Thursday, August 30, 2012

A New Ice Age

I love to point to these frantic fear of coming ice age articles from the 1970s, usually published in mainstream (that is to say, liberal) news media.  For example, this article from January 31, 1977 New York magazine with this opener:

3 comments:

  1. Anthropogenic CO2 -- is there nothing it can't do?

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  2. And notice the prominence of Stephen Schneider, who very deftly moved from the coming ice age to global warming, he of "So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. [...] Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." infamy.

    Lately what's amazing to me are the liberals who are my age or older who were following all this back in the '70s but who now have selective amnesia until I e.g. remind them of Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze. I mean, we're children of the Cold War, apocalyptic scenarios were just a normal part of life.

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  3. You know what happened to global cooling? It went down the memory hole. This is what Wikipedia says of it:

    "Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of 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 scientific understanding of ice age cycles."

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