The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers – by David Kirtley

Spread the love

This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I’m reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age. There were in fact a number of articles back in the 1970s that discussed the whole Ice Age problem, and I’m not sure what my friend was referring to. But here, David Kirtley places a recent meme that seems to be an attempt to diffuse concern about global warming because we used to be worried about global cooling. The meme, however, is not what it seems to be. And, David places the argument that Ice Age Fears were important and somehow obviate the science in context.

<

h3>The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers
– by David Kirtley

A few days ago a facebook friend of mine posted the following image:

From the 1977 cover we can see that apparently a new ice age was supposed to arrive. Only 30 years later, according to the 2006 cover, global warming is supposed to be the problem. But the cover on the left isn’t from 1977. It actually is this Time cover from April 9, 2007:

As you can see, the cover title has nothing to do with an imminent ice age, it’s about global warming, as we might expect from a 2007 Time magazine.

The faked image illustrates one of the fake-skeptics’ favorite myths: The 1970s Ice Age Scare. It goes something like this:

  • In the 1970s the scientists were all predicting global cooling and a future ice age.
  • The media served as the scientists’ lapdog parroting the alarming news.
  • The ice age never came—the scientists were dead wrong.
  • Now those same scientists are predicting global warming (or is it “climate change” now?)

The entire purpose of this myth is to suggest that scientists can’t be trusted, that they will say/claim/predict whatever to get their names in the newspapers, and that the media falls for it all the time. They were wrong about ice ages in the 1970s, they are wrong now about global warming.

But why fake the 1977 cover? Since, according to the fake-skeptics, there was so much news coverage of the imminent ice age why not just use a real 1970s cover?

I searched around on Time’s website and looked through all of the covers from the 1970s. I was shocked (shocked!) to find not a single cover with the promise of an in-depth, special report on the Coming Ice Age. What about this cover from December 1973 with Archie Bunker shivering in his chair entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the Energy Crisis. Maybe this cover from January 1977, again entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the weather. How about this one from December 1979, “The Cooling of America”? Again with the Energy Crisis.


Check out: Ubuntu and Linux Books

___________________

Now, there really were news articles in the 1970s about scientists predicting a coming ice age. Time had a piece called “Another Ice Age?” in 1974. Time’s competition, Newsweek, joined in with “The Cooling World” in 1975. People have collected lists and lists of “Coming Ice Age” stories from newspapers, magazines, books, tv shows, etc. throughout the 1970s.

But if it was such a big news story why did it never make the cover of America’s flagship news magazine like the faked image implies? Perhaps there is more to the story.

In the 1970s there were a few developments in climate science:

  • Scientists were finding answers to the puzzle of what caused ice ages in the past: variations in earth’s orbit.
  • Scientists were gathering data from around the world to come up with global average temperatures, and they found that temperatures had been cooling since about the 1940s.
  • Scientists were realizing that some of this cooling was due to increasing air pollution (soot and aerosols, tiny particles suspended in the air) which was decreasing the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere.
  • Scientists were also quantifying the “greenhouse effect” of another part of our increasing pollution: carbon dioxide (CO2), which should cause the climate to warm.

The realization that very long cycles in earth’s orbit could cause the waxing and waning of ice ages, coupled with the fact that our soot and aerosols were already causing cooling, led some scientists to conclude that we may be headed for another ice age. Exactly when was still a little unclear. However, the warming effects of CO2 had been known for over a century, and new research in the 1970s was showing that CO2 warming would more than compensate for the cooling caused by aerosols, resulting in net warming.


Check out: Books on programming, especially for kids
________________________________

This, in a very brief nutshell, was the state of climate science in the 1970s. And so the media of the time published many stories about a coming ice age, which made for timely reading during some very cold winters. But many news stories also mentioned that other important detail about CO2: that our climate might soon change due to global warming. In 1976 Time published “The World’s Climate: Unpredictable” which is a very good summary of the then current scientific thinking: some scientists emphasized aerosols and cooling, some scientists emphasized CO2 and warming. There was no consensus either way. Many other 1970s articles which mention a Coming Ice Age also mention the possibility of increased warming due to CO2. For instance, here, here and here.

Fake-skeptics read these stories and only focus on the Coming Ice Age angle, and they enlarge the importance of those scientists who focused on that angle. They totally ignore the rest of the picture of 1970s climate science: that increasing CO2 would cause global warming.

The purpose of the image of the two Time magazine covers, and of the Coming Ice Age Myth, is not to show the real history of climate science, but to obscure that history and to cause confusion. It seems to be working. Because today, when there really is a consensus about climate science and 97% of climatologists agree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is leading to climate change, only 45% of the public know about that consensus. The other 55% must think we’re still in the 1970s when scientists were still debating the issue. Seems newsworthy to me, maybe Time will run another cover story on it.

To learn more see:

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.

Spread the love

839 thoughts on “The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers – by David Kirtley

  1. It is just the same with mobile phones and cancer. In this country, one textbook (“Approved” by the examining board) uses this as an example of “Controversy in Science”. It gives the case for phones causing cancer completely unjustified prominence.

    Now this is a recent phenomenon. Research into the origins of the “scare” is easy. First look for references to the original paper published in a reputable, peer-reviewed, journal that started it (even Wakefield had that). A search of the Internet shows nothing. Maybe there was some anecdotal evidence, maybe the trends in cancer cases showed something. Again nothing. What you find is an endless circle of references citing newspaper reports or just people citing each other.

    Researching something that did not happen in the 1970’s is much more difficult. Too recent to be history and too old to be current affairs. Sufficently long ago not to be able to remember not hearing about it.

    1. “I lived through that time and the airwaves and media were full of the pending ice age.”

      Of course, even if that is true (which I doubt, since I too lived through that area and don’t recall things being “full of the pending ice age”, airwaves and media are not the scientific community. Your little anecdote is just that: an anecdote, and worthless.

  2. I had some insight into scientific consensus back then. That was back when I thought I was going to be a planetary scientist, and was studying a fair amount of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Caltech.

    As I remember it (it’s been a while),there was a lot of uncertainty about what clouds and particulates would do, because clouds are hard to model, and particulants are hard to measure globally. We did have nice, smooth CO2 from Mauna Loa, and had a pretty good idea where that was headed. We were also well aware that we were in the middle of an interglacial, and that all else being equal, we were due for another glaciation soon. (Well, “soon” in a geological sense.) putting all of this together, I would say that most people I knew back then thought the atmosphere would most likely heat up in the near term. If I had had to make a guess, it would not have been too far off from what has been observed since. (Meaning like within a factor of two or something.)

  3. What a clueless piece of fake design. Time magazine looked nothing like this in the 1970s and anyone with a few years behind them should know it.

  4. Imbrie and Imbrie have a nice graph at the end of their book expressing I liar thoughts, CBS

    1. So sick of hearing conservatives are climate deniers or we don’t like science who the heck are you? I don’t know one conservative that doesn’t live and global warming or climate change or whatever the heck you want to call it.

      What we are skeptic of is Doom and Gloom sayers BS that has never come forth has always been wrong. Algor is a perfect example and there was a prediction from somebody at the UN in 1989 that said by year 2000 this world would come to an end.

      And I think this guy Greg Landen it’s just trying to cover for the scientists that were wrong in the 60s and 70s. Yes I know technology is better over time better predictions blah blah blah. So climate scientists how can we trust them they can’t even predict the weather 10 days or seven days out how can they tell me what’s going to happen to the Earth 20 30 40 50 12 years from now?

      Forgive any spelling or grammar issues on my part.

    2. Below is your words but the links are not there so I think your full of it trying to debunk something to prove us conservatives climate deniers are crazy. But we aren’t climate deniers we are anti- doomeday deniers. You’re trying to debunked the 1960s and ’70s Ice Age predictions just like everyone else like yourself. Trying to cover up for scientists who make mistakes we all make mistakes no one’s perfect but you can’t accept it.

      “I searched around on Time’s website and looked through all of the covers from the 1970s. I was shocked (shocked!) to find not a single cover with the promise of an in-depth, special report on the Coming Ice Age. What about this cover from December 1973 with Archie Bunker shivering in his chair entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the Energy Crisis. Maybe this cover from January 1977, again entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the weather. How about this one from December 1979, “The Cooling of America”? Again with the Energy Crisis.”

  5. Pingback: Anonymous
  6. Great post! Another way to fact check this is to compare Google Scholar searches on “global cooling” vs. “global warming” each in quotes to match the exact phrase, for specified date ranges. Every decade there are lots more hits for warming than for cooling.
    BTW can you fix the spelling of Spencer Weart? You’re missing the ‘a’.

  7. And the fool who thought this was a convincing fraud also left in the top left hand corner an actually headline from a `1977 story on ‘Cancer: the changing science”. Seems the idiot will accept that idiot will accept that science changes as more information comes to hand, but not when it offends his pre-determined ideology.

  8. Time magazine 1974-

    Another Ice Age?
    Monday, June 24, 1974

    In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection….

    The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age…

    When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. ..

    Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world…

  9. Not that long ago, we were very rightly concerned about polluting our environment, filling the air and the water and the soil with toxic by-products of our industrial activities. It was very easy to say when any of these natural resources was contaminated, and almost as easy to determine exactly where the source of contamination was occurring. Somehow, in the early 1990s, those who contaminate our planet for their own greedy means commandeered the discussion about pollution and changed the focus to climate change. I realize that one of the outcomes of pollution is climate change, and it is a hugely destructive and apocalyptic outcome, but it also a longer term outcome, more difficult to prove on a case by case basis, and fraught with many challenges to accurately document so that the general public can easily comprehend the immediate problem. Added to that, the naysayers do have, in their favor, several millions of years of natural climate change data they use to undermine public confidence in current scientific predictions.

    Climate change is an issue because we pollute the environment . We can easily prove that industry practices pollutes the environment. Why have we allowed the argument of contaminating this planet to be hijacked by the monsters who are ruining our air and water and soil? By focussing on climate change, vast amounts of scientific energy and goodwill is expended on proving and ‘reproving’ the value of the date and the models, meanwhile, the pollution of the planet continues essentially unchanged. There was a time when activists confronted individual polluters at individual sites and got action. Now, with the attention on climate change and not on specific rivers, or landfills or air sheds, the targets are amorphous, the cause and effect not so clear. . It makes one wonder who exactly is benefitting from all the climate change summits, the earth or the polluters?

    1. Who “is benefiting from all the climate change summits, the earth or the polluters?” Neither! It is people like Al Gore and other proponents of climate change who are either raking in research dollars and/or speaking fees.

      By the way, I was in high school in the early 60’s and our science textbook said earth was headed for another ice age. No, I do not still have the textbook, but I know what I read and was taught.

    1. By the way, I was in high school in the early 60’s and our science textbook said earth was headed for another ice age. No, I do not still have the textbook, but I know what I read and was taught.

      The first part of your comment is the huge indicator telling us not to believe this part.

  10. I’d like to add to this the little point that I first heard about the threat of global warming when the science around it was used in a sci-fi story about a future earth, a major part of the history of which was the catastrophe that befell the earth in the 21st century due to warming from pollutants. I don’t think that story was unique either. That would have been about 1975. I told my mother about it, and that she shouldn’t buy aerosols or use her car so much, and she told me I was being silly. And I do remember some articles and things speculating about if an ice age might come again soon, but they were always very speculative, and not a part of the news, or any serious focus of concern, and existed alongside other such stuff,as we still, quite reasonably, have today, such as whether we could become capable of intergalactic travel. An important thing to bear in mind here too, is how younger people of course don’t remember times before they were born, and actually can end up believing that things were very different to what they were, thus making them open to this kind of disinformation.

  11. Thanks for the comments.

    I second Greg’s comment to Peter: What?

    Daughter # 3 and Simon: I noticed how the fake-skeptic cover used the design of the real cover. They kept the same “cancer” headline but changed the woman in the photo. (I’m not sure who these two women are. Cancer survivors?) The middle headline about Baghdad got changed to one about detente with the Soviets. And the last one about the tv show The Sopranos was changed to M.A.S.H. Pretty clever, but Daughter # 3 is right, that isn’t the design used in the 1970s.

    I was curious about what date is on the fake cover. I think it says April but the resolution isn’t too good and I can’t read it. (Anyone know how to clean it up??) I wonder if the fake-skeptics just kept the date that was on the real 2007 cover (April 9) or if they changed it to an accurate date of a real 1977 cover (which would have been April 4,11,18, or 25).

    Jim: sorry about Weart’s name. I fixed it in my original google doc. Maybe Greg can fix it here.

  12. Oops forgot about awaiting moderation/disappearance practiced of this blog.
    Guess I’ll have to rely on screencaps.

  13. Whoah. The Climate Deniers really don’t have any shame at all do they? Did they rally, honestly , think they’d get away with that?

  14. I think maybe the genesis of the myth of global cooling is a conflation of “nuclear winter” and the fever dreams of conservatives who hate science. Nuclear winter was supposed to happen when great clouds of dust were kicked up by a few thousands nukes going off. Like that’d be the thing you worry most about in that situation!

  15. It isn’t really the case that concern over global cooling was a myth. There was concern. The part about it being a myth is that this concern has been reconstructed as equally valid in comparison to understanding of climate science 40 or so years later, that mention of ice ages 50 years ago means that climate science has always been confused, and as is documented in this excellent bit of research (blog post above) 1970s cooling is mythologized further by fabricating phony evidence making it look like a bigger deal than it was.

    But yes, I think the nuclear winter fed into this idea then, and conservative hatred and fear of science had fed into it in more recent decades as a valid point of concern has been turned into a Fox News style lie.

  16. There is one thing missing from this story that I would really like to know. Were you ever able to discover who was responsible for producing this forged Time cover? So much of the output of the right is out and out lying disguised as serious commentary (their entire response to the climate issue is a perfect example) that I think it is important to track down, if we can, who is behind the lies.

  17. Green Eagle, Bryan Walsh at TIME mag

    http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/

    traced the cover back to April 2012 at this site:

    http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/time-cover-fake-1970s-global-cooling-fears-not/

    which is an Intelligent Design site (!) They acknowledge that the cover is a fake, and in the comments it seems like the cover appeared in a previous post which was then deleted.
    You’ll notice that on the image there is a web-address: ExtraordinaryIntelligence.com. I looked around on this weird, new-age site run by someone named Natalina and found this from May 2011:

    http://extraordinaryintelligence.com/4633/extraordinary-intelligence-com/could-this-deadly-weather-become-our-new-normal/

    It’s about crazy weather. Anyway, at the bottom of the piece is this note: “****This article previously contained an image of a Time magazine cover predicting a coming Ice Age. It was brought to our attention that the image was photoshopped… so we’ve removed it.”

    In the comments section we learn that in June 2012 a reader (Will S,) showed Natalina that the image was a fake. Will S. said, “But faked covers like the one on the left don’t do our side, i.e. the side of skeptics of CAGW (‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’) any favours; we should instead point to actual words, properly sourced and documented, and show when and where they actually promoted the opposite hysteria, to that which they promote today.”

