Thirty years ago, scientists were warning of a new ice age, climate change skeptics/deniers contend. Now scientists are saying that man-made global warming is threatening the planet. It's all bunk, the skeptics say.
"How quickly things change," Senator James Inhofe, Republican-Oklahoma, and the leader of the Senate's man-made-global-warming-is-a-hoax school, said in a 2003 floor speech. "Fear of the coming ice age is old hat, but fear that man-made greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise to harmful levels is in vogue."
However, a study published in the September Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports that there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s about an imminent ice age. In fact, emphasis on anthropogenic greenhouse warming "dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then."
The basis of global cooling "myth" in the 1970s, "lies in a selective misreading of the [scientific literature] both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today."
The article noted that Time Magazine warned in 1975 that "climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." A Newsweek article, often cited by Inhofe, stated that there was an "almost unanimous view" that the cooling trend would "reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century."
A March, 1975 issue of Science News featured cover art depicting a massive ice flow toppling Manhattan skyscrapers. The magazine reported that new findings raised the possibility of "the approach of a full-blown 10,000 year ice age." However, the article also said that by the turn of the century, enough carbon dioxide will have been put into the atmosphere "to raise the temperature of earth by half a degree."
Even a "cursory review of news media coverage reveals there was no consensus at the time among scientists, nor among journalists," the AMS article said. The New York Times ran one article in 1975 that reported that "major cooling may be ahead; and a second headlined: "Warming trend seen in climate."
A survey of major peer-reviewed journal papers between 1965 and 1979 "identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming," the article said. Global cooling "was never more than a minor aspect of the scientific climate change literature of the era, let alone a scientific consensus."
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