litterature AND in the mainstream press. If David Appel rewrites the History of times he didn’t even happen to know, then he must be striving to get a job in the Ministry of Truth (Pravda, in Russian).
Really? If there were papers in the scientific “litterature” [sic] “almost every week,” then why don’t you list a few dozen of them? With that many, they should be easy to find.
Hi Mr. Appell,
Certainly the AGW scare is much bigger than the cooling scare of the 1970s but a scare there certainly was.
There are some papers which predicted ice age / cooling future. Check these out. 😉 1970s.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.short
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v275/n5680/abs/275489a0.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v258/n5537/abs/258697a0.html
http://finden.nationallizenzen.de/Record/ZDB-1-NTA@212937227
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q07p5u4374150478/
Sorry, but I am a french speaking European. How about you writing in French, so that I can have a good laugh, David? Or in Flemish? Or even in German? And what do you think about writing in Italian? I can write and talk in all of these languages, even if I make some mistakes, some of the time.
Let’s look, shall we? Google Scholar. Time frame, 1960 -1980, search term “ice age”.
Could it be that easy? Really?
There are 92,700 results. There’s what, 52 weeks a year? Times 20.
It works out to about 89 scientific papers a week mentioning the ice age between 1960 and 1980.
Here’s your link.
Did you ever have to write a research paper in, say, junior high school? I honestly can’t tell….
Do you think perhaps people in the 1960s-1980s may have been writing about the geologic ice ages, without any reference whatsoever to anything taking place in the 1970s? Can you explain, then, how your search criteria distinguishes between them?
As I said, standards here are quite low.
What part of this isn’t clear to you?
Hubert Lamb CRU Director : “The last twenty years of this century will be progressively colder“
John Firor NCAR director : “it appears we are going into a period where temperatures will be low and variable“
David, you really are incredible! You can’t understand that people are able to remember things that happened in their own lives! Apparently, theory (written by the likes as Connoley, Wikipedia’s warmist “braghettone”) is more important to you than memory. There was a say in a french satirical magazine of the seventies that went like this : ” J’l’ai pas vu, j’l’ai pas lu, mais j’en ai entendu parler”. It is perfectly fit for people like you, who are totally dogmatic.
There is all kind of research showing that people’s memories are not very reliable, and are frequently altered (and even invented) afterwards: “Our memories of major past events can be surprisingly unreliable, says a new study of the July 2005 London bombings, which found that people can easily convince themselves they’ve seen things that never happened.” – Cosmos Magazine, Sept 2008
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2193/study-shows-memory-surprisingly-unreliable
Memories are no substitute for documents, except for those with low standards. So where is the list of all these scientific papers?
@David: Jimbo has a few (6 comments above yours). I only had a quick glance at them; I will have to look in detail later (supper time, as it were).
Someone, at least, should have looked at these in detail, so I will.
1) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.short
This paper does not predict the onset of global cooling. It says that a large increase in aerosols, should it occur (something not unthinkable at the time, given pre-Clean Air Act America,) could lead to substantial cooling. It examines a scenario.
2) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v275/n5680/abs/275489a0.html
Does this paper predict the onset of an ice age, or examine certain conditions (such as the passage of the solar system through a supernova remnant) that could cause global cooling? From the abstract it seems the later.
3) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v258/n5537/abs/258697a0.html
Again, this paper examines a scenario (which is part of the job of climate scientists) – it doesn’t make a prediction. Without reading the paper (and not just the abstract), it’s difficult to tell what exactly they concluded and why (or if they thought about carbon emissions from land use changes).
4) http://finden.nationallizenzen.de/Record/ZDB-1-NTA@212937227
I can’t tell anything from a simple title and citation. (Again, you guys have very low standards.) According to Skeptical Science, “As in Broecker’s 1975 study, Kellogg correctly identified that carbon dioxide represents the most significant human impact on the global climate. However, Kellogg also stated with a fair amount of confidence that aerosols should have a net warming effect on the climate because not only do they scatter sunlight, but they also absorb it, and Kellogg believed the latter effect was stronger than the former.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-kellogg.html
According to Spencer Weart at AIP, Kellogg thought aerosols would lead to a net warming: “The prominent meteorologist William W. Kellogg, for one, told a 1975 World Meteorological Organization symposium not to worry. He noted that industrial aerosols, and also the soot from burning debris where forests were cleared, absorbed sunlight strongly — after all, smog and smoke are visibly dark. They would thus retain heat. He calculated that the chief effect of human aerosols would be regional warming (although he admitted that the calculation relied on properties that were poorly known). Anyway, as Kellogg also pointed out, rains washed aerosols out of the lower atmosphere in a matter of weeks. Eventually the warming due to the increase in CO2 — a gas that lingered in the atmosphere for centuries — must necessarily dominate the climate.”