    I don’t know where the faked image goes from there. I guess I could contact Natalina and the Intelligent Design site but this is about as far down the rabbit hole I want to go.

  18. I took courses in meterology and climatology around 1956-57. Because we know so little then, compared to what is known now, I am very careful not to present my self as any sort of expert on the matter. I’ve seen some comments on the short doubling times of scientific knowledge. From 1957 to 2013 is some 55 years. If doubling time for climate knowledge has been a leisurely five years, that is is 11 doublings. 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-126-258-516-1038-2076. No doubt the increase in climate knowledge over 55 years has been a lot, whatever the real number is.

  19. It’s a shame that the US Academy of Science’s 1975 report “Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action” is yet to make it into digital format and made available online. Commissioned in response to the media fuss about ‘imminent global cooling, it made clear that understanding of climate was insufficient to make any such predictions – from it’s foreword –

    “…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…“.

    The NAS – and every leading science body – failed to confirm global cooling as a danger that requires urgent and global action, but what it did do was set in train some focused scientific efforts to build that foundation of understanding of how the climate system. When that was built the results have been considered more than solid enough that the NAS – and every peak science body – does urge global action.

  20. “But why fake the 1977 cover? ”
    It was faked by someone (a believer in global warming) who wanted to pwn the skeptics. He succeeded.

  21. My previous comment doesn’t deserve publishing, I see you did address three Time covers that weren’t faked, but apparently have been taken out of context. When you say:

    “Fake-skeptics read these stories and only focus on the Coming Ice Age angle, and they enlarge the importance of those scientists who focused on that angle.”

    Realize that the first of your lists from Popular Technology strikes a very balanced tone:

    “While a silent majority of the scientific community may have been more skeptical, you ironically find one of the most outspoken supporters of modern day Al Gore style global warming alarmism was promoting global cooling in the 1970s, the late Dr. Steven Schneider.”

    A lot of irony there, and if 97% of active publishers on climate change are in agreement, that makes me more skeptical about the environment in that community. You really think if you took all the scientific minds who were actively looking at the data, the minority opinion would only amount to 3%? The publishing community on climate changed is an old boys network, a closed society keeping out the minorities much like they used to do in country clubs.

  22. Note, MikeC, that Time is not now and never was a journal of science. The fact that they had one, or two, or a handful, of articles about cooling, does not mean anything in terms of today’s science.

  23. MikeCornelison.com:

    You really think if you took all the scientific minds who were actively looking at the data, the minority opinion would only amount to 3%?

    Do you think you can tell who has a “scientific mind” and who doesn’t? What does “actively looking at the data” mean to you? What do you think is required, to understand climate science well enough to be an expert? Does in-depth knowledge of the subject make a difference? How do you think that kind of knowledge is acquired?

    The publishing community on climate changed is an old boys network, a closed society keeping out the minorities much like they used to do in country clubs.

    Why do you think that? Have you ever submitted a scientific article for publication? Have you ever presented a paper at a scientific conference?

    Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

  24. Pingback: Gazette #43
  25. It’s 60 degrees below zero in certain parts of the United
    States today.

    and the top grossing film in the nation involves eternal winter….

  26. If global warming was a fact, every scientist would agree. Not every scientist agrees. Why was it changed from global warming to climate change? Doesn’t the climate always change? Isn’t there only temp records dating back to 1880’s? Going off 135 years of data?

  27. Panther, it was not “changed from global warming to climate change.” Both terms mean something, one is inclusive of the other, people tend to go back and forth. There are conspiracy theories and I’ve seen people argue over the history of the terms … it turns out to be a bit complicated … but using the fact that there are two words for one thing is poor evidence for the science at issue.

    If every single scientist, or any other group of people, fully agreed on the same thing that would be strange. There are scientists, a very small number, who disagree with almost every other scientist on almost every thing scientists have come to generally agree on.

    Your own side of this fake argument, the denialists, claim that consensus is not argument (and that is correct depending on what one means by argument) so it is funny to see you using consensus as data. But the truth is that if the vast majority of scientists in a given field come to thing the same thing is likely true, or accurate, or actually happened, etc. etc. within that scientific field, than that is a good clue that that thing is for real, especially when it is something that has been given very careful consideration and that has been addressed, argued about, fought over, etc. in the peer reviewed literature, at conferences, and in other venues for years.

    So, what is the consensus regarding climate change?

    Here is a close look at the issue of consensus about climate change and/or global warming

  28. you people can’t even accurately predict tomorrows weather. Go to the highest peaks and the lowest depths and judge (be honest) your significance on this planet…..you have little to no impact on this place…..a bit grandiose to think you, little ol you has that much influence on this planet….get real…& you people cal the “deniers” crazy….mirror time

  29. I think I have finally figured out how to deal with anomalies, and graphs which show a zero or slightly negative slope of the anomalies do not necessarily show a stable global temperature. Since the anomalies are calculated vs. an average of previous years, if the temperature continues to increase at the average rate the anomaly curve will be zero. Right? Have I decoded the anomaly correctly?

  30. So many comments filled with ignorance. 1978 was the year climate “scientists” predicted the glaciers would cover the USA down to kansas city.

    Widely reported in all the magazines and especially omni.

    More alarmist religion from the truly ignorant.

  31. I just watched on you tube an episode of the old in search of series called the coming ice age. Leonard Nimoy talks about climate scientists worried about global cooling.

  32. Here is a small list of articles on global cooling/coming ice age that were published in the 1970s. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t change the facts…

    1. Sorry, Harvey, I don’t allow links to blatant science denialist site on this blog. I have kids that I care about.

  33. The American Meteorological Society has a very useful paper on the myth of a consensus in the ’70s that global cooling was imminent:

    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1

    It shows that, by far, most scientific papers published during the period predicted warming.

    Of course the story was an artifact of (some) of the public media, not the general opinion of scientists studying the climate. “Skeptics” clinging to this old story just show how impoverished their whole argument is.

  34. As we are hit with freezing weather , all I remember is the Time magazine cover of the ice age coming from the ’70’s but the people who predicted that are now politically involved with the left and their dopey global warming. So I pulled it up and found this, the Ice Age was made up by Time and their writers in the ’70’s. I bet in another 40 years the Global warming articles will be fiction as well. One nice thing about aging is watching all this and knowing the truth !

  35. Let’s all get together and smear opponents by equating them to holocaust deniers. Then lets change the term “global warming” to “climate change” when we learn the “inconvenient truth ” that the earth is not warming, at least for the last 15 years. Finally, let’s stifle dissent by having the President state that “science” says the climate change issue is settled and incontrovertible and have John Kerry tell people that climate change is a weapon of mass destruction (wielded by the polluting Chinese and Indians, no doubt).

  36. It’s Called WEATHER… Climate Change MY ASS. MORONS!!!

    And the WEATHER cahnges every day, every year. But when Obama’s Muslim brothers in Iran uneash an EMP attak over us, you will have YOUR Climate Change when the GRID is GONE!!

  37. Almost bingo: no difference between weather and climate, the President is a Muslim partnering with a foreign government, and the mythical threat of some type of attack (the dreaded statement of EMP by someone who most likely doesn’t understand any of it). Come-on #67, you can “conspiracy” better than that.

  38. No different than the faux science GW alarmist are feeding us now. leave out any data lately, lololol? What goes around, comes around. Ever wonder why they don’t call it GW anymore? Because we haven’t been for the last 16 years. CG here we come. now, where is my grant money, so I don’t have to get a real job.

  39. I am sorry, but I was there and I DO REMEMBER the covers of magazines predicting a new ICE AGE in the 1970’s.

    It was presented as real and serious.

    SO NOW you say, “Oh, pay no attention to the Global Cooling scientists of the 1970’s.”

    It eventually faded away since it was obviously false, but there was never any great backlash from the scientific community.

    You can convince willing believers that they weren’t serious back in the 1970’s, but you still have to explain why today’s scientists who were absolutely certain (the science is settled) had to change the name from GLOBAL WARMING to CLIMATE CHANGE.

    So what was that all about?

    You guys said the science was settled.

    1. Yes, people were concerned about the ice age in those days. The orbital geometry idea had been tested by then against the deep sea core records, and people were thinking about it. Also, there had been one of those occasional “pauses” in the overall trend of warming.

      It didn’t fade away because it was false. Concern over a coming ice age faded away because further research indicated that we were pushing atmospheric CO2 levels well above any threshold that would disallow an ice age to kick in even when orbital geometry favored it.

      This is not about willing believers. This is about the science.

      Nobody was certain “in those days” about an ice age coming.

      There was never a change from “global warming” to “climate change.” Both have been used all along. They mean somewhat different but related and overlapping things.

      What is your agenda, here, TommyD6of11?

  40. I always ask those who claim scientists had to change the name from global warming to climate change:
    a) when that supposed change in terminology was made
    b) what the “CC” in “IPCC” stands for
    c) when the IPCC was formed
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, those questions are never answered.

  41. Ha. Great questions, I’ll have to start doing that. Might even be worth a blog post. Want to write a guest blog post?

  42. @64. valerie :

    “As we are hit with freezing weather, .. “

    Whose “we” here? Its summer and getting hotter where I live!

    “.. all I remember is the Time magazine cover of the ice age coming from the ’70’s but the people who predicted that are now politically involved with the left and their dopey global warming.”

    Really? Not so sure bout that. I recall reading articles in Science year book encyclopedia from the 1970’s where both “coming ice age” and “global warming*” ideas where discussed and if memory serves they said the latter – ie global warming* was more likely.

    Also the actual scientists tended to be apolitical and non-polemical. Some of the commentators and pundits outside of the science less so of course, natch.

    “So I pulled it up and found this, the Ice Age was made up by Time and their writers in the ’70’s. I bet in another 40 years the Global warming articles will be fiction as well.”

    I’ll take that bet. I bet you’ll lose.

    Also, bzzt. No. It wasn’t made up by Time writers although they may have publicised someof teh climatological debate sat the time.

    “One nice thing about aging is watching all this and knowing the truth!”

    Or thinking you know the truth anyhow.

    See also this excellent debunking of the ‘In the 70s, They said there’d be an Ice Age’ canard by Greenman3610 / Peter Sinclair :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3S0fnOr0M

  43. ^ * “Global warming” strikes me as the wrong term too because ‘warming” has too many pleasant connotations and doesn’t accurately describe the reality that our planet is getting too hot.

    Personally I prefer the description of HIRGO – Human-Induced Rapid Global Overheating as the most accurate and descriptive way of terming the issue.

    Plus those who use the idea that the world isn’t getting hotter after all may want to read this :

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/14/october_2014_was_the_warmest_october_on_record.html

    Warmest October on record in the same year that we’ve had the warmest ever April, May, June, August and September -and it isn’t even an El Nino year! Yikes. Co-incidence? (Obi- wan voice) Oh I don’t think so! (/Obi-wan Kenobi voice)

  44. @67. Navyman Norm :

    It’s Called WEATHER… Climate Change MY ASS!

    Shouting doesn’t make it so – or even make it clear what you are referring to here Norm.

    Weather and climate change both exist and are different things as is HIRGO or Global Overheating.

    “And the WEATHER cahnges every day, every year.”

    Hell, the weather can change every hour and even in the space of a few minutes depending on where and when you are. The climate? Not so much.

    But when Obama’s Muslim brothers in Iran ..

    Hmm .. usually the “Obama is a secret Muslim” mob are coy on exactly which islamic brothers Obama has and which branch of that global diverse religion he supposedly follows.

    I wouldn’t have thought Iran would be high on that list because firstly, they are Sunni whereas the groups Obama has most notably been tied to are Sunni. For ex. – the Saudis to whose King he bowed to (Oh shock horror! Showing a foreign dignity some basic politeness ! Can’t have that can we!) are Sunni. Secondly, Indonesia where Obama apparently maybe went to a mosque as a kid is Sunni – and, btw, the largest Muslim though not Arab nation. Finally the woman who told McCain, Obama was an Arab (or Ay-rab rather!) in espousing that perspective – despite Obama’s skin colour and physical non-Arab nature.

    Note here that Arabs and Persians aka Iranians are very diffferent groups with a bitter history of some antagonism between them and Shiite Iran hates the Sunni Arabs historically to the point of ongoing sectarian warfare now between them incl. the Syria-Iraq -Is-IL/S conflict currently raging.

    So even *IF* Obama was a “secret Muslim”, it strikes me as most unlikely he’d be working with Iran and more likely that he’d be working against them. Of course even the first of those is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence as per Sagan’s law. (If Obama is actually a secret anything I suspect he’s more likely a secret agnostic / atheist.)

    “..uneash an EMP attak over us, you will have YOUR Climate Change when the GRID is GONE!!”

    Nope. That won’t change the climate although I guess it would mean people experience it more directly without the benefits of air-con. Enough nuclear weaponry detonated could cause a Nuclear winter but Iran lacks nuclear bombs at all and it is highly unlikely to be quickly manufacturing enough to cause that effect.

    So, sorry, but you are fractally wrong in your comment there – still thanks for the laughs!

  45. D’oh! Correction – that’s :

    I wouldn’t have thought Iran would be high on that list because firstly, Iran are Shia Muslims whereas the groups Obama has most notably been tied to are Sunni.

    Please feel free to edit and correct for me if you are so inclined Greg Laden.

  46. Pingback: Anonymous
  47. The author should read the June 24, 1974 issue of Time and the April 28,1974 isuue of Newsweek which were both alarmist about the chilling of the planet. NOAA was one of the main sources quoted in the Newsweek ariticle citing temperature drops at that time which is now warning us about it being the hottest year ever. They can’t have it both ways.

    1. Robert, you need to get it straight. It is true that in the 1960s and 70s climate scientists were looking at both cooling and warming. That is not in dispute. It is also true that concern 40 years ago about cooling is not even a tiny bit relevant to the reality of global waarming, or to NOAA or NASA talking about the warmest year having just happened.

  48. For you children who depend on Wiki and Google for your “science”, I _lived_ through the global *** of the 1970s. There absolutely _was_ a great hue and cry about the coming ice age. Scientists (the very same scientists who were shouting global warming in the 1990s) were decrying the miles of ice that were to bury us by the year 2000.
    There was even a plan to scatter carbon black on the polar caps to gather more solar heat in the attempt to prevent that ice age.
    The cause then, as now, was that of maintaining the cash flow of government grants for the ‘study’ of climate.

    1. Kilroy: Yes, as has been stated several times, both warming and cooling were being considered then. Recent research starting in the 1960s with deep sea core recovery and going into the 1970s with the test of the orbital geometry hypothesis had brought ice ages into the forefront, but global warming due to the release of greenhouse gasses had been on the table for a century and concern was growing then.

      There’s the thing. This is not simple. None of this is simple. The climate is complex and climate science is complex. There seems to be an entire category of science denier arguments that are based, ultimately, on the idea that if something is complex it can’t be understood, or more exactly, since the climate is complex, it can’t be changing. That is a form of argument from incredulity, and it is incorrect.

