What's thee difference: Global warming or global cooling?

Question

I seem to remember back in the late 70s early 80s that scientists kept complaining about global cooling... now it's global warming. Are they just creating problems for the media and politicians???

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Answer 2

Very few scientists 'complained' about global cooling in the 1970's. This is something which has been blown out of all proportion by the global warming skeptics who incessantly use this argument in an attenpt to discredit the science of global warming. When asked to provide evidence to substantiate their claims it's not forthcoming and the reason it's not forthcoming is simple - it doesn't exist.

Challange a climate change skeptic to provide any evidence of global cooling and all they can do is refer you to a report from either Time, Newsweek or National Geographic; not to any first hand scientific evidence which, if it was such a big issue, would be extremely easy to find.

Try this simple test for yourself - ask people who were around in the 70's if they remember global cooling, few of them will and those that do will confirm that it was no big deal.

Interestingly, there is more research currently being undertaken into global cooling than there was in the 1970's. Further, if you read the scientific reports from the 70's (the ones the media latched onto and distorted), you'll see that the science was absolutely correct - namely that natural cycles will ultimately lead to global cooling if there are no other influencing factors.

Global warming has been around for a long time. It was propositioned in 1811 and established by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, in 1896. To say that global warming is the new global cooling is a factual error, not that that makes much difference to some skeptics.

Answer 3

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.
—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.
—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

The global cooling scare was not as big as global warming however it was also not the ranting of a few scientists and magazines as the global warming alarmists want you to believe. If we had the same media technology we have today I think the scare would have been elevated to global warming levels.
It is also not because of the lack of scientific technology, even our current temperature studies show a dramatic cooling in the period between 1940 and 1970. This begs the question why did temperatures drop while CO2 levels rose?

Every time that global temperature graph goes up or down the alarmists cry that the sky is falling. Each time the scare is worse from the last. The global cooling scare of 1910's, the global warming scare of the 1930's, the global cooling scare of the 1970's, and the global warming scare today.

Answer 4

Sigh! Well, ya know, maybe it just doesn't matter ....

I mean, there is only a finite amount of oil anyway. We will need renewable sources of energy, so what if we get them a little sooner because of a misguided and unnecessary religious fervor??

Also, these are the same nut cases that shut down nuclear power plants in the 80's. If we let them run unfettered in this direction, I'm not sure how they can solve the "problem" without resorting to nuclear energy at least to some degree.

So maybe we should just tune them out and fan the flames a little .... in the long term, what harm can they really do?

Answer 5

This theory never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to press reporting following a better understanding of ice age cycles and a temporary downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s.

Answer 6

Very interesting...

It could just be that we actually improved our technology and are now more capable of determining what the hell is going on. That is one of the lame excuses people use to 'prove' that global warming isn't real. @_@

Answer 7

That is what climatologists get paid to do.

If they were to say it is completely beyond their capability to predict the long term future, they wouldn't attract any research funding and they certainly wouldn't sell any books.

People don't seem to appreciate how political academic research is. For a researcher to get funding, they must demonstrate that they are likely to discover something important.

Answer 8

Yes I believe so !!!