OK does anyone remember the 70s and 80 it was all over the news that we we going to have a norther ice age?

Answer 1

yes, the coming ice age was all over newsweek and time magazine. it was a cover story for both magazines. and the public schools were pushing the idea as hard as they are pushing global warming today. everyone in this thread who claims the environmental scientists never predicted an ice age in the 70's were not even born until the 80's. simply talking out of their asses. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

Answer 2

Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that you actually DON'T remember that era. I'm old enough that I do, and you're plain wrong. The only thing similar to what you're talking about was the discussion of 'nuclear winter' that was mainly in the early 80's. The idea was that a major nuclear war would put so dust, smoke, and fallout into the atmosphere that the entire planet would freeze up, killing even those who weren't effected by the actual explosions.

In fact, the main environmental concerns that were in the media in those years were about acid rain/smog, overpopulation, the ozone layer, and nuclear plants (after the problems at Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disaster). I know it's true that some scientists speculated on a possible new Ice Age, and some media picked up the story, But conspicuously unlike global warming, there was never a scientific consensus or extensive media coverage. The only discussion of global cooling I remember seeing at the time was a few brief mentions of it as a competing theory in stories about global warming - the media did talk about global warming in the 80's, although far less than it does now.

Answer 3

No, because it didn't happen. One or two guys floated the idea back then, and it had some brief play in the popular press. These guys were outside their fields of expertise.

The only scientific reference to predicting Climate by a scientific body is a report by the National Research Council. The conclusion of that report is that they did not know enough at that time to make ANY predictions. They recommended some changes and projects they thought would make predictions possible, and those are still a work in progress. They rejected both Global Cooling and Global warming as without foundation, based on the existing data at that time.

Most authoritative sources classify this one as a myth, with a grain of truth (it's not ENTIRELY made up). I think there are two reasons it's been incorporated into the conspiracy theories about Global Warming.

1) If I'm responding to a post on here by someone who is 40 years old, I have to keep in mind that while I was 30 at that time, they were 10. I'm sure they do remember the events I mentioned, and some of them may remember them as "predictions" (some even claimed to be predicions, like Lowell Ponte). Some also will say they "were taught this" in school back then. Here's how I see it. The adult personality starts to form when adolescence ends. It's usually complete by the late 20's or early 30's. One of the biggest differences between the child and adult personalty is that the adult will "filter" information a lot more before storing it. An adult would categorize something from Newsweek differently than something from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Generally speaking, children and adolescents do less of this, or none at all. All adults start out as authority figures, and are therefor credible. During adolescence that may change a little, or become inverted (anything an adult says is a lie), but the basic nature of the thought process is unchanged. The wise thing for an adult to do I think, is to go back and re-examine those pre-adult memories and recategorize them in the adult way, replacing the adult authority figure with personal judgement, based on the rest of what one knows and has experienced. I can remember reading about flying cars, cities at the bottom of the ocean, and the colonization of the solar system. I can even remember on occasion discussions in school about them. Yet in the context of what I've learned since, with even minimal reprocessing I believe today they were not efforts to teach me things guaranteed to happen (although the advocates of each may have said so). I believe instead they were efforts to expose me to a wider range of ideas, or in some cases, just tabloid journalism.

2) If you really dig, you can find articles in Newsweek, Time, even the National Geographic, (but not in scientific publications) about the ideas of people who thought they could predict the future climate climate. These are often quoted by Rush Limbaugh, and other conspiracy theorists as the voice of science in the 1970's. Many times they misquote even those sources. Rush Limbaugh frequently mentions the National Geographic article. In fact it describes both Global Warming and Global Cooling, but takes no position on either (just as the National Research Council would have recommended). Letters to Rush by the editors of National Geographic have not resulted in a retraction, and he continues to post the comment every time he talks about Climate Change. I think Rush and the rest of this group are knowingly trying to spread false information for purely political reasons. These type are numerous in the Bush Administration, and the members of the first group are easily recruited if they are not on their guard.

Answer 4

Well, I am actually old enough to remember the 70s and 80s and the only thing that made the headlines regarding another (not norther, learn to spell before you learn to rant) Ice Age would have been an announcement of a sequel to the movie.

Answer 5

I vaguely remember something like that in the 70's. Growing up in Dallas in the 70's I remember it snowing enough most winters to build decent sized snowmen and still having snow left in the yard. They would also have to send us home early from school because there wasn't enough energy to keep the school heated.
In 1980 that all ended. We hit 113 degrees and had 60 days of over 100 degree temps. The 80's, 90's and most of 2000's have had pretty warm winters.
Now I live in Los Angeles and we're in a drought.

Answer 6

I remember those years well and I remember the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Nineties, the beginnings of this century as well. So, I have a more panoramic view of the situation than you do though, by far, I'm no expert. However, I have been studying the effects of atmospheric warming, now called Global Warming. The scientific evidence is irrefutable. The Earth, its atmosphere and its waters are warming at a rate which has been faster in the last two hundred years than in the four thousand years previous. Check out this website, then start reading more on global warming on the Net. There are thousands of sites and more information than you can digest in lifetime about the subject. It's a real threat and needs to be dealt with.

http://www.otumba.com/lightsout9999/

Answer 7

Yes, I absolutely believe we are heading for another ice age. Little do most people know but Europe and US was in an Ice age from 1600's to the mid 1800's. IT was a mini ice age. It's all relative to sun spot actitivy. We are approaching a low point activity.

Also ice shelves are melting at an alarming rate as we speak. The more freshwater that is dumped into the jet stream the more likely it is to shut down and stop conveying warm waters to Europe etc... Thus bringing very cold weather.

Answer 8

Yawn.

Yes. Scientists were jsut starting to study climate change and pointed out that one possibility was that the Earth might--at some future time, go into another ice age. some magazines like Time and Newsweek picked up the idea and ran popular science stories on the idea. It was jsu ton e f a number of hypotheses, but it made good copy.

Of course, none of these "skeptics" even know the difference between a scientific journal and a popular magazine, much less the difference between a theory and a preliminary hypothesis. And they still wonder why people are laughing at them! LOL

Answer 9

I was in my teens and 20s then and stories of another ice age were NOT all over the news. People were worried about nuclear war, running out of oil, polluting the air so much that we would all choke, and running out of food due to over population. The idea that CO2 could accumulate in the air enough to cause global warming was about as common as thoughts about the possibility of a coming ice age. That is to say, neither subject was exactly front page (or even back page) news.

Answer 10

Yes I remember it. I get blasted by everyone saying everything from that it wasn't in the news to that it was 30 years ago and the science has improved. I give up. Global Warming is the new religion of the 21st century.