  49. That’s it? The question is reduced to ‘why didn’t Time do a cover on it’ if it was such a big deal? Who knows why? Maybe because they didn’t have to compete with a host of internet and cable competitors for readers. Maybe because everyone from the NYT to the Chicago Tribune to the Eugene Register-Guard had already published reams on the topic.
    The point is that academic science can’t use sensationalism to derive funding without being called on it if it is found to be false. That’s just what happened in the 1970’s, so excuse us if we exercise skepticism today.

    1. So, Chardin, your current disbelief in basic physics is predicated on your almost certainly incorrect perception that grants were written to scientists owing to the strength of their marketing efforts in major media.

      Wow.

  50. From what I can tell, the people with the best background in physical climate modeling (Manabe, Wetherall, Broecker, Hansen, etc.) knew in the 1970s that the future would be dominated by greenhouse-gas-induced warming. (See, e.g., Broecker’s 1976 paper that had both “global warming” and “climate change” in its title).

    At the same time, some other people – mostly those who did not have as strong a background in physical climate modeling – were influenced by discussion of Milankovich cycles to speculate that we might be nearing the end of the current interglacial.

    The people in the first group were right, and those in the second group were wrong.

    But for some reason, fake-skeptics like to claim that the existence of the second group somehow invalidates the correct reasoning of the first group.

    Frankly, it’s just another example of how so much of climate contrarianism is based not just on misinformation or bad data, but on bad reasoning.

  51. You know back in the 1970’s (indeed intothe 1980′;s if memory serves) there was also debate about whether quasars were extremely distant galaxies or strange objects that were very much nearer to us but somehow only appeared further away and thus more powerful.

    There was the Big Bang theory versus the Steady State theory.

    Yet somehow today we don’t argue that because some scientists then thought quasars were nearby or the universe infinite with no Beginning that somehow means the modern understandingand scientific consensus is wrong.

    Just as the phlogiston theory of fire was once widely held and argued for doesn’t mean that our modern understanding of chemical combustion is somehow invalid and the scientists wrong to change their mind and drop the old no longer tenable theory based on the evidence.

    Scientists back in the year umpty ump however long or short ago saying ‘X’ when they and we now say ‘Y ‘ really isn’t an actual argument against ‘Y’ being true, just a curious bit of history that shows how much we’ve learnt.

    Climate reality Deniers that say otherwise are really not very bright or logical.

  52. @ Chardin :

    “The point is that academic science can’t use sensationalism to derive funding without being called on it if it is found to be false. That’s just what happened in the 1970’s, ..”

    It is? Is it really? I don’t think so.

    I don’t think climate scientists were out to sensationalise their findings back then and I think they stressed the uncertainties and doubts and different possibilities at the time.

    “so excuse us if we exercise skepticism today.”

    You are excused. You – and everyone else – are always welcome to exercise skepticism, I’m not quite sure that’s what you are really doing here though and that’s a question -‘Are you really being skeptical here?’ which I think you would do well to consider for yourself.

  53. @ 86. kilroy :

    “For you children who depend on Wiki and Google for your “science”, I _lived_ through the global *** of the 1970s. There absolutely was_ a great hue and cry about the coming ice age.”

    Y’know I think I’ll still to actual tangible physical evidence such as articles and scientific papers and so on from that time. Human memory is sadly, not always relaible as has been found in a lot of experiments on eyewitness testimony for example. Our memory is not the same as photographs or recordings or ice cores and not as trustworthy. As the old saying goes the plural of anecdote isn’t anec-data.

    .. the very same scientists who were shouting global warming in the 1990s were decrying the miles of ice that were to bury us by the year 2000.

    Some of those scientists maybe but certainly not all and likely not the majority. Stephen Schneider for instance was one scientists who famously once suggested that an ice age could be on its way – although with a lot of caveats as noted no further away than wikipedia :

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

    In 1971, Schneider was second author on a Science paper with S. I. Rasool titled “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate” (Science 173, 138–141). This paper used a one-dimensional radiative transfer model to examine the competing effects of cooling from aerosols and warming from CO2. The paper concluded:

    “However, it is projected that man’s potential to pollute will increase 6 to 8-fold in the next 50 years. If this increased rate of injection… should raise the present background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °C. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age. However, by that time, nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.[5]”

    Carbon dioxide was predicted to have only a minor role. However, the model was very simple and the calculation of the CO2 effect was lower than other estimates by a factor of about three, as noted in a footnote to the paper.

    The story made headlines in the New York Times. Shortly afterwards, Schneider became aware that he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosols, and underestimated the warming effect of CO2 by a factor of about three. He had mistakenly assumed that measurements of air particles he had taken near the source of pollution applied worldwide. He also found that much of the effect was due to natural aerosols which would not be affected by human activities, so the cooling effect of changes in industrial pollution would be much less than he had calculated. Having found that recalculation showed that global warming was the more likely outcome, he published a retraction of his earlier findings in 1974.[6]

    In a 1976 book The Genesis Strategy he discusses both long-term warming due to carbon dioxide and short-term cooling due to aerosols,[7] ..

    Stephen Schneieider passed away about five years ago and thus is no longer around. many of the current climate scientists are in fact young folks in their twenties and thirties and thus were not even born at the time.

    “The cause then, as now, was that of maintaining the cash flow of government grants for the ‘study’ of climate.”

    That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Do you actually have any extraordinary evidence to back that offensive conspiracy theory allegation up?

    Do you really think climate scientists are actually getting rich from devoting their lives to understanding our climate and do you really think that’s what mainly motivates them – and if that were so why go into science as opposed to business or working for , say, a fossil fuel giant that rakes in far more with arguably much less brainpower and effort required?

    Also note that a scientist who broke ranks and disproved or who “blew the whistle” on the supposed “conspiracy” here would earn far more and be hailed by so many many rich and powerful people as well as not having to come up with tough peer-reviewed science papers that contradict – in your scenario -actual reality. The absence of such occurrence in essence invalidates your absurd proposition there and destroys the already obviously silly idea of any such conspiracy.

  54. kilroy:

    Scientists .. were decrying the miles of ice that were to bury us by the year 2000.

    That would have been Reid Bryson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Bryson

    the very same scientists who were shouting global warming in the 1990s

    Er, no. Reid Bryson remained a human-caused global warming denialist until he died.

    You’re just spreading a lie. Shame on you.

  55. Robert Gunthry:

    Here is the real 1979 cover.

    1979? The media certainly like beating-up a dead horse don’t they? This is what scientists were saying in 1976 (in New Scientist):

    “The growing disturbance of the global balance of carbon dioxide is without doubt mankind’s greatest single impact on the environment”.

    http://books.google.com.au/books?id=obHSBCxiJ1YC&pg=PA750&lpg=PA750&dq=%22bert+bolin%22+burn+coal&source=bl&ots=CPc5kB5tbt&sig=gs_yb2uahRVhFtZOWOTp8y_KWQY&hl=en&ei=Dp0iTZPPO8TCcZuutL4K&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22bert%20bolin%22%20burn%20coal&f=false

    Thanks for reminding us that the media like to do beat-ups by the way.

  56. Whether or not there was any factual basis for a “big cool down” aside, the media, did in fact, make a huge scare campaign warning that the next ice age was coming. As a child in middle school during this time, we were taught this as *fact*, presented papers researched primarily through media clippings and worried our little hearts out over how we would live in the new ice tundra which was our only supposed future. Sure, they were wrong. But I assure you, that if you lived through it, it certainly happened, you would remember the horror that only a 12 year old budding mind can have, and you wouldn’t make light of the power of a misinformed media. Perhaps research of local and regional newspapers would be more meaningful that a few magazine covers to understand the hype and scare tactics of the time.
    That climate deniers use the 70’s Ice Age scare as weapons to continue polluting is awful. But let’s don’t deny that it made for a great story back then, used to scare petroleum consumers to scale back dependency on middle eastern oil. Sound familiar in any way?

    1. weapons to continue polluting is awful

      Sound familiar in any way?

      Anyone else notice the cognitive dissonance?

  57. The sophistication of climate deniers can be summed up by James Inhofe’s ridiculous 2015 stunt of throwing a snowball on the Senate floor, as if “Al Gore said winter would vanish!” or the entire planet is a particular city in winter. These people are as nearsighted as moles. They harp on record snowfall as if it equates to record cold, when it’s mostly a combination of greater evaporation and adequate cold to freeze water vapor. Heat elsewhere is causing the evaporation, and overall heat is accumulating. Deniers refuse to connect more than two dots at a time and try to constantly move the goalpost.

  58. Deniers? Here’s a list of articles from the 70’s predicting the next ice age along with a link to the website that listed them. Many of the same scientists that are predicting global warming predicted global cooling not too long ago.

    1970 – Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age – Scientists See Ice Age In the Future (The Washington Post, January 11, 1970)
    1970 – Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself? (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970)
    1970 – New Ice Age May Descend On Man (Sumter Daily Item, January 26, 1970)
    1970 – Pollution Prospect A Chilling One (The Argus-Press, January 26, 1970)
    1970 – Pollution’s 2-way ‘Freeze’ On Society (Middlesboro Daily News, January 28, 1970)
    1970 – Cold Facts About Pollution (The Southeast Missourian, January 29, 1970)
    1970 – Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports (St. Petersburg Times, March 4, 1970)
    1970 – Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century (The Boston Globe, April 16, 1970)
    1970 – Pollution Called Ice Age Threat (St. Petersburg Times, June 26, 1970)
    1970 – U.S. and Soviet Press Studies of a Colder Arctic (The New York Times, July 18, 1970)
    1970 – Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1970)
    1971 – Ice Age Refugee Dies Underground (Montreal Gazette, Febuary 17, 1971)
    1971 – Pollution Might Lead To Another Ice Age (The Schenectady Gazette, March 22, 1971)
    1971 – Pollution May Bring Ice Age – Scientist Rites Risk (The Windsor Star, March 23, 1971)
    1971 – U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming (The Washington Post, July 9, 1971)
    1971 – Ice Age Around the Corner (Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1971)
    1971 – New Ice Age Coming – It’s Already Getting Colder (L.A. Times, October 24, 1971)
    1971 – Another Ice Age? Pollution Blocking Sunlight (The Day, November 1, 1971)
    1971 – Air Pollution Could Bring An Ice Age (Harlan Daily Enterprise, November 4, 1971)
    1972 – Air pollution may cause ice age (Free-Lance Star, February 3, 1972)
    1972 – Scientist Says New ice Age Coming (The Ledger, February 13, 1972)
    1972 – Ice Age Cometh For Dicey Times (The Sun, May 29, 1972)
    1972 – Ice Age Coming (Deseret News, September 8, 1972)
    1972 – There’s a new Ice Age coming! (The Windsor Star, September 9, 1972)
    1972 – Scientist predicts new ice age (Free-Lance Star, September 11, 1972)
    1972 – British Expert on Climate Change Says New Ice Age Creeping Over Northern Hemisphere (Lewiston Evening Journal, September 11, 1972)
    1972 – Climate Seen Cooling For Return Of Ice Age (The Portsmouth Times, ?September 11, 1972?)
    1972 – New Ice Age Slipping Over North (The Press-Courier, September 11, 1972)
    1972 – Beginning of new ice age (The Canberra Times, September 12, 1972)
    1972 – Ice Age Begins A New Assault In North (The Age, September 12, 1972)
    1972 – Weather To Get Colder (Montreal Gazette, ?September 12, 1972?)
    1972 – British climate expert predicts new Ice Age (The Christian Science Monitor, September 23, 1972)
    1972 – Scientist Sees Chilling Signs of New Ice Age (L.A. Times, September 24, 1972)
    1972 – Science: Another Ice Age? (Time Magazine, November 13, 1972)
    1972 – Geologist at Case Traces Long Winters – Sees Ice Age in 20 Years (Youngstown Vindicator, December 13, 1972)
    1972 – Ice Age On Its Way, Scientist Says (Toledo Blade, December 13, 1972)
    1972 – Ice Age Predicted In About 200 Years (The Portsmouth Times, December 14, 1972)
    1973 – New Ice Age coming? (Popular Science, January 1973)
    1973 – The Ice Age Cometh (The Saturday Review, March 24, 1973)
    1973 – Believe new ice age is coming (The Bryan Times, March 31, 1973)
    1973 – ‘Man-made Ice Age’ Worries Scientists (The Free Lance-Star, June 22, 1973)
    1973 – Fear Of Man-made Ice Age (The Spartanburg Herald, June 28, 1973)
    1973 – Possibility Of Ice Age Worries The Scientists (The Argus-Press, November 12, 1973)
    1973 – Weather-watchers think another ice age may be on the way (The Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 1973)
    1974 – Ominous Changes in the World’s Weather (PDF) (Fortune Magazine, February 1974)
    1974 – Atmospheric Dirt: Ice Age Coming?? (Pittsburgh Press, February 28, 1974)
    1974 – Support for theory of a cooling world (The Canberra Times, May 16, 1974)
    1974 – New evidence indicates ice age here (Eugene Register-Guard, May 29, 1974)
    1974 – Another Ice Age? (Time Magazine, June 24, 1974)
    1974 – 2 Scientists Think ‘Little’ Ice Age Near (Hartford Courant, August 11, 1974)
    1974 – Ice Age, worse food crisis seen (Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1974)
    1974 – Imminent Arrival of the Ice (Radio Times, November 14, 1974)
    1974 – Making a BBC Science Special [The Weather Machine] (New Scientist, November 14, 1974)
    1974 – The Weather Machine (BBC, November 20, 1974)
    1974 – New ice age ‘could be in our lifetime’ (The Canberra Times, November 22, 1974)
    1974 – Believes Pollution Could Bring On Ice Age (Ludington Daily News, December 4, 1974)
    1974 – Pollution Could Spur Ice Age, Nasa Says (Beaver Country Times, ?December 4, 1974?)
    1974 – Air Pollution May Trigger Ice Age, Scientists Feel (The Telegraph, ?December 5, 1974?)
    1974 – More Air Pollution Could Trigger Ice Age Disaster (Daily Sentinel, ?December 5, 1974?)
    1974 – Scientists Fear Smog Could Cause Ice Age (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 5, 1974)
    1975 – Climate Changes Called Ominous (The New York Times, January 19, 1975)
    1975 – Climate Change: Chilling Possibilities (Science News, March 1, 1975)
    1975 – B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon? (Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1975)
    1975 – Cooling Trends Arouse Fear That New Ice Age Coming (Eugene Register-Guard, ?March 2, 1975?)
    1975 – Is Another Ice Age Due? Arctic Ice Expands In Last Decade (Youngstown Vindicator, ?March 2, 1975?)
    1975 – Is Earth Headed For Another Ice Age? (Reading Eagle, March 2, 1975)
    1975 – New Ice Age Dawning? Significant Shift In Climate Seen (Times Daily, ?March 2, 1975?)
    1975 – There’s Troublesome Weather Ahead (Tri City Herald, ?March 2, 1975?)
    1975 – Is Earth Doomed To Live Through Another Ice Age? (The Robesonian, ?March 3, 1975?)
    1975 – The Ice Age cometh: the system that controls our climate (Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1975)
    1975 – The Cooling World (Newsweek, April 28, 1975)
    1975 – Cooling trend may signal coming of another Ice Age (The Sun, May 16, 1975)
    1975 – Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead (PDF) (The New York Times, May 21, 1975)
    1975 – Summer of A New Ice Age (The Age, June 5, 1975)
    1975 – In the Grip of a New Ice Age? (International Wildlife, July-August, 1975)
    1975 – Experts ponder another ice age (The Spokesman-Review, September 8, 1975)
    1975 – Oil Spill Could Cause New Ice Age (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 11, 1975)
    1976 – Deadly Harvest [Film] (Starring: Kim Cattrall, Clint Walker, 1976)
    1976 – The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? [Book] (Lowell Ponte, 1976)
    1976 – Ice Age Predicted (Reading Eagle, January 22, 1976)
    1976 – Ice Age Predicted In Century (Bangor Daily News, January 22, 1976)
    1976 – It’s Going To Get Chilly About 125 Years From Now (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, January 23, 1976)
    1976 – Worrisome CIA Report; Even U.S. Farms May be Hit by Cooling Trend (U.S. News & World Report, May 31, 1976)
    1977 – Blizzard – What Happens if it Doesn’t Stop? [Book] (George Stone, 1977)
    1977 – The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age [Book] (The Impact Team, 1977)
    1977 – The Ice Age Cometh… (New York Magazine, January 31, 1977)
    1977 – The Big Freeze (Time Magazine, January 31, 1977)
    1977 – Has The Ice Age Cometh Again? (Calgary Herald, February 1, 1977)
    1977 – Space Mirrors Proposed To Prevent Crop Freezes (Bangor Daily News, February 7, 1977)
    1977 – We Will Freeze in the Dark (Capital Cities Communications Documentary, Host: Nancy Dickerson, April 12, 1977)
    1978 – Ice! [Book] (Arnold Federbush, 1978)
    1978 – The New Ice Age [Book] (Henry Gilfond, 1978)
    1978 – Winter May Be Colder Than In Last Ice Age (Deseret News, January 2, 1978)
    1978 – Current Winters Seen Colder Than In Ice Age? (The Telegraph, January 3, 1978)
    1978 – Winter Temperatures Colder Than Last Ice Age (Eugene Register-Guard, Eugene Register-Guard, January 3, 1978)
    1978 – International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere (The New York Times, January 5, 1978)
    1978 – Little Ice Age: Severe winters and cool summers ahead (Calgary Herald, January 10, 1978)
    1978 – Winters Will Get Colder, ‘we’re Entering Little Ice Age’ (Daily Record, January 10, 1978)
    1978 – Geologist Says Winters Getting Colder (Middlesboro Daily News, January 16, 1978)
    1978 – It’s Going To Get Colder (Boca Raton News, ?January 17, 1978?)
    1978 – Another Ice Age? (Kentucky New Era, February 12, 1978)
    1978 – Another Ice Age? (Reading Eagle, ?February 13, 1978?)
    1978 – The Coming Ice Age (In Search Of TV Show, Season 2, Episode 23, Host: Leonard Nimoy, May 1978)
    1978 – An Ice Age Is Coming Weather Expert Fears (Milwaukee Sentinel, November 17, 1978)
    1979 – A Choice of Catastrophes – The Disasters That Threaten Our World [Book] (Isaac Asimov, 1979)
    1979 – The Sixth Winter [Book] (John R. Gribbin, 1979)
    1979 – The New Ice Age Cometh (The Age, January 16, 1979)
    1979 – Ice Age Building Up (Daily Record, June 5, 1979)
    1979 – Large Glacial Buildup Could Mean Ice Age (Daily Chronicle, June 5, 1979)
    1979 – Ice Age On Its Way (Lewiston Morning Tribune, June 7, 1979)
    1979 – Get Ready to Freeze (Daily Chronicle, October 12, 1979)
    1979 – New ice age almost upon us? (The Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 1979)