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm
5) http://www.springerlink.com/content/q07p5u4374150478/
This paper examines aerosols and finds they lead to a cooling. IT DOES NOT SEEM TO EXAMINE OTHER FACTORS, ESPECIALLY CO2, and so it does not predict an onset of cooling, let alone an ice age.
—
So out of these five papers – 5 whole papers! — which are poor evidence in the first place because all we have are the abstracts (and in one case not even that) – none “predicts” cooling, but suggest scenarios where it might come about, especially if other factors are ignored.
This is pretty lousy evidence for a purported consensus on global cooling, let alone BIG scares of an imminent ice age.
Conclusion: People with low standards grasp at straws to maintain their biases and preconceived notions.
Conclusion : Consensus is a word used by people who aren’t very bright. Temperatures plummeted from 1940 to 1975.
What part of this isn’t clear to you?
Except I asked, where are the scientific papers, not “what did two scientists each say to a journalist?”
@David ” … not “what did two scientists each say to a journalist?””
So does that mean that anything a scientist says to you doesn’t count?
The current director of GISS lies to journalists all the time, but I don’t believe that either Lamb or Firor had that same problem.
Do you believe that the Holocaust happened? You said that people’s memories fail them. and none of those people in gas chambers did any peer review to prove it.
There was even a miniseries on the coming ice age – probably 1975. Showed the panics that would occur if Hollywood celebrities couldn’t wear skimpy skanky dresses (or chase same).
I found it: http://www.starshipsofa.com/forums/topic/ice-james-follett-1978/
I was there. I lived to tell the tale.
I know I have mentioned this before and feel compelled to repeat it (briefly). I lived in Europe at the time and the mountain folk were very concerned because ‘experts’ told them that alpine glaciers would wipe out their peaceful mountain villages. I remember the TIME magazine cover, it was my father’s subscription, which I read every week. This scenario is what hooked me into a life of studying geology, and later climatology.
David is indeed a denier, and probably worse…
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” What you think you remember is meaningless to the topic.
You’re so predictable in your mendacity. When every single publication, both scientific & not, disagrees with you, you just claim it’s “anectdotal”. Never mind that all of us were actually paying attention in the 1970s. Were you, Mr. Appell?
Yes David, we know. Whenever our realities conflict with your fantasies, they are meaningless. And as I am not senile yet, my memory serves me well, sorry your delusions (denials) do not serve you as nicely. 😉
Science writer! LOL!!!
Do you think that statements from the directors of NCAR and CRU, and published temperature graphs from NCAR and NAS, are anecdotal?
The reason you are reticent to accept reality, is because it isn’t what you want to hear.
This isn’t about scientific publications — it’s about what someone claims to remember. That is no evidence at all for anything.
But those scientists back then received death threats telling them to say that…otherwise they were predicting CAGW. And you have to believe that…it’s the truth! What? Proof? Actual death threats in paper…hard evidence? You don’t need that…but there really were death threats!
-Scott
I’m off to Horsetooth Reservoir and Bellvue. Meet you at the coffee shop in 50 minutes. ;^)
I don’t drink coffee. Nor am I in the shape to keep up with you…presumably.
-Scott
Two short newspaper articles do not comprise a “scare.” Nor do two unsourced figures.
Your standards are extremely low.
@David: “Your standards are extremely low.”
Yet you keep coming back … why?
I have no problem with David coming back. In fact, I actually agree with some of the things he says sometimes. On the other hand, I want to know what sort of standards he held himself to regarding the supposed death threats. How do they compare to Steve’s here?
-Scott
@Scott: I have no problem with him coming back at all; in fact, I think it is a good thing. I post comments far more often when there is disagreement. My question is why he keeps coming back in spite of the obvious contempt he has for Steve and this site.
LLAP – that’s a good question. It’s one thing to disagree with Steve’s statements and approach (heck, I disagree enough with those plenty) and keep returning. Someone like Tony Duncan (I miss him) might fall in that category. But to come back to a place you hold in such low esteem and give hypocritical comments on it? I just don’t get it. Nor am I a psychologist, so I won’t even try to give a hypothesis on what’s up with it.
-Scott
Re: death threats. I’ve been very clear on this:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/05/australian-threats-yet-again.html
David – I still see no death threats. The only thing that is very clear is that you see things how you choose and no one will convince you otherwise by pointing out the lack of evidence.
-Scott
Amazing. A person “welcomes” a scientist to his country by showing him a noose, and you don’t see a death threat. Perhaps he just didn’t have any flowers handy?
