For those who believe that global warming is such a threat. What do u think after this?

Question

In the 70's many scientists believed in Global Cooling.

http://www.glennbeck.com/2006news/newsweek-coolingworld.pdf

ok girly girl i live in the world where people aren't controlled by the media. the whole global warming thing is natural. the earth gets warm then cold. there is nothing you can do about it.

yeah i will go on believing that it is not a threat. what you will see is that in the future the earth will begin to cool.

i was wondering when bob would be back.

Answer 1

i agree and let me ask how are we warming up mars and venus too becuase those are heating up just as fast as us?

Answer 2

Back in the 70's we knew very little about climate. Even 10 years later when I studied climatology it was still something of a novelty. Our knowledge of climate has more than doubled since 2000, since the 70's it has probably increased twenty-fold.

The article you cite makes it clear that whilst we knew the world was cooling we didn't know why. We now know what caused the cooling (we've known since the late 70's), had we had today's extensive knowledge and massive computer power available in the 70's the media reports would have been very different indeed.

Here's an interesting thing. The sum total of the 'global cooling scare' amounted to nothing more than a few media reports. Newsweek was one such medium, others included Time and National Geographic (essentially the same as the Newsweek article). There were no follow up articles, no interviews, no TV coverage, no movies, no political action, no consensus, no scientific reports, no public concern, nothing in fact other than a handful of media reports.

Why was there so much inaction - because the global cooling scare never existed, it never had any scientific basis (if it did the skeptics would have been able to find the scientific reports, they can't find them because they don't exist).

In truth, the media did what the media does. It took the work of some scientists and distorted it to create 'newsworthy' editorial. Strange isn't it that none of the scentific publications carried the global cooling story?

The reality is much more mundane than global cooling and impending ice ages. The work being conducted then, as now, focussed on the possible causes of global cooling including sulphates, aerosols, solar variation and planetary cycles. What the scientists actually said was correct, what the media reported was a different matter altogether (nothing new there then).

Answer 3

For starters, the planet was cooling slightly from 1940-1970, so "believing in global cooling" was simply acknowledging reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

Secondly, Newsweek is not a scientific magazine.

Thirdly, the myth that you're trying to communicate is that scientists claimed that there was going to be an imminent ice age. As I said, this is simply a myth. Here is a compilation of the scientific papers written at the time. Good luck finding any that concluded anything about an imminent ice age.

http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

Fourthly, why are you getting your information about a scientific issue from Glenn Beck? Last time I checked he has zero scientific degrees or knowledge. Global warming is a scientific issue, not a political one.

Finally, there is one nugget of truth to this myth, but it undermines your argument. One climate simulation at the time concluded that if we continued to rapidly increase our sulfur emissions (which were the main cause of the 1940-1970 cooling), eventually it would lead to an ice age. Guess what happened? We soon got our sulfur emissions under control, and they've actually decreased since 1980. See pages 12-14 here:

http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-14537.pdf

So we simply avoided the scenario which could have potentially caused an ice age. The same is true now - we need to avoid the scenario which will cause catastrophic climate change by decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Answer 4

I believe that this whole global warming thing is natural, but humans are not making things any better by polluting and what not. I'm doing what I can to not pollute to keep our earth clean, which we should be doing anyway. Did you know that the first Earth day was actually for global cooling, not the opposite? i think that's pretty interesting....

Answer 5

If you really lived in the world that's not controlled by the media, you would be able to cite a scientific paper instead of linking to a one-page article in Newsweek (media) on a site owned by Glenn Beck (media).

Here's how:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/39/15248
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11089968&dopt=Citation
http://www.cgam.nerc.ac.uk/~jonathan/doc/gregory04greenland.pdf

Answer 6

You're right the earth does go through certain cooling and warming periods, and i think the earth would have gone through this warming period anywase, but it wouldnt have happened so quickly if it wasnt for us.
and we can help slow it down in numerous ways. but saying that it is nothing to worry about is totally wrong.

Answer 7

Actually, only a few scientists believed in global cooling. It wasn't backed up and agreed upon to the degree global warming.

Answer 8

Glenn Beck is not a good source. I read in "The Inquirer" that global warming is real.

Answer 9

It wasn't "many" scientists. Just a few, with no good data, and no backing from ANY major scientific organization.

They in no way resembled today's global warming scientists, with massive amounts of data, and backing from EVERY major scientific organization.

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

What they actually resembled was today's "skeptics".

More about the "global cooling" myth here.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11643

Getting your information on global warming from Glenn Beck is exactly like getting your brain surgery done by Stephen Colbert. Here are some good scientific sources:

http://profend.com/global-warming/
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/
http://www.realclimate.org
"climate science from climate scientists"

Answer 10

Check out http://www.iceagenow.com