    * Note: A couple of the news stories are duplicates in different papers with slightly different titles, this is intentional to show that these types of stories were not isolated to a certain regional paper.

    http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html

  59. Here’s a list of articles

    Another fool who believes everything he reads in the newspapers.

  60. It is a was a real thing we were taught in school in the 1970’s the teachers and scientist tried to scarce the hell out of us.

  61. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_861us8D9M

    [Yes. Before the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution a new ice age was a possibility and this was discussed in the 1970s, as was climate change in general. Not the point of this post, but thanks for the link.

    I suggest you do not get your science from “In Search Of.” It was the first sensationalistic science show leading us into a new era of science-BS all over the TV.

    Meanwhile, have a look at this: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/09/05/scientists-predict-global-instability-and-drought-due-to-greenhouse-gas-pollution/

    -gtl]

  62. My concern is how the findings of so called “consensi of scientists” are used to influence government policy, and specifically to expand the scope of government. The 70’s scare about another ice age, perpetrated throughout the entire decade, giving credence to the belief that the oncoming ice age was attributable to pollution (polluting particles creating a shield inside the earth’s atmosphere that interdicted solar heat from reaching the earth’s surface) formed the impetus for Nixon’s creation of the EPA. How many of us have experienced the negative impact of that department’s interference in commerce and individuals’ lives? Now we are confronted more alarmism that will fuel further encroachments on our livelihoods. When will we ever learn to recognize the impostors? The answer: never.

  63. Michael Bullington:

    My concern is how the findings of so called “consensi of scientists” are used to influence government policy,

    Right, because government policy should never be influenced by science.

    The 70’s scare about another ice age, perpetrated throughout the entire decade, giving credence to the belief that the oncoming ice age was attributable to pollution (polluting particles creating a shield inside the earth’s atmosphere that interdicted solar heat from reaching the earth’s surface) formed the impetus for Nixon’s creation of the EPA.

    Huh. I don’t remember being scared about another ice age, but I did get sort of alarmed when the Cuyahoga River caught fire that time.

    How many of us have experienced the negative impact of that department’s interference in commerce and individuals’ lives?

    I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has. The impact on my own life has been positive, like water that’s safe to drink and air that’s safe to breathe.

    Now we are confronted more alarmism that will fuel further encroachments on our livelihoods.

    Yeah! Freedom shouldn’t come with responsibility! It’s outrageous that anyone would suggest we pay the full cost of our prosperity. Enjoying the private benefits of fossil fuel use while socializing the cost of climate change is our dog-given right!

    When will we ever learn to recognize the impostors?

    You, at least, appear to be the genuine science-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, faux-libertarian article.

  64. Hey Greg — Sorry to hit you with a dose of Reality and FACTS.

    You are a purveyor of prevarications.

    “WOW! WORLD’S TOP PHYSICIST AND DEMOCRAT: Obama Backs “Wrong Side” In War On “Climate Change”, Follow The Money, Carbon Does Far More Good Than Harm”
    By 100% FED Up –
    Oct 15, 2015

    “The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the “wrong side” in the war on “climate change.”

    So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson (pictured above), the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

    In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

    This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.”

    Read more and get educated…

    http://100percentfedup.com/wow-worlds-top-physicist-democrat-obama-backs-wrong-side-war-climate-change-follow-money-carbon-far-good-harm/#

  65. You are all sacks of shit and we have learned not to trust a single word that comes out of your mouths. You doctor and falsify data. You slam anyone, scientist or not, who doubts your hypotheses. You concoct computer models that turn out to be inaccurate, and then won’t fess up. You are bought and paid for by those who loathe progress and feel guilty for being more advanced than other countries. Why don’t you all admit the actual truth: that there has been NO WARMING in 18 YEARS and that the SUN is responsible for the temperature on earth, and THE SUN IS COOLING DOWN NOW

  66. You deniers are all sacks of shit and we have learned not to trust a single word that comes out of your mouths. You doctor and falsify data and its interpretations. You slam anyone, scientist or not, who imposes reality on your self-serving hypotheses. You concoct your own denier models that turn out to be inaccurate, and then won’t fess up when reality bites. You are bought and paid for by those who loathe progress and want to stick with fossil fuels and feel guilty for not being more advanced than other countries. Why don’t you all admit the actual truth: that there has been NO HIATUS in 18 YEARS and that the human-added CO2 is responsible for the temperature on earth, and THE SUN IS COOLING DOWN NOW yet THE EARTH IS WARMING UP.

  67. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s and we were inundated with magazine covers and articles warning of the coming ice age and global cooling. Now it seems promoters of climate change and global warming are trying to rewrite history and say it was all a myth, it never happened. That’s BS. Is it any wonder anyone who’s been around long enough knows better then to believe the hype and hysteria the media pushes. The real myth is anthropomorphic global ANYTHING. The reason we’re experiencing climate change is due to the same reasons the climate has been changing for millions of years. Currently the solar system’s heliosphere has degraded by an estimated 60%, thus allowing increased gamma radiation from outside our solar system to heat up temperatures on all the planets in our system. But you won’t make any money pushing the truth.

  68. Now it seems promoters of climate change and global warming …

    Dave! If you see any of these nefarious promoters of climate change, you’d best capture them and put them in a cage, then notify the FBI. We all need to do everything we can to stop the promotion of climate change, and keep the Earth’s climate stable. This can only be done by reducing the CO2 emissions that are occurring globally. Remember, your health, wealth, and family are all depending on this!

  69. The Ice age burdened the earth,s crust and now the ice is gone the crust is rebounding,rising from the sea and making our mountains grow in height. Right? no Wrong. The land is not rising it is the sea that is receding from the land. Once we can realize that fact and it is fact the Ice age fades into the realm of mythology. The Receding Sea is so obviously simple we simply overlook it. the book “The Mysterious Receding Seas” spells it all out. Richard Guy

  70. Nope. I owe you an apology. The Time covers don’t happen to match with the cooling scare articles. Damn. But I can’t help concluding that the cover switch was a set up (by your side) to increase confusion, since the cooling scare was real and widespread, as Pop Tech has shown. It’s an irrelevant and coincidental technicality that the hype did not produce a Time cover. “Extraordinary Intelligence” is hardly in the climate skeptic business. Just how much time lapsed between EI’s article and yours? –AGF

  71. Come now, you must be aware of the CIA report outlining reports of disaster ascribed to cooling. –AGF

  72. Come now, you must be aware of the CIA report outlining disasters ascribed to cooling. Or does the censorship begin here? –AGF

  73. Nothing was quantified then and nothing is quantified now–except pseudo-quantification: “97% of climatologists agree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is leading to climate change”? Where did you get that figure and what does it mean? Is this “climate change” significant or measurable? Is there any consensus on how or how much the climate should change? Is it serious enough that we should consider real solutions, like nuclear power? Does anyone in Asia care that coal plants proliferate there at many times the rate the West shuts them down? Or should we continue to play the same old games, tax this and that and pretend we’re making a difference? All is junk science. Nobody really takes it seriously except outcasts like James Hansen, who deserves to be an outcast but for the fact that he takes his doomsday science seriously. –AGF

  74. AGF, seems like you take your denialist talking points seriously. Do you have evidence to back any of that up?

  75. Brainstorms, do I have to do your googling for you? You don’t know that China is building coal plants at the rate of one every week or two? Of course not. Your mentors like to claim it’s for the greater good when they put American coal workers out of work. That’s coal China wants even with the low price of gas and oil. –AGF

  76. AGF, I have no mentors. (I think for myself and I take Googling with an appropriate grain of salt.). Do you have evidence to back any of that up?

  77. Where do the AG Fosters come from? Is there an assembly line building super-stupid humans somewhere?

    Yes, James Hansen is an “outcast” – LOL. Well, true if you append ‘in the minds of a small sect of super-stupid humans.’

    This is Steve Goddard, Paul Homewood, JoNova level dumb.

    It’s interesting that I recently had a related comment over at WUWT that never made it out of moderation; it read, in part:

    James Hansen is this generation’s leading climate scientist. From his early work on planetary atmospheres, his work with early computer models and volcanoes, his systematic compilation of the GISS surface temperature dataset, and the hundreds of papers on which he was lead or co-author make him the truly a figure that will go down in history. Yet, on ‘skeptic’ sites his name is nearly a curse word. Why? Because they don’t like the results.”

    AG Foster surely resembles that remark. I doubt he can even spell Agung or Pinatubo.

    BTW – China just announced a moratorium on coal plants AND ordered many already under construction to be halted. Another GWPF shrill cry silenced by reality. Google *that* AG.

  78. Well, O’Neill, if you have something more up- to-date than this, let’s hear it: http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2016/03/02/china-coal-bubble-210-power-plants/

    But maybe you don’t know the difference between a coal mine and a coal fired power plant.

    As for Hansen being an “outcast,” I’m of course referring to that being being the case within his own his alarmist party. For example Naomi Oreskes called him a “denier” because of his support for nuclear energy: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/16/new-form-climate-denialism-dont-celebrate-yet-cop-21

    And he has become persona non grata at the White House for saying of the US – China policy: “That spin is so gross, it is best described as unadulterated 100% pure bullshit.”
    http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2015/20151127_Isolation.pdf

    And of course the IPCC has long ignored Hansen’s more outlandish warnings of the runaway greenhouse effect and the Venus Syndrome. But he does have a few allies in favor of nuclear energy, even among the climate quacks.

    And here’s that CIA report: http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf

    As always, the climatics have to be educated from scratch.
    –AGF

  79. P.S. – since Hansen’s name came up, I’d like to recommend anyone that has not read Spencer Weart’s interview with him do so. The transcript for Part I of the interview can be found here: American Institue of Physics, Oral Histories, James Hansen – Session 1

    If you browse the available transcripts you can find many more informative oral histories.

    Alternatively, you could enjoy a completely fantastical history at WUWT, RealScience, etc., etc. LOL

  80. AG Foster – funny how suddenly you don’t know how to use Google, isn’t it ironic?

    From the very same site to which you link – just a little more recent: energydesk.greenpeac – China stops building new coal-fired power plants, 3-24-2016

    Or ecowatch – China puts brakes on new coal plants, 3-24-2016

    Or from Reuters – China to halt construction on coal-fired power plants in 15 regions, 3-24-2016

    Hansen is an outcast 🙂 Stick with that story. It’s like hanging a sign around your neck saying ‘Kick Me” BTW – you realize that the NH has already exceeded 1.5C and is near 2C above pre-industrial. An agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C *is* a pipedream.

    AG, I suggest you actually *read* Hansen – not whichever denialist site you normally frequent. For Venus, you might like to first read Hansen’s short piece Making Things Clearer: Exaggeration, Jumping the Gun, and The Venus Syndrome 15, April 2013.

    Educated from scratch? Like having to teach you how to use Google and the difference between a coal mine and a coal-fired plant? Yes, it appears we will have to educate you from scratch – right after you’ve been deprogrammed. And deprogramming super-stupid humans is not easy.

  81. Kevin O’Neill

    Franklin, WI USA
    March 27, 2016

    “Alternatively, you could enjoy a completely fantastical history at WUWT, RealScience, etc., etc. LOL”

    Except that you couldn’t. O’Neill makes it all up as he goes.

  82. AG Foster – this isn’t WUWT. There will be no crowd of simpletons to cheer you on. If you don’t have facts on your side you will be called out.