Plus, there are these:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/05/threats-in-australia-more-to-story.html
and Document 5:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/05/australian-threats-yet-again.html
Thousands of articles, the heads of every major science organization, & you say it’s only two? Have you ever heard of google.com? Have you bothered to looks at the hundreds of articles referenced on this very website? They can help you learn things you’re too stupid to see with your own eyes.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=1850&as_yhi=1980&q=%22ice+age%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C1
I searched scholar.google.com “ice age” and limited to between 1850 and .
I only received 13,300 hits. They sure wasted a lot of money back then modeling ice ages.
What thousands of articles?
I searched scholar.google.com “ice age” and limited to between 1850 and . I only received 13,300 hits.
That proves people write about ice ages — but nothing about the 1970s.
They didn’t have the internet back in the ’70’s so that works in David’s favour. I have only one or two publications from that period remaining that discuss the coming ice age but what would that prove, right? Stephen Schneider one of the world’s ‘leading climatologists’ was warning us of the coming ice age as well. I suspect he only admitted to this because we have him on video saying so.
Is there a link for the Schneider video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c53gfWqgnw4&feature=relmfu
Go to the 4:50 mark David
So if you were a trial judge, you would expect that the prosecutor repeat the entire body of evidence in each new sentence?
I would if, as the judge, I had serious doubts there ever was such a body of evidence.
A bit of history –
The New Ice-age
“U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming,” blares the headline of the July 9, 1971, article, which cautions readers that the world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts.”
The scientist was S.I.Rasool, a colleague of Mr. Hansen’s at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The article goes on to say that Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied clouds above Venus.
As reported
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/sep/19/inside-the-beltway-69748548/
A newspaper of course is not peer reviewed, no, in some ways it gets better than that – it’s publicly reviewed, including peers, and sometime proprietors of news organizations are indited and charged when found to be breaking the law.
I think there’s a serious confusion over this issue that needs to be clarified; otherwise the two camps will continue to talk past each other. Recently I’ve been going through the literature from the late 50’s to the late 70’s that dealt with world temperatures up till then in the 20th century, especially from 1940. I’m trying to make this a fairly exhaustive survey, including German articles from the Berliner Wetterkarte (cited by Lamb in his 1974 CRU Tech. Report – are you familiar with those articles, Mr. Appell?). (Unfortunately, I can’t read Russian so I can’t base any report on direct reading of that part of the literature, although I did get hold of a copy of Budyko’s book on climate change, which refers to this work.)
My reading so far shows that there are actually two issues in play here. The first is whether there was a consensus by the mid-70’s concerning future cooling. In fact, this issue was a contentious one; this is admitted by Lowell Ponte in his book “The Cooling”, although he argued for continued cooling. (Hence, selective quotes from this book are misleading.)The second issue is whether temperatures had fallen since 1940. Here, as far as I can tell, there was complete agreement; the graphs I’ve seen usually show a decline in the estimated world average of about 0.3 degrees from 1940 to 1970. As a result of this, there was real cause for concern in many quarters, both within the field of climatology itself as well as in the popular literature. But it is true that there was no complete consensus on this latter point.
I’ve also noticed (as I’m sure many other readers here have) that most contemporary graphs of average world temperature in the 20th century show a tiny, almost indiscernible decline between these years. In other words, a decline for which there was a general consensus (and no counter claims in the literature that I know of) has disappeared.
Finally, I would note that many, perhaps the majority, of references pertinent to the 2nd issue, that of the actual temperature decline from 1940 to 1970, are not referenced in the well-known paper by Peterson, Connelley and Fleck, which only deals with the first issue. This ‘sin of omission’ seems to me at least a little disingenuous, as do remarks by others in the warmist camp that speak to the issue of concerns over cooling during the 70’s.
There is no official website you can go to and check out what the ‘consensus’ is on any topic (whatever that may mean). And you are correct in that there is a difference between a ‘scare’ and a ‘consensus.’ We can prove that both scares happened by citing media articles on the subject. But it’s virtually impossible to ‘prove’ that there is a consensus. It is not even possible to prove that there is a AGW ‘consensus’ because I can cite various surveys that indicate there is no consensus. (Although there is a majority of views on the AGW side.) If I wanted to argue for a consensus, the best I could do here would be to cite the IPCC AR4 executive summary and note the list of scientific institutions that endorse its findings. (There a couple of ‘analyses’ that purport to show that 97% of scientists agree that the planet has warmed or respond positively to other vague questions of that type, but they are so laughably bad I could do not use them for their intended purpose as evidence of anything.)
