"The Long Consensus On Climate Change"

[Wildkow]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Mar 12 2007, 10:14 PM) [snapback]404643[/snapback]</div>

So the author of this article is stating that scientist were saying in the mid-60's that Global Warming was due to man made greenhouse gases, specifically CO2 and that we had better change our ways? Very entertaining but also pretty dubious as temps were going down during that decade as they did the prior 20 years before and would continue to do so for another decade at least and scientist were almost all saying that another ice age was just upon us if we didn’t change our ways.

Wildkow

p.s. “The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proven to have their counterparts in the world of fact.” J.T.
[/b]

Well there you go facts that the GW Sheeple don't have a glib retort for.

Wildkow

[Mirza]

Actually, the so-called global cooling scare is media hype taken WELL BEYOND out of context, and not science... being exploited by rightwing jokes such as canada"free"press (check for yourself).

Now for a REAL source of information:
"The global cooling myth"
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...l-cooling-myth/

[malorn]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mirza @ Mar 15 2007, 09:44 AM) [snapback]406026[/snapback]</div>

Actually, the so-called global cooling scare is media hype taken WELL BEYOND out of context, and not science... being exploited by rightwing jokes such as canada"free"press (check for yourself).

Now for a REAL source of information:
"The global cooling myth"
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...l-cooling-myth/
[/b]

Are you saying the prevailing scientific thought in the mid-1970's was not saying there was a coming ice-age or global cooling?

[Mirza]

From a climate scientist himself:

The state of the science at the time (say, the mid 1970's), based on reading the papers is, in summary: "...we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate..." (which is taken directly from NAS, 1975). In a bit more detail, people were aware of various forcing mechanisms - the ice age cycle; CO2 warming; aerosol cooling - but didn't know which would be dominant in the near future. By the end of the 1970's, though, it had become clear that CO2 warming would probably be dominant; that conclusion has subsequently strengthened.[/b]

Yes.

[KMO]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(malorn @ Mar 15 2007, 02:55 PM) [snapback]406030[/snapback]</div>

Are you saying the prevailing scientific thought in the mid-1970's was not saying there was a coming ice-age or global cooling?
[/b]

Absolutely not. That's what's known as a "lie". Just the sort of thing the deniers make up to try and muddy the waters.

As ever, there is a grain of truth in it - enough to fool a lot of people.

Back in the 1970s there were a few papers, which the popular press immediately latched on to. In other words, it was much akin to all the usual "red wine is good for you"/"bad for you" you get regularly. There was no consensus at all. And certainly no claimed certainty there was going to be a sudden impact in the next couple of hundred years.

This in no way compares to the huge amount of research and supporting evidence for global warming, and the massive body of work from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Now, the cooling trend from the 40s to 70s was largely caused by the emissions of aerosol pollutions into the atmosphere. It's now known that this served to largely mask the heating effect of the CO2 emissions, meaning that the effects of the CO2 were being underestimated.

And, yes, if we weren't spewing out gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, there would be a gradual cooling due to natural cycles. But the difference is like that between a ball gradually rolling down a shallow hill on its own suddenly being kicked back up the hill. The problem isn't so much that the climate is changing - it's that its changing incredibly fast.

For more discussion, see RealClimate.