    *You* chided others for not Googling something, then when more recent news than your offering was referenced you suddenly lost the ability to use Google. Additionally, you implied that *I* didn’t know the difference between a coal mine and a coal plant. Of course the reality is you simply couldn’t use Google to locate the more recent news. Ironic isn’t it.

    Now, having given you several easily found URLs linking to reports that China has not only put a moratorium on new coal plants you drop the subject.

    Giving you Hansen’s actual words on the Venus Syndrome, you drop the subject.

    You represent the sect of super-stupid humans about as expected. Thanks for playing.

  83. “Except that you couldn’t.”

    At least AGF doesn’t disagree that he enjoys fantastical histories. Pity that he thinks they’re reality.

  84. “the CIA report”

    It’s interesting how a lone crackpot (Reid Bryson) can spread his influence far and wide.

  85. If O’Neill had bothered to read the articles he links to he would have learned:
    1) “Environmental group Greenpeace said the rules, if fully implemented, could involve up to 250 power projects with a total of 170 gigawatts (GW) in capacity, according to initial estimates.” And,
    2) At least 570 coal-fired units with 300 gigawatts of capacity could still come online, despite dramatic overcapacity of coal in China.
    And he offered this China BS in a strained attempt to assure us all is well in Alarmsville, that Hansen and Obama and Oreskes see eye to eye, that Hansen now has nothing to worry about, that China has sworn of coal, etc.

    And we still have India, which alone, ” by 2020…may have built about 2.5 times as much capacity as the U.S. is about to lose.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-21/the-grim-promise-of-india-s-coal-powered-future

    “And Japan’s Kiko Network, an environmental group, says there are 43 coal projects under construction or planned to be built in the coming years to make up for the loss of nuclear power capacity after the Fukushima disaster.”
    http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/09/japan-defies-obama-plans-on-building-43-coal-plants/

    And so the rest of Asia, as well as Germany, which is replacing its nuclear plants with lignite coal while Hansen pulls out his hair.

    See, it makes little difference whether you buy into a bankrupt ideology if the risk remains so unquantified that nobody can agree what we should do about it. If anyone believed Hansen they ought to take his nonsense at face value and go nuclear. What do you think, O’Neill, should we take Hansen seriously and go all out with nuclear technology? Be forewarned, your fellow ideologues will call you a “denier.”
    –AGF

  86. Chris O’Neill at #147, re. the “the CIA report”:
    “It’s interesting how a lone crackpot (Reid Bryson) can spread his influence far and wide.”

    As #106 shows, there were few naysayers. Bryson wasn’t very lonely. And as the CIA report shows, a few years of cold weather were all it took to blame every catastrophe on a few years of cooling. And what the skeptics are saying is it only took a few years of warming to repeat the stupidity.

    97% of scientists agree: we don’t have a clue what we should do about it. –AGF

    1. “As #106 shows, there were few naysayers”

      Actually, if you check through 106 you’ll find that a lot of those originated from the lone crackpot Bryson.

      “as the CIA report shows, a few years of cold weather were all it took”

      for Reid Bryson, since that is where the claim in the CIA report originated

      “to blame every catastrophe on a few years of cooling.”

      Fixed it for you. Thanks for reminding us that a few years of cold weather was all it took for Bryson to blame every catastrophe on a few years of cooling. That’s all it takes for a crackpot to make up his claims.

  87. AG – you wrote:”Brainstorms, do I have to do your googling for you? You don’t know that China is building coal plants at the rate of one every week or two? ”

    But you were *completely* unaware that China had placed a moratorium on new coal plants and halted construction on those already underway.

    And you were unable to find the reports via Google – instead claiming others had misinterpreted ‘coal mines’ for ‘coal plants’.

    That is the history of this thread on that topic. As for your claim: “And he offered this China BS in a strained attempt to assure us all is well in Alarmsville”

    Please show a quote of mine that even comes close to resembling your characterization. All my comments are up there – shouldn’t be hard to find.

    crickets chirping…….

  88. Not gullibe at #40…you got any *proof* of that, or is that just a personal opinion, borne of delusions?

  89. The majority of my posts disappear. That can be frustrating. Maybe links have to do with it, maybe not.

    Yes, Bryson was was something of a crackpot, just like Hansen (and Mann and Jones, etc.). Google “Quark Soup” to get Apple’s opinion: “Hansen anymore seems interested in promoting alarmism at all costs. There’s been a whiff of this throughout his entire career, but this latest paper is just too much to take seriously.” And this has been the opinion of t he IPCC as well, and their administrators have generally been crackpots, like Pachauri. So Hansen is a crackpot among crackpots.

    Warm is good. Cold is bad. There’s a 50/50 chance the surface temp will go up or down. When it goes up that’s usually good. It means we’re still recovering from the LIA. As the lone crackpot Callendar said way back, the CO2 warming should “save us from the deadly glaciers.” And if we’re lucky it will, but it probably won’t.

    It makes no difference whether we take Hansen seriously. Nuke power is good but gas will do, and China and the climate don’t care one way or the other. It makes no difference whether we acquiesce to the climate credo if no one can agree on how to address it. If it were as serious as Hansen likes to think, we should take his advice. But like he says, the Paris conference and BAU offer nothing but junk solutions.

    So O’Neill, should we invest immediately in massive nuclear technology or dis Hansen as he deserves? Can you answer that? –AGF

  90. Paykasa Bozdurma (#153): “borne of delusions.”

    “not gullible” is probably right. As I recall I found the original post a few days ago and now I can’t. I think the obscure “Natalina” has taken it down, totally embarrassed. She suckered for a plant from the climate quacks whose modus operandi has always been one of tricks and deceit. Mann, Gleike, Pachauri, the white washes, the forever changing surface record (GISS under Hansen), Karl et al. Liars all, who will flinch at nothing to advance their agenda.

    A timeline would help a little. When did the trick post first appear. How long did it take Kirtley to find it and Laden to publish it? And first someone pretty astute had to notice that there was no correspondence between the Time covers and the cooling articles. Pop Tech mixes in one of those weather motivated covers with the cooling doom coverage, quite misleadingly. (I was misled.)

    Sure looks like a setup to me. –AGF

  91. OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling. Get it?

  92. Wow. You really ARE as stupid as people are saying.

    Go back to your brain-addling propaganda fix, or whatever allows you to cocoon your mindset in more of that comfort of self-righteousness and false certainty.

    I’m done with you…

  93. Yes, Bryson was was something of a crackpot

    At least we all agree that Bryson (the source of many of the citations in #106) was a crackpot. That agreement doesn’t extend to 97% of todays climate scientists of course. I’ll bet you’re not interested in producing a subset of the list in #106 that isn’t sourced from crackpots.

  94. But Bryson was a crackpot only in the sense that Hansen and your bogus 97% are crackpots: he like them extrapolated doom from a short record. NOBODY went to the press in the 70’s and said Bryson and all were crackpots. NOBODY knew the cool spell would be short lived. NOBODY knew whether CO2 would ever do any good or evil, including Callendar, though he thought it would do some good. NOBODY took Callendar seriously in his lifetime. And I don’t take Hansen seriously and neither do you, or Oreskes or Obama or the IPCC or China or hardly anyone else. –AGF

  95. OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling.

    The amount of stupid packed into that short sentence is astounding.

  96. AG Foster: “OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling.”

    AG – You do realize that the question is complete nonsense as posed, don’t you? The inability to even ask an intelligent question underlines your ignorance on the subject.

  97. Hard to say who’s funnier, O’Neill or his link. First, on the 50/50 point: “AG – You do realize that the question is complete nonsense as posed, don’t you? The inability to even ask an intelligent question underlines your ignorance on the subject.”

    My assertion is patently obvious to anyone with a high school science education. I’m surrounded by idiots.

    And his link (from 1976)–marvelously entertaining.

    Excerpts:

    “The current steady rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a major threat to the stability of natural climate patterns, a threat that if realised could within 40 years [2016] throw into complete chaos world agricultural production.”

    Notice the reference to “natural climate patterns” rather than
    GHG warming, which is never mentioned in the article. Remember this was a period of cooling. And before reading “global warming” between the lines consider this line:

    “Atmospheric carbon dioxide would, however, reach suffocating levels long before even a modest fraction of the coal stocks are burned.”

    We are left to guess whether they speak of suffocating heat or CO2 asphyxiation, which can be a problem at less than 5000ppm, but the context suggests the latter.

    And the predictions:

    “The real problem would be faced if coal were to replace the other fossil fuels when they dry up in 40 years time [2016].”

    “[The CO2 level] is set to double its current figure of 332 ppm in less than 50 years [2026].”

    So O’Neill’s link makes my case better than I could; these guys didn’t have a clue what CO2 would do, or even what would produce it–the article asserts that biomass was as problematic as oil and gas, that by 2016 we will have run out of gas and oil, that gas and oil were too scarce to be a problem anyway, but that by 2016 agriculture would be in chaos due to coal burning. I suppose George Soros still believes that–just move the date back a little. And of course they’re way off on the CO2 prediction.

    There’s just not a competent scientist on the planet who takes this climate doom seriously, and as the O’Neills and other posters insist on demonstrating here, neither is there an intelligent layman who buys into it. –AGF

  98. Sorry, wrong quote.

    NOBODY went to the press in the 70’s and said Bryson and all were crackpots

    Bolin went to the press and contradicted Bryson’s claims about global cooling being the thing to worry about.

    I’m still waiting for a subset of the list in #106 that isn’t sourced from the agreed crackpot Bryson.

  99. “Bolin went to the press and contradicted Bryson’s claims about global cooling being the thing to worry about.”

    Prove it. As for Bryson, the burden is on you: find any articles that CAN be traced to him. As early as Mar 4, 1970, we have a gov. agency predicting cooling doom: “Pollution Could Cause Ice Age, Agency Reports (St. Petersburg Times.”

    –AGF

  100. My assertion is patently obvious to anyone with a high school science education.

    your assertion is stupid – to this person with a Ph.D. in statistics, and to everyone else here.

    I am surrounded by idiots.

    I would guess that the people to whom you usually talk about this, and who agree with you, are idiots.

  101. AG – Do you understand what an ill-posed question even is? Clue: “A problem which may have more than one solution, or in which the solutions depend discontinuously upon the initial data.”

    Now, I said your question was ill-posed. It is. There are numerous solutions based on what we’re using for initial data. Is the randomly selected time seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years? Is it the same time each day, week, month, year?

    That you fail to understand that ‘Time of Observation’ inherently influences the result is not surprising.

    Just another pseudoskeptic with half a brain.

  102. NOBODY went to the press in the 70’s and said Bryson and all were crackpots.

    OK smartypants. Prove it.

    NOBODY knew the cool spell would be short lived.

    Prove it.

    NOBODY knew whether CO2 would ever do any good or evil

    Prove it.

    As for Bryson, the burden is on you: find any articles that CAN be traced to him.

    You dumb clown. Your precious CIA report cites the “Wisconsin study”, Wisconsin being the place where Bryson was professor of earth sciences.

    So at least the only agreed crackpot was the one who forecast that the world would return to the climate regime of the Little Ice Age.

    So when are you going to get rid of citations based on claims originating from agreed crackpots (Bryson at least) from your list?

  103. Me, #154: “Warm is good. Cold is bad. There’s a 50/50 chance the surface temp will go up or down. ”

    Me, #157: ” OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling. Get it?”

    Dean, #171: “your assertion is stupid – to this person with a Ph.D. in statistics, and to everyone else here.”

    Goes to show how perfectly incompetent one can be and still have a Phd. “Random”: any time or place in the universe. “Stasis”: approached only in deep space but never perfectly achieved. Assuming a Big Bang the universe has been cooling ever since, but before the Bang nothing can be known including the existence of time.

    Limiting the discussion to the earth, the interior is probably cooling slowly as radioactive matter is spent. Tidal heat is slowly decreasing as the moon’s distance increases.
    Solar radiation at this stage is slowly decreasing. All these factors occur over billions of years.

    Let’s take an automobile engine. You might say it spends very little time heating up and more time staying hot or cooling down, but that depends on the precision specified. In fact the engine warms while it accelerates or climbs, and cools as it coasts. And while it idles its temperature fluctuates depending on when the fan kicks in.

    Limiting the discussion to global T of the Pleistocene (as one might automatically expect with climate discussions among reasonable company) my assertion obviously holds true: it might be possible to show that sea ice melts faster than it freezes on various time scales, but in the absence of such specific knowledge we are forced to fall back on the general rule: T does not remain the same; it goes up or down with an even chance of either. Moreover the climatic fluctuations are overwhelmed by seasonal and daily variation. For 6 months or 12 hours the earth warms; then it cools.

    So going into the LIA the earth cooled. Coming out of it the earth warmed. At any given time and on any scale of time or T there is a 50/50 chance of either. At present we are recovering from the LIA. GHG’s might be supposed to be responsible for some of the current warming but there is no evidence for this in the troposphere.

    At any rate, my statement stands, and I’m surrounded by idiots–Phd’d idiots or not. –AGF

  104. A G Foster tells us that he spends his days in the Fun House “Hall of Mirrors”.

    No one is surprised. He favors the mirror that makes his head look big.

    It’s all an illusion. He never believes anyone who points this out to him, preferring to insult them.. as he goes back to admiring the distorted image of himself.

  105. Re #173:

    First the trivia: The CIA never mentions Bryson in the text; only Kutzbach from Wisconsin. Its bibliography lists 4 technical papers from Bryson, including “Climate Modification by Air Pollution.” Peterson et al, in their farcical “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” list only three Bryson papers in their charted tally: 2 “neutral” (1974, 77) and one “cooling” (1976); Bryson published 11 papers in 1974 alone.

    The notion that Bryson was a maverick is far fetched. That the climate was cooling was little argued. That the cooling was man made as Bryson argued was certainly disputed as it is today, but many modern warmists continue to blame the cooling of the 70’s on aerosols. Stephen Schneider condoned Bryson’s communicating the “urgency of the situation” but not the “certainty.” Schneider had no trouble jumping on the warming band wagon when it came around. If you just switched “global cooling” to climate change Bryson would fit right in today. Like Schneider and Barrett and many others then, and Hansen and a host more now, he was a climate alarmist –an anthropogenic climate change alarmist. And he was generally wrong, as have been the modern alarmists: 97% of climate models run high.

    But O’Neill, I still can’t get an answer from you: should we invest in nuclear energy like Hansen says? Or his Hansen too extreme for you? –AGF

  106. agf@174: Your string of unrelated “science sounding” comments make no sense, and in no way support what you are trying to say.

    It is of no use trying to discuss things with someone as deeply uninformed as you.

  107. Well why should I waste time with you any more than with Brainlesstorm? Nobody has offered an iota of criticism of substance. And of course no idiot can. –AGF

  108. #177: “It is of no use trying to discuss things with someone as deeply uninformed as you.”