There are many cases where it is reasonable to assume a consensus among knowledgeable people, e.g. the Neuron Doctrine, the periodic table, the fact that the Phlogiston Theory designated some compounds as elements and vice versa. What I’m saying is that the claim that there was no consensus of this sort regarding what the cooling after 1940 presaged has some basis. At the same time, there’s no question in my mind that this is part of an attempt to deflect attention from the real consensus of the time, which was that the earth had cooled appreciably from 1940 to 1970. In other words, these arguments are part of an attempt to erase the whole global cooling episode from our historical memory, since it detracts from the AGW narrative. (Incidentally, the very fact that people are doing this is further evidence that AGW is primarily a ‘narrative’ rather than a scientific hypothesis. Because an earlier hypothesis of global cooling would not in itself threaten the current AGW hypothesis, any more than Phlogiston Theory poses a threat to modern atomic theory.)
Which surveys, in your opinion, show there is no consensus?
Just to forestall any silly comments about there being no scientific literature on this subject, the articles I’ve collected so far include the following journals.
Science
Quartenary Research
Tellus
Geographical Review
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Weather
Geografiska Annaler
The Geographical Journal
Sound familiar?
“In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have…”
http://socioecohistory.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/time-magazine-april-1977.jpg
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
Before anything became ‘political’, i worked for Environment Canada.(late 70’s early 80’s) The instructors I learned from all talked about the cooling period we were in. The talk was ‘global cooling’, with a long way off the next ice age. My initial posting was in the high arctic, and the following summer had an excellent ride over to Axel Heilberg Island to drop of supplies and mail to a couple of european’s who were studing the glaciers. In our broken English, we found out that the glaciers were receding, which at the time surprised me! Well, you continually learn over the years, that yes, we had come out of the little ice age and things had ‘thankfully’ warmed up. Now though, it is totally political, and the bs is brutal, its no longer science….
Remember the 1970 Oldsmobile 442?
How about the AMC Javelin with vinyl roof or the Chevelle?
How about Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali.
When the AFL and the NFL merged.
TV remote controls made clicking noises, changing from The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians to George M! or later watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. MASH the film became MASH the TV series.
Transistor radios were all the rage. And so much more.
Now I’ve reminded you of how things were, caste your mind back there and remember –
How many TV channels were there, not so many. What news papers were read, what magazines, how many radio stations did you hear (some were in stereo!)
Now if you recall as clear as I can, then that coming ice age idea was a big thing.
I was big not because it was the leading science paper. No, it was memorable because it was a scientific paper! And it was reported everywhere, even Time magazine, the National Geographic, back when those publication were very well respected for their factual reports. So newspapers, magazines, radio and TV all re-reported it, again and again. But why? Because it was a scientific pronouncement that everyone could at that time relate too. Winters were harsh then and looked set to get harsher, so naturally people remember this scientific fact of the age.
One of the most widely popular known facts of that time was that scientists reported that we were heading for an ice age, NASA had said so!
Peterson et al did a systematic review of the scientific literature, and sampled the popular media:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
Nothing you’ve written above, or anything else that has appeared on this post, comes close to this degree of detail and completeness, which makes their conclusion much better than yours: “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”
You neglected to mention that the “et al” part of Peterson et al contains one William M Connolley. Considering Connolley censored climate change entries at Wikipedia so that only one side was presented (and he got barred in the process), I can’t take ANYTHING he says seriously. He is an activist and an idealogue who abused his position at Wikipedia, which also included altering biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with. Ergo, he is not likely to publish anything that would go against AGW. Nice try David, but that was an epic fail.
As is usual you’ve avoided the point.
Back in the seventies there were considerably fewer news outlets and just about all of them, at some time or other, reported that the ice age was coming. This was because “Time magazine, the National Geographic, back when those publication were very well respected for their factual reports. ” reported this. At the time people thought the majority of scientists were honest, moral human being reporting truth.
Did they “report” an ice age was coming, or have an article or two on about scientists trying to puzzle out what looked to be some cooling?
An imminent ice age would be a story of immense proportions — one of the biggest stories in history. So where were all the articles about this?
Peterson et al have a sidebar (p. 1330) that excerpts some of the best known of them — they mostly are asking a lot of questions, and only one of them qualifies as “reported that the ice age was coming.”
But you must have a better list.
“The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”
that’s hysterical…..
There’s no consensus now
@Lat: “There’s no consensus now”
Check this out … Roy W Spencer dismantles the whole idea of consensus, starting at 1:25:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePyyqjQgCgA
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/28/paging-david-appell-and-nick-stokes-again-time-to-fess-up-and-apologize/#comments
😆
“The state of scientific knowledge in 2012 is far better than it was in the 1970s”
So having more knowledge now somehow erased the ice age scare? Must be Doc Brown’s fault.