During the 1970s ice age scare, climate scientists blamed deep dips in the jet stream and extreme weather on global cooling. Now they blame them on global warming.
1975
During cooler climatic periods, however, the high-altitude winds are broken up into irregular cells by weaker and more plentiful pressure centers, causing formation of a “meridional circulation” pattern. These small, weak cells may stagnate over vast areas for many months, bringing unseasonably cold weather on one side and unseasonably warm weather on the other. Droughts and floods become more frequent and may alternate season to season, as they did last year in India. Thus, while the hemisphere as a whole is cooler, individual areas may alternately break temperature and precipitation records at both extremes.
If global temperatures should fall even further, the effects could be considerably more drastic.
Science NEWS 1975