    You might start by offering a rebuttal. Something beyond, “I’m a Phd. and you don’t know squat.” I’ll try to make it easier for you. Suppose you have equal odds of living in either hemisphere, north or south. I could safely give even odds that the seasonal weather is warming or cooling in your area. Or suppose that you have even odds of living in any time zone on the globe. The chances are even that at this moment the outside temperature is rising or falling. So tell us that makes no sense and see if it helps your credibility. –AGF

  109. You know, Dean, that Ph.D.’s don’t argue high school-level subject matter with kindergarteners…

    They may try to teach kindergarteners some of the basics of high school-level subjects…

    …But kindergarteners aren’t taken to starting hostile disputation with their superior should the Ph.D. offer to teach them.

    Because kindergarteners don’t hew assiduously to mindless ideologies and value those ideologies and self-centered interests higher than learning something valuable.

    There are those who are teachable, and then there are those who are hopelessly useless, to themselves and to society.

  110. AG Foster – I said your question was ill-posed and that has not changed.

    I started with time, but we could do the same with geography.

    If one posits a given locale, a given time, and a reference frame, then it’s possible to calculate odds. Otherwise your question has multiple solutions depending on the data. It is almost the definition of an ill-posed question.

    BTW. The odds that the odds are 50% are virtually nil. Given a random time interval it is overwhelmingly more likely that the second temperature will be colder. The only way to change this is to change the question – make it less ill-posed.

    Once you figure out why the odds are the second temperature is likely to be colder you will be on the right track – i.e., you will have displayed at least the ability to think outside your preconceived notions.

    My inclination is that you can’t even grog the fact your question is ill-posed, much less figure out why the answer with the fewest assumptions is colder.

  111. The CIA never mentions Bryson in the text; only Kutzbach from Wisconsin.

    You dumb deliberately dense clown. The text says “The second group, at the University of Wisconsin, is under Reid Bryson and John Kutzbach, both mentioned earlier.”

    So when are you going to get rid of citations based on claims originating from agreed crackpots (Bryson at least) from your list?

  112. Nobody has offered an iota of criticism of substance. And of course no idiot can. –AGF

    We’re already aware that you can’t.

  113. 181: Ah yes, I missed the single mention on p.26. That no doubt precludes any influence from Barrett at ESSA (the for runner of NOAA — Bryson was careful by comparison.) Pretty much irrelevant. We still can’t get a commitment from O’Neill on whether we should go with nuclear technology. Is he capable of admitting fallibility in his hero, or of the uselessness of current remedies? –AGF

  114. You know, Dean, that Ph.D.’s don’t argue high school-level subject matter with kindergarteners…

    I know. I’m done, but I do feel tainted by his stupidity aura.

  115. And here folks, you have a microcosm of the religion of climate doom. Despair of any good argument, all ye who enter here. When every last prognostication fails they’ll just say, April Fools! –AGF

  116. Re. (current, but changeable) #181: “BTW. The odds that the odds are 50% are virtually nil. Given a random time interval it is overwhelmingly more likely that the second temperature will be colder.”

    What gibberish.

  117. But yes, the earth is slowly cooling down (as I said above), and more importantly, as we approach another big or little ice age we will cool down in the shorter term. Ultimately the coolers were right: we will generally have more to fear from cooling than warming. Even now. –AGF

  118. agf:

    I missed

    So when are you going to get rid of citations based on claims originating from agreed crackpots (Bryson at least) from your list?

    Or is all we get from you a shyte list sourced from crackpots?

  119. “But yes, the earth is slowly cooling down ”

    Any day now! Really! It will! It was in 1990, but then it warmed up. And then it was cooling in 1998, too! But then it warmed up again, but really, any day now the cooling will commence!

  120. OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling.”

    Are we talking localized temps, spatially averaged temps or temporally averaged temps (or both), averaged locally or globally? If this one random selected time interval how long is the interval? Minutes, days, months, decades? What criteria would you use to determine if the change in that interval is significant or you just saying any random fluctuation works? Or are you wanting to compare two randomly selected time intervals (of indeterminate length) side-by-side?

    That’s just the start of the things we need to know to answer the question. As others have pointed out, as the question stands it is nonsense although the seed of the idea does have promise as an interesting exercise for students.

  121. AG – there are two O’Neill’s posting in this thread; referring to “O’Neill” (again) shows your lack of attention to detail.

    Now, I’ve told you your question is ill-posed and yet you haven’t even tried to defend it.

    Time (sampling)
    Location
    Reference Frame(total time period considered)

    In the long run the sun will die out. That will last for eternity. I.e., sampling over the life of the universe will have more than 99.999999% of the temperatures at or near absolute zero.

    In the long, but shorter run – say a trillion years) the sun will increase in brightness, become a red dwarf and then a white dwarf. This will dominate for most of the sun’s remaining life. So in this timeframe the odds are of warming.

    Now, as we shorten the scale both the sampling period and the reference frame must be known. At shorter and shorter periods we also need to know the location.

    As I said, your question was ill-posed. You were unable to defend it or supply a decent answer (50% LOL).

    In fact, I suspect you cannot concoct a single well-posed question where the odds are 50% other than sampling at sub-minute intervals and making the reference frame extremely short.

    Thanks for playing.

    A)

  122. K O’Neill and Andrews: you’re splitting hairs. At any point on the globe and on nearly all scales of time, there is within a percent of a percent of a percent a 50/50 chance that that place is either warming or cooling. Your inability to see the truth of this basic, elementary point speaks poorly of your philosophical skill. How can I teach such thick skulled people?

    Marco, pinheads come out of the woodwork here. A normal person would notice the parenthetic, “as I said above,” and check to see what I said above. As even K O’Neill and Andrews recognize, in the long term the earth is cooling. Over the last 15 years it hasn’t done much of anything. That could change for the better with a little warming. The LIA was no fun.

    I wonder what percentage of O’Neill’s spell their name with two L’s. –AGF

  123. Chris O’Neill: You have only scored the cheapest points possible. You dwell on the irrelevant and ignore what matters. I repeat, it matters not whether we cite the credo if we can’t agree on the discipline. Your hero Hansen says anything but nuclear won’t cut it. So the radicals among the zealous label him a “denier.” They don’t like his solution.

    Of course it boils down to the magnitude of the problem: the risk must be quantified. If it were as high as Hansen insists, we would be fools not to agree. Bryson said we’re doomed; Hansen says we’re doomed. Kyoto like solutions only reveal one’s hypocrisy. Gore doesn’t really believe the junk he preaches–he just gets rich like a televangelist.

    I don’t really believe you’re capable of learning anything from it, but I might just take you up on the list challenge. So far we have one point a piece. Care to place any bets?
    –AGF

  124. AG – ” on nearly all scales of time” LOL. What fraction of eternity is that again? What fraction of the rest of the sun’s lifespan? Even when explained to you you can’t understand it. Pretty much what I predicted several comments back.

    Nonsense. As I said, you can’t come up with *any* scenario – other than very, short sub-minute sampling, where the odds are nearly 50%. If you could, you’d propose one or offer a well-posed question.

    The fact you can’t speaks volumes.

    P.S. the correct spelling would have two ells (the original Gaelic Ua Néill). There is a high correlation between single ells (or O’Neal spelling) and immigration through ports other than the northeastern USA.

  125. agf:

    You have only scored the cheapest points possible.

    What pathetic hypocrisy. You cite a cheap list of mainly practically inaccessible newspaper articles for your claims of scientists unconditionally forecasting global cooling and you have the hide to accuse me of only scoring cheap points????????

    Don’t make me laugh.

  126. agf:

    Over the last 15 years it hasn’t done much of anything.

    15 years is quite often not long enough to prove anything. So the above claim is just a strawman. However, even the last 15 years (since the beginning of 2001 specifically) has shown statistically significant global warming in GISTEMP and NOAA land/ocean.

    Also, GISTEMP, HADCRUT4, NOAA and Berkeley all show statistically significant warming over the last 5 years since the beginning of 2011. Global warming is now roaring away.

    But global warming denialist clowns like agf keep saying “the pause, the pause”.

    Sorry, the “pause” is dead. Let it rest in peace.

  127. #199 or KO: ” As I said, you can’t come up with *any* scenario – other than very, short sub-minute sampling, where the odds are nearly 50%.”

    A thoroughly meaningless statement when “nearly” remains unquantified, unless it were taken as a definition.

    And I already gave two examples, hemisphere and time zone. I leave it to you to quantify “nearly” in those two examples. –AGF

  128. 201: “Sorry, the “pause” is dead. Let it rest in peace.”

    Yeah, after dozens of papers were written trying to explain it, and Oreskes hollering for the word to disappear from the community vocabulary, Karl et al suddenly make it disappear with such atrocious junk science that even Michael Mann and Ben Santer protested. And then the records were adjusted to accommodate Karl’s junk science, and poof, the pause was gone. You can fool some of the people all the time — without even trying.
    –AGF

  129. AG – No, you never responded with any well-posed question. Your remark on hemispheres (not addressed to me, but to #177 – not my comment) shows exactly why the question is ill-posed; you get a different result depending on hemisphere, time of day, time of year, etc. You are *unable* to post a single well-posed question. You can’t. You haven’t. You never will.

    I will repeat; to get a meaningful answer you need to specify a location, a sampling period, and the timeframe over which we will sample. Even giving you these criteria that will lead to a well-posed question, you can’t find a scenario that’s 50-50.

    Ignorance is one thing – we’re all ignorant on one subject or another – but now you’re just showing us you stupidity, an inability to learn.

  130. after dozens of papers were written

    The operative word here being “after”. “The pause is dead” is what you write after the pause has finished.

    Oreskes hollering for the word to disappear from the community vocabulary

    No shit. Wouldn’t that be sensible after the pause has finished.

    Karl et al suddenly make it disappear

    Maybe you should complain to Roy Spencer who has brought it to an end too (along with every compiler of surface records, but we all know they’re a global conspiracy).

    The “pause” is dead. Stop torturing it. It’s not pretty to play with dead bodies. Let it rest in peace.

  131. Once again, #154: There’s a 50/50 chance the surface temp will go up or down.”

    #157: “OK, given a randomly selected time, there is a 50/50 chance that T will be rising and a 50/50 chance that it will be falling.”

    These are essentially true statements. The second is less general than the first, and granted, no uncertainties were given, but the inane quibbling over such a basic statement is absurd. As I said before, I’m surrounded by idiots. The matter in both O’Neills’ skulls is not grey. –AGF

  132. Two different claims: 1) there never was a Pause; 2) the Pause is over. The Niño makes it look like the pause is over but that remains to be seen. Oreskes’ ban on the word came at the end of 2013 when the Pause was alive and well. Karl et al claimed there never was a Pause. Then the the surface T records were adjusted according to Karl et al, making the Pause disappear. But Spencer said a year and a month ago:

    “The “pause” in global warming is becoming increasingly difficult for the climate establishment to ignore, which is a good thing. They are now coming up with reasons why there has been a “pause” (a term I dislike because it implies knowledge of future warming, which no one has), and spinning it as if it is bad new for us.”

    And you’re mixing him in with the quacks? As always, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, but you keep babbling on. –AGF

  133. To Greg Laden:
    Your format is horrendous. Numbers are apparently assigned when a post begins, and the writer may sit on it for hours before submitting. Then no time of day is indicated by which to identify a post. A recipe for endless confusion, baked and burned. Is there no remedy for this? –AGF

  134. “These are essentially true statements.”

    No they are essentially incorrect statements. Let’s take the ‘randomly selected’ time-period January to July: the global temperature is likely to be rising in this period (January is on average almost 4 degrees Celsius cooler than July).

    Please note that my response is mainly for the lurkers, as I don’t think AGF will ever understand the point Kevin O’Neill made, and that I made even more specific.

  135. Marco’s only post from this year (#193):

    April 1, 2016
    “But yes, the earth is slowly cooling down ”

    Any day now! Really! It will! It was in 1990, but then it warmed up. And then it was cooling in 1998, too! But then it warmed up again, but really, any day now the cooling will commence!
    =============================================
    Somehow Marcos imagines he has said something relevant here. And his latest:

    ” Let’s take the ‘randomly selected’ time-period January to July: the global temperature is likely to be rising in this period (January is on average almost 4 degrees Celsius cooler than July).”

    This pinhead thinks he can cherry pick a “random” time frame. I thought April Fools was over. –AGF

  136. AG writes – “This pinhead thinks he can cherry pick a “random” time frame. ”

    AG – *You* are the pinhead. I told you your question was ill-posed, Marco illustrates the point. Unless you supply a location, sampling period and reference timeframe the answers are all over the place.

    Yet you *can’t* supply those data criteria because any set of criteria you actually select will disprove your point.

    I’ve already shown how sampling over eternity will lead to cooler; I’ve shown how sampling over the life of the sun will lead to warmer. That’s the problem with an ill-posed question; different assumptions lead to contradictory answers.

    There are an infinite number of possibilities – but you can’t find even *one* that yields your preferred answer. LOL.. Not ONE! That’s what I would expect from an actual pinhead. Own it. Wear it.

  137. AG – Pause? Are you still on about that? Please show me the pause in any scientific graph of Ocean Heat Content. Then explain why the oceans, with a heat capacity thousands of times more than the atmosphere, are not a better gauge of the earth’s energy flow.

    The whole ‘pause’ meme was based on a bait-and-switch; the earth is not the atmosphere. The ‘A’ in AGW does *not* stand for ‘Atmosphere.’ AGW is a theory of how the *earth* will warm due to human influences, mainly CO2 and associated feedbacks.

    Deniers – of which you are one – fail to realize or accept basic physics. Radiative transfer is a fact. GHGs warming the planet is a fact. There is no global scientific conspiracy. Only nutjobs believe in one.

    That these impacts of GHGs are oftentimes not immediately visible in surface temperatures should surprise no one. There is plenty of natural variation (i.e., weather). If we saw ocean heat content dropping, then a better scientific explanation would have to be found. That has not been the case. Ocean heat content shows there never was any pause in the earth’s energy balance.

    But even surface temps now give lie to the whole pause meme – so it should die even for those that don’t understand that it was a manufactured denier meme in the first place.

    We will avidly await your explanation on OHC. Just as we avidly await your simple data criteria for 50-50 question. In other words, none of us will be holding our breath.

    AG: P.S. – I once wrote an essay about people like you. You can find it reposted as a comment. In it I ask a simple question. So which of the four glass slippers are you wearing?

  138. Re. Kevin@#213, 4/4: nothing but alchemy.

    Are you also foolish enough to deny the pause? The pause about which dozens of papers have been written in explanation? The “pause” which always referred to surface T? Surface T, which was the only T record fussed over until the pause came along? Surface T from which the alchemists conjured up a hockey stick? The hockey stick which the skeptics called voodoo science, but which was only relevant if the ocean was ignored?

    And now you want to tell me surface T doesn’t matter because the ocean is bigger? What do you imbeciles think we’ve been trying to tell you nincompoops for the last 20 years? And you think you’re teaching us when you spit our own arguments back at us?

    111 out of 114 climate models run hot; never fear, Kevin knows more than all those modelers, and why none of their models were worth a damn– the heat was going into the ocean! Therefore, says Kevin, the skeptics don’t know squat.
    Kevin, are you able to tell us why surface T flat lined while ARGOS picked up some barely measurable warming? Why at some particular time and not some other? And you’re gonna wait for my explanation, as if you had one?
    And since the ocean is capable of sinking heat without necessarily heating the atmosphere, as the skeptics have always held, why should we worry about GHG’s?

