“Ice Age doomsayers note evidence that average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped 1° Celsius during the 1950s and 1960s. Kukla found that the average snow and ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere increased sharply in 1971 compared with the years between 1967 and °70. It reached a peak in ’72 and °73 and then retreated about halfway back to what it had been in the late 60s. Now, says Kukla, satellite studies indicate that the snow and ice cover last fall increased again to about the level of 71. German Oceanographer Martin Rodewald has noticed a slow, general cooling of the waters of the North Atlantic and North Pacific and an airtemperature drop in the Arctic regions over Canada and Russia.
Global cooling might be explained by a link between ice ages and changes both in the earth’s attitude and in its orbit around the sun. That concept was championed by Germany’s Alfred Wegener (best known for his ideas about continental drift) and later refined by Yugoslav Mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, for whom the theory is now named. Last year three scientists —James Hays of Columbia, John Imbrie of Brown University and Nicholas Shackleton of Cambridge University in England—published the strongest evidence yet that Milankovitch was right, Analyzing cores of sediments taken from beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean, the trio assembled an accurate record of the earth’s climate dating back 450,000 years and correlated this information with data about the earth’s orbit,
TIME, JANUARY 31, 1977”
Page 33 – Jan. 31, 1977, Vol. 109, No. 5 – The Vault – TIME
Understanding climatic change : United States Committee for the Global Atmospheric Research Program : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
“Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds — the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is the widening of this cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of Africa’s drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest’s recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.”
Page 105 – June 24, 1974, Vol. 103, No. 25 – The Vault – TIME