    I sure as hell won’t wait for a coherent answer. And if you can’t get these simple questions straight, how will you ever go anywhere in probability and cosmology? –AGF

  139. agf:

    Spencer said a year and a month ago

    Spare us the ancient history lesson.

    The Niño makes it look like the pause is over but that remains to be seen.

    Can you give up this crap for God’s sake?

    The so called “pause” was invented because every global temperature record did not show “statistically significant” warming since 1998 right up until the beginning of 2015 (but it was close for quite a while). That condition has now ended. Every global temperature surface record now shows statistically significant global warming since 1998. Even Roy Spencer’s official noisy satellite radio reception shows statistically significant warming since the end of 1998.

    Statistically significant warming => no “pause”

    What does it take to get this through your thick skull?

  140. The stupidity of AG Foster apparently knows no bounds. The simple fact is that if I can so easily cherry pick a period in which warming is much more likely to occur than cooling, it is *impossible* to pick “any random period” in which it is just as likely to warm as it is to cool. After all, “any random period” includes the specific period I chose. That means the claim AG Foster made is actually wrong, because there must be specific conditions for that “random period” to exclude the possibility someone by accident choses e.g. the period January to July (or July to January for that matter).

  141. agf:

    The pause about which dozens of papers have been written in explanation?

    Just because there was a temporary “pause”, viz no statistically significant surface temperature warming for a climatically insignificant period, doesn’t mean scientists are not entitled to research it. Just like they research the ongoing, and now statistically significant since 1998, global warming.

    Surface T, which was the only T record fussed over until the pause came along?

    Don’t worry. You can fuss over it again now, if that’s all you’re capable of understanding.

    only relevant if the ocean was ignored

    WTF are you bullshitting about? The hockey stick reconstructions were for the whole northern hemisphere or globe. They did not exclude the oceans.

  142. AG – the entire ‘pause’ was *based* on an El Nino – moron. Compare El Nino years only to El Nino years; compare La Nina years only to KLa Nina years; compare ENSO neuitral years only to ENSO neutral years; what does that tell ya? Every trend line is up consistently!

    Denier morons just can’t keep their stories straight – was the ‘pause’ due to El Nino? Yes, but somehow then we should ignore El Nino ony when it *ends* the ‘pause.’ You have zero ability to explain *earth’s* warming. Zero ability to explain ocean heat content.

    Ignorant, stupid, insane, or just plain evil? Which glass slipper are you wearing AG?

  143. @106. Anthony :

    Late here I know but skimming though your list I saw

    1979 – A Choice of Catastrophes – The Disasters That Threaten Our World [Book] (Isaac Asimov, 1979)
    1979 – The Sixth Winter [Book SF novel] (Douglas Orgill & John R. Gribbin, 1979)

    (Corrections and emphasis added.)

    I happen to have – and have read and reread – both those books and they don’t exactly add up to support of the belief in global cooling or an imminent ice age.

    One of those, ‘The Sixth Winter’, is an enjoyable, interesting Science Fiction novel which is based on the premise of solar minima leading to a new abrupt ice age. Its a good read but we now know the premise is NOT what is happening nor really likely to happen. Even within the novel itself it notes in a fictional report for the novel’s fictional President on the heroes (& novels) thesis :

    ELEVEN It is, of course, my duty to inform you that this is one of several models now being postulated as the final trigger for Ice Age conditions.

    TWELVE I cannot emphasise too strongly that it is premature to draw any such dramatic conclusions from the present run of rather unusual conditions with recurrent ‘blocking highs’.

    (Capitalisation & italicisation original.)

    Source : Pages 22-23, ‘The Sixth Winter’, Douglas Orgill & John Gribbin, Futura Publications 1980.

    So its a speculative SF “If then” novel which includes caveats inside the text – hardly a source for seriously claiming that something actually *is* happening or even going to happen.

    The other example would have Isaac Asimov – of whom I am a big fan BTW – rolling in his grave.

    Asimov’s A choice of Catastrophes is a wide ranging non-fiction set of essays about possible future calamities which very briefly touches upon the possible scenario of a future Ice Age among a great many other possibilities such as the death of our Sun or collision with it, bolide impacts and nuclear war. Oh & the Greenhouse effect too for instance :

    Since 1900 for instance, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has risen from 0.029 per cent to 0.032 per cent. It is estimated that by the year 2000, the concentration may reach a figure of 0.038 per cent, an increase of some 30 per cent in the century. This must be the result, at least in part, of the burning of fossil fuels, though it may also be due, in part , to the retreat of forests which are more efficient as carbon dioxide absorbers than are other forms of vegetation. … (snip -aside on breathing) .. It does not take much of an increase in the carbon dioxide concentration to intensify the greenhouse effect appreciably.

    &

    There are those, in fact, who point out that if the carbon dioxide content increases above a certain point, the slight rise in the ocean’s average temperature will release carbon dioxide from solution in the ocean water, which will further enhance the greenhouse effect, raising the ocean temperature still higher, releasing still more carbon dioxide and so on. Such a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’ might raise Earth’s temperature finally to beyond the boiling point of water and make it uninhabitable; and that would surely be a catastrophic consequence of burning fossil fuels.”

    Source : Pages 310 – 311, ‘A Choice of Catastrophes : The disasters that threaten our world”, Isaac Asimov, Hutchinson & co, 1979.

    Also, y’know, this :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz1g55H6XgA

    Is what Isaac Asimov was actually saying about this issue back in the 1970’s – to be precise 1977 – back when Niki Lauda was winning the F1 championship, Jimmy Carter was US President and before we knew Pluto had even one moon let alone five of them. ‘Bout the time Viking was landing on Mars.

    To then use these sources to pretend Isaac Asimov thought the world was cooling or that scientists in general then did, is at best and with maximum charity, horribly mistaken and disingenous and at worst outright dishonesty and blatantly lying.

  144. Oh back in the 1980’s (just – but that’s still three decades in the past. Yyyii-ikes! ) Isaac Asimov was saying this -consistently & scientifically accurately :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEPhf0SHQEk

    How dare these (almost indecipherable & unprintable obscenities) now try to use one of his books as a cite for their (putting it way too politely) rubbish?

    Shameless flippin’ factually erroneous douchebags!

  145. D’oh! The italicisation referred too inmy quote from The Sixth Winter was the line :

    I cannot emphasise too strongly

    For clarity.

  146. C O’Neill contradicts himself between 215 and 216, and he contradicts K O’Neill between 216 and 217, where KO says:
    “AG – the entire ‘pause’ was *based* on an El Nino – moron.”

    It’s hardly clear what KO means to say; maybe he supposes the Pause is a statistical artifact of a Niño step function and has no real meaning, or whether he blames global warming on Niños in a tautological sort of way. Or maybe he really means to invoke natural variation. But I’m not inclined to give him any benefit of doubt–he is an arrogant fool who ignores the vast disagreement among the experts, as reported here:

    LINK DELETED

    I’m pretty much wasting my time with anyone named O’Neill.
    –AGF

  147. AG – foster – the quotes around ‘pause’ should give you a clue. If English isn’t your first language, then you’ll learn about ‘air quotes’ someday.

    Deniers – like yourself – claim the ‘pause’ only ended because of a large El Nino – but the ‘pause’ only existed because of a larger El Nino. So, it’s deniers that want it both ways.

    As I said, compare El Nino years, La Nina years, and ENSO neutral years respectively. The trend for all three subsets is steadily upwards. Comparing like to like removes any influence of El Niino/La Nina and shows what any iintelligent person already knew. Deniers – like yourself- do not qualify as intelligent persons, sadly.

    Still waiting on OHC explanation.
    Still waiting on a well-posed 50-50 proposition.

    Crickets chirping …….

  148. agf:

    C O’Neill contradicts himself between 215 and 216

    The claim of a moron who thinks the “pause”, whatever it was, continues. He probably doesn’t even understand the difference between “was” and “is”.

  149. Does the “pause” continue? Who knows ? Was there a pause? CO says yes; KO says it was an invention of deniers. True, some preferred to call it a “slow down” or ‘hiatus,” but few blamed it on Niños. Too bad Laden won’t allow a link to the list, but here’s just one explanation for the pause that has nothing to do with Niños: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897.abstract

    So rest assured, when Kevin O’Neill imagines himself sitting on orthodoxy calling out heretics he doesn’t have the slightest clue, much less does he come to grips with the real essence of the question, why are the models all wrong?:
    http://skepticalscience.com//pics/ProjvsObs.png
    The predictions have been as bad as during the cool scare.

    KO: “Still waiting on OHC explanation.”
    I wonder what he’s talking about.

    KO: “Still waiting on a well-posed 50-50 proposition.”
    Since he steadfastly refuses to accept a practical setting (quaternary surface T) I’ll play his game one more minute: will the universe expand forever or is there enough dark matter to halt it? In the former case all finite time ranges becomes infinitesimal, and so any corresponding ?T; the odds of warming or cooling remain equal at zero. In the latter heating and cooling balance out. The odds remain even: 50/50. –AGF

  150. Was there a pause? CO says yes

    Rubbish. I said there was a “pause”, viz something called a “pause”. That doesn’t mean that “pause” is a correct choice of name, just a name that some people rightly or wrongly use.

    few blamed it on Niños.

    Absolute crap. 2011 and 2012 were the strongest pair of La Ninas on record and just happened to be near the end of the so called “pause”.

    In any case, statistical significance doesn’t care if there were or were not El Ninos/La Ninas in any particular period. That’s why statistical significance matters. If there is statistical significance then the warming is more than just that produced temporarily by El Ninos/La Ninas or any other type of noise.

  151. Greg Laden

    April 6, 2016
    “AG, I don’t allow links to science denial sites.”

    Do you burn books too?

  152. Chris at 217: “Just because there was a temporary “pause”, viz no statistically significant surface temperature warming for a climatically insignificant period, doesn’t mean scientists are not entitled to research it.”

    It’s good that Chris’s nonexistent “pause” is temporary–that makes it easier for it to have an end even when it doesn’t exist. I tell you these are intellectual giants we’re dealing with. –AGF

  153. agf, you’ve demonstrated you aren’t very bright with the 50/50 thing, and not very honest with the statements about the pause, but: this is a science blog, not a denialist blog. This is not a public space but a private one. Why does having a policy of not promoting sites that actively spread disinformation and lies seem odd? Cries of censorship are really stupid, especially since you’re still here spouting your crap.

  154. So you too condone book burning, while implicitly admitting that this is nothing but a propaganda site which necessarily deems free thinkers as counter propagandists. Very interesting.

    But note, as I have pointed out from my first appearance here, that the ideological goal is merely a confession of guilt and acquiescence to looming doom — a doom from which no certain expiation has been offered, except that of Hansen, whom Oreskes lumped in with the denier camp for his nuclear heresy. Next thing she’ll want to outlaw the internet. I think I’ll go find a cat house to shower and pray. –AGF

  155. AG – Still unable to propose a well-posed question. Surprise. /snark

    I’ve already explored the infinite universe. Sorry, in that case the odds are *NOT* 50-50 but that we will measure a temperature different from today that is colder – the odds are 99.9999% that it will be colder. Of course the 9s after the decimal are infinite.

    Your 2nd suggestion also shows the ill-posed nature of your question – different results with different assumptions. Sorry, loser. Only one of the assumptions is correct.

    You need a location, a sampling time, and a reference timeframe. You can’t provide *one* not one single instance of 50-50. The simplistic ones you have chosen have different answers depending on assumptions. I.e., almost a textbook case of ill-posed.

    OHC – crickets chirping. Since you obviously have a difficult time reading, try #213. Please show us the ‘pause’ in OHC. Please tell us how the earth equals the atmosphere of the surface only.

    Please tell us how the ‘pause’ exists if we remove El Ninos from the data – or if we only compare El Nino years to El Nino years; La Nina years to La Nina years; ENSO neutral years to ENSO neutral years. I’ll keep asking and you’ll keep making a fool of yourself.

  156. So you too condone book burning, while implicitly admitting that this is nothing but a propaganda site which necessarily deems free thinkers as counter propagandists. Very interesting.

    No. Whether you miss the point due to ignorance, willfully ignore the point, or are simply likely (the last is by far the most likely thing), you are wrong. The notion that you are a thinker of any kind, let alone a “free thinker”, is ludicrous, since the ability to think means you have the ability to learn, and you have clearly demonstrated the inability to learn anything.

  157. Chris’s nonexistent “pause”

    No-one said the so called “pause” that I’m talking about, viz lack of statistically significant warming in the SURFACE temperature for a climatically insignificant amount of time, e.g. 15 years, does not exist. You’re just playing with semantics.

    So stop making shit up agf.

  158. I wonder what happened to agf’s cheap newspaper articles?

    Obviously went into the bin wrapped around the kitchen scraps long ago.

  159. nothing but a propaganda site

    So now they’re calling Science propaganda.

    Sounds like something straight out of 1984.

    A G Foster apparently has his knickers in a twist because he doesn’t get to be Big Brother.

  160. Where does one begin in the company of rabid doomsday cultists who ban the books of their critics? (the skeptics don’t do that!) What are they afraid of? Truth?

    Well I’ll start by eating a little crow: one of my examples was a little off and another way off: daily T. One has to get beyond 40 latitude to have any summer days long enough for warming time to exceed cooling, and as for seasonal warming, the opposite is often, maybe usually the case: the span between min annual T and max is a little longer than the cooling down period, especially in places like San Francisco, surrounded by water.

    As for a universe with critical dark matter, it is a closed system, and it’s a mystery to me how anyone can suppose that its contraction period could be anything but a thermodynamic mirror image of its expansion. Odds of random warming: 50/50.

    KO: “Please tell us how the ‘pause’ exists if we remove El Ninos from the data – or if we only compare El Nino years to El Nino years; La Nina years to La Nina years; ENSO neutral years to ENSO neutral years.”

    The relevance escapes me. Do you want to delete the Niño years? Subtract anomalies? But UAH is flat between 2002 and 2014 which span includes no Niños: DENIALIST SITE LINK DELETED

    …as it was in all records until recently. The pause or non-pause was worrisome enough for Karl et al that they felt the need to adjust the record once again to make it go away. Still, I’m required to separately link the excuses for it–excuses for something that no longer exists in revisionist history. Here are a few:

    The Montreal Protocol (successful reduction of emissions):
    http://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1999.epdf?referrer_access_token=_OEl2TSQmE-QS4921CslyNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MPhDxoKW66gukJ7B0T4hu_MRLP_1EgZhyZHNKMOATBLS3wKYxk2uDlSQC0wIsgfcstfxjSnPwAyQWftWyxsS36i8M6R3l6r-eD9vxJ_-r7vaYbtxQfICgqHcP_1DDyJqJ8vJb5R8kwHM-g3WBERryw848C2yVFyn6749Nn2y57aHc8ApdBEaOGptWoZGcBGjOOi7w46ThOqAkc1_fv0_iLmBu354il2Wzicu0cZbvI91hv_Xhq5CziesWdkNXYzQtDpnYfF8HhGRPk_ldF1lvl&tracking_referrer=www.slate.com

    Reduced solar activity: http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=41752

    Coverage bias (Cowtan and Way: include the Arctic): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract

    I could provide links to different lists but this is very dangerous knowledge which must be kept from the eyes of the uninitiated. And KO knows it’s all Niños anyway, and these other warm mongering climatologists don’t know anything.

    –AGF

  161. On to C O’Neill’s fixation with “cheap newspaper articles.” They always derive from the pronouncements and conventions of scientists. Plenty of experts are mentioned by name, usually government employed, but Bryson isn’t cited in any non-paywalled articles until 1974, so the notion that Bryson got the ball rolling is an invention of C O’Neill’s little head. Bryson was the Paul Ehrlich and James Hansen of global cooling: trouble was assured. And Bryson had a considerable following among scientists to varying degrees.

    During the 70’s it was learned from sediment and ice cores that interglacials were short and onsets of glaciation could be rapid, that we could be due for another big ice age. This recognition coincided with the last and coldest decade of a 30 year long cooling period, widespread tropical famine temperate crop failures. The cooling scare was as ill defined as the warming scare is now–a number of scenarios over disparate time frames could be meant. There was a solid consensus that we were due for another ice age eventually. The current interglacial had lasted already as long as the newly discovered average, and the LIA could well be taken as the new norm, with the warming up to the ’40s being anomalous. Armadillos were heading south, polar ice and glaciers and deserts were growing, crops were failing, food stores shrinking, and it was looking like climate could cause trouble. Nor Bryson nor any other expert ignored GHG heating, but it was obviously losing. Bryson blamed pollution: man was to blame. Most were skeptical, preferring to blame the sun or Milankovitch or whatever.

    In 1974 the NAS climate convention concluded we don’t know enough: the cooling might continue; it might not. 50/50 odds were as good as any. At the end of the year NASA boss James Fletcher NASA boss reported Mariner 9 showed Martian dust storms lowered surface T 20C, “confirming that much more smog aerosol pollution could indeed set off another ice age on Earth” (Fletcher’s words).

    Back then no climate cult took over the hysteria–they left it for the media, and often the press provided well researched and balanced reports, presenting views differing from Bryson’s. So nobody polled the scientists, and nobody labeled the skeptics quacks. Few claimed the science was settled, but nearly all recognized that we were fortunate to be living between ice ages. That remains true today. –AGF

  162. AG writes: “As for a universe with critical dark matter, it is a closed system, and it’s a mystery to me how anyone can suppose that its contraction period could be anything but a thermodynamic mirror image of its expansion. Odds of random warming: 50/50.”

    Wrong, first – contraction is only a probability in itself. So, only one outcome is correct. But assume that it is correct, then the earth will cease to exist at some point long before a singularity is formed. So, you have – again – failed to prove anything other than your question is ill-posed.

    What part of ill-posed don’t you understand? If your question leads to multiple different answers, then you need to rephrase the question. Basically, you just keep proving your ignorance over and over again.

    You have a religious belief, nothing can prove it wrong. That’s why deniers- like yourself – hate science. You don’t understand it and it calls into question your deeply held *faith* in your own ideology.

    We see the same thing in economics. How many times do we have to rerun the mantra of cutting taxes will reduce the deficit, lift all boats, and give everyone a pony before economic deniers realize it’s all a charade? Remeber the doom and gloom that every conservative predicted with Clinton’s first budget? Remember the doom and gloom with Obama’s? Remember the converse with Dubya’s tax cuts and Reagan’s?

    Reality is known to have a liberal bias – that’s why deniers hate reality.

  163. AG writes : “UAH is flat between 2002 and 2014”

    Umm – UAH? Which version – and why should we use it instead of some other measure> And is that statistically significant? What is the relevance of a statistically insignificant piece of data? You’re really just being stupid.

    Not to mention – what’s the relevance of temperatures (UAH) at 4km above the surface to anything? It’s neither surface temperature nor the *earth’s* temperature.

    As for “The relevance escapes me. ” The so called pause was based on the 1998 El Nino year. If you want to compare trends, without the trend being corrupted up or down by La Nina or El Nino it should be obvious what you do – exactly as I suggested.

    AGWis a theory of how the *earth* warms. Again, the atmosphere is a small part of the earth. OHC better reflects the earth’s energy budget. Of course you ignore that because there are no denier talking points from trash pseudoskeptic sites that can explain OHC. Where’s the pause in OHC? Nowhere to be found.

  164. Endless BS. OHC is calculated from thermometers that supposedly measured thousandths of a degree. It is the shortest and least reliable of T records. Surface T is the most difficult to compile–or replicate–or define. SST reflects the exact problems of OHC that you harp on, suggesting a one to one equivalence between land and sea is arbitrary and meaningless. Satellite measuring of the lower troposphere has the same advantages over ground stations as SAT measured SLR has over tide gauges. You have to be educated from scratch. –AGF

  165. agf:

    C O’Neill’s fixation with “cheap newspaper articles.”

    Not my fixation. You’re the one who’s citing them.

  166. By some criteria we are always in either Niño or Niña conditions. Problems of definition are discussed here: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/defnBAMS.pdf

    And the cooling alarmists were well aware that the SH warmed as the NH cooled:
    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1940/to:1990
    So yes, the decade from 1965 to 1975 was the coolest since 1943 when the NH cooling began.

    And that, folks, is the best Chris O’Neill can do. –AGF

  167. 4/13 1345GMT
    The point source sat around forever and ever. And ever. And then one day it blew up. And expanded forever and ever. And ever. Never to collapse again. Forever.

    Genesis does better.

    As for the other pinhead named O’Neill, my post hasn’t shown up yet. Here is a close approximation:

    By some criteria (SOI) we are always in either Niño or Niña conditions. There are big Niños and little ones, with no standard definition of what constitutes a Niño: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997BAMS…78.2771T

    The coolers of the ’70’s had more data and were more interested in NH T than global; they were aware that the small southern land masses were warming. And the decade from 1965-1975 was the NH coldest since 1943: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1940/to:1980/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1945/to:1975/trend
    –AGF

  168. The coolers of the ’70’s had more data …

    The fact that you keep repeating the lie that science in the 70s was all about “cooling” reinforces the fact that you are simply a congenital liar with no intention of making a serious discussion.

  169. agf:

    By some criteria we are always in either Niño or Niña conditions.

    Pity your mind was already made up. Closed minds are like that.

    the SH warmed as the NH cooled

    So NOW the NH gets mentioned. In any case, there was no significant change in global or any hemispheric temperature from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The last statistically significant cooling period ended in the 1950s.

    the cooling alarmists

    No-one is denying there were crackpot human-caused cooling alarmists. Funnily enough, even though Bryson claimed humans were going to cause global cooling, he also claimed it was impossible for humans to cause global warming through CO2 emissions. This was in complete contrast to genuine climate scientists like Schneider who stated that possible further global cooling was CONDITIONAL on there being further rises in sulphate aerosol emissions. Brain dead and dishonest global warming denialists like afg ALWAYS forget to mention this condition that Schneider stated. Such denialists are nothing but dishonest scum.

  170. Here’s a NH T graph from 1982:
    https://www.aip.org/history/climate/xtemps82.htm
    …showing 0.8C cooling between 1938 and 1972: significant, downhill, coldest last–till the early ’70s. They didn’t google WFT.

    CO: “Funnily enough, even though Bryson claimed humans were going to cause global cooling, he also claimed it was impossible for humans to cause global warming through CO2 emissions.”

    This is another CO lie. Compare: “Bryson contends that sometime after 1930, the cooling effect of more dust in the atmosphere began to overpower the warming effect of carbon dioxide.”
    http://www.pennsylvaniacrier.com/filemgmt_data/files/Ominous%20Changes%20in%20the%20Worlds%20Weather.pdf
    (p.95, 3rd column)

    And another load of BS:
    StevoR
    Adelaide hills, South Australia
    April 5, 2016

    Asimov took the threat of cooling seriously, as reported here:
    https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=TP1jAAAAIBAJ&sjid=LvkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6686,3866860&hl=en

    Getting the truth out of a doomsday cult that bans the books of skeptics is like pulling badgers’ teeth. –AGF

  171. “dean
    United States
    April 13, 2016
    “The coolers of the ’70’s had more data …
    “The fact that you keep repeating the lie that science in the 70s was all about “cooling” reinforces the fact that you are simply a congenital liar with no intention of making a serious discussion.”

    Dean’s head is in an unflushed toilet blowing bubbles. He might try reading the articles from PopTech’s list and see how many cooling skeptics he can find there or anywhere else. Go ahead you moron, put together a sourced list of global warming warners from the ’70s. –AGF

  172. agf:

    showing 0.8C cooling between 1938 and 1972

    Stupid dumb clown. Nothing but a brain dead pair of cherry-picks. Absolutely zilch about the claimed accuracy of that graph either. Regardless of your stupid dumb claim, that graph and any other graph does not show any significant change, cooling or warming since the 1950s (1956 to be precise) until the 1970s, as I stated above.

    agf:

    This is another CO lie.

    Arrogant and ignorant clown. Bryson 2007:

    “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, NOT BECAUSE WE’RE PUTTING MORE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE AIR.”

  173. 1500GMT
    Marco cites Peterson, Connolley and Fleck’s childish contrivance. Let’s take a look:
    1) Their chart has Bryson and Dittberner in both the cool and neutral columns just a year apart.
    2) It has Schneider in the cool and warm columns 3 years apart.
    3) It has Idso in the warm column.
    4) Bryson, for one, published about a dozen articles per year. His output alone would overwhelm the sparse scattering of papers presented by PCF.
    5) “Warmers” like Mitchell could say (in 1977): “This invites an alternative view of the comparative warmth of the 20th century, as being not a recovery from the Little Ice Age but perhaps only an interruption of it” (“The Changing Climate,” p.58).

    Budyko was the exception, but he did provide a graph:
    http://s90.photobucket.com/user/dhm1353/media/Climate%20Change/budyko_1969_mid-century-cooling.png.html
    …showing once again what a lying fool is C O’Neill. This perfect retard sees no difference between, “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, NOT BECAUSE WE’RE PUTTING MORE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE AIR,” and ” it was impossible for humans to cause global warming through CO2 emissions.”

    The evidence from melting glaciers leave no room for doubt that a major portion of current warming is due to LIA recovery: the receding glaciers continue to reveal logs from the MWP that were buried by advancing glaciers. –AGF

  174. More D’oh! from AG. There is no ‘recovery’ in physics. You have forcings and they determine the earth’s energy budget. We don’t ‘recover’ from ice ages – little or otherwise. The forcings change and the earth responds. Jesus, what a nitwit.

    AG has gone the full-denier of science again. It is a well-established fact that CO2 and other GHGs warm the earth. Scientists figured this out using pen and paper (not even an abacus!!) between 100 and 200 years ago.

    AG should write his treatise on the (lack) of radiative transfer properties of GHGs and his explanation of physics. A Nobel prize awaits.

    LOL from here to eternity.

  175. Kevin O’Neill repeatedly insists on proving he’s as stupid as his namesake. Take up your mindless semantics with Mitchell, you moron. He’s the one who said, ” This invites an alternative view of the comparative warmth of the 20th century, as being not a recovery from the Little Ice Age but perhaps only an interruption of it.”

    And if it’s all about forcings, you idiot, tell us what forced the LIA (or unforced it). My hell what a collection of imbecilic trolls hang out here. –AGF

  176. agf:

    NOT BECAUSE WE’RE PUTTING MORE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE AIR,” and ” it was impossible for humans to cause global warming through CO2 emissions.”

    You brain dead moron. If global warming is “NOT BECAUSE WE’RE PUTTING MORE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE AIR” when we’re putting it in the air then our CO2 is not causing causing global warming i.e. it is not possible for our CO2 to be causing global warming.

  177. 1) Their chart has Bryson and Dittberner in both the cool and neutral columns just a year apart.

    We’re all agreed that Bryson was a crackpot so nothing surprising about his inconsistency.

    2) It has Schneider in the cool and warm columns 3 years apart.

    i.e. the first being “the most misinterpreted and mis-used paper in the story of global cooling”. It was “the first foray into climate science for Schneider”. “Rasool and Schneider were trying to extend the newly developed tool of climate modeling to include the effects of aerosols, in an attempt to sort out two potentially conflicting trends— the warming brought about by increasing carbon dioxide and the cooling potential of aerosols emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere by industrial activity.”

    “An INCREASE BY A FACTOR OF 4 in global aerosol concentrations, could be enough to trigger an ice age (Rasool and Schneider 1971).” i.e. Rasool and Schneider’s prediction was CONDITIONAL on a FACTOR OF 4 INCREASE in global aerosol concentrations. As I pointed out earlier, brain dead and dishonest global warming denialists like afg ALWAYS forget to mention this condition that Schneider stated. Such denialists are nothing but dishonest scum.

    3) It has Idso in the warm column.

    Idso’s a crackpot so who knows what he’s capable of.

    4) Bryson, for one, published about a dozen articles per year. His output alone would overwhelm the sparse scattering of papers presented by PCF.

    No-one disagrees that crackpots, including ones we agree on like Bryson, can be very prolific.

    5) “Warmers” like Mitchell could say (in 1977): “This invites an alternative view of the comparative warmth of the 20th century, as being not a recovery from the Little Ice Age but perhaps only an interruption of it” (“The Changing Climate,” p.58).

    It must have taken the global warming denialist industry a while to find that quotation out-of-context. Mitchell went on to say:

    Beyond such vague statements as these, disturbingly little can be said about the probable course of natural climate in the decades and centuries ahead. Moreover, a number of man’s activities are being ingested by the climate system, adding further uncertainty to an already uncertain future of climate. The need for better understanding of the climate system, in all its aspects, is a clear and present one.

    Mitchell was clearly hypothesising above, and he went on to point out the great uncertainty that existed at the time. Global warming denialists like agf are too dumb to understand that scientific uncertainty is not set in stone and can be reduced as time goes by. Just because there were very large uncertainties in climate science in the 1960s and 1970s does not in any way, shape or form mean that we have a similar level of uncertainty now, especially about the long term global temperature trend.

    Budyko was the exception

    No, Budyko was the rule, i.e. most climate scientists in the 70s were expecting a global warming trend. Your crackpot friend Bryson was the exception. And BTW, Budyko’s graph does not contradict my point about no significant hemispheric or global cooling since 1956. The statistically significant global cooling occurred before and up to 1956. Significant cooling died in 1956. R.I.P. statistically significant global cooling 1956.

  178. This isn’t even funny anymore. C O’N has now invalidated PCF because the papers were written by quacks. And Schneider wasn’t a true cooler because his scenarios were unrealistic.

    There comes a time when you have to call it quits. C O’N can throw out bullshit faster than I can clean it up. Anyone who can’t see through it, well, you’re destined to remain a doomsday cult fanatic. If I were to demand of this particular doomsday cultist a few examples of predictors of global warming from the 70s–not of possibilities but prognoses of dangerous warming–he would just ignore it and blow more smoke. And listen up any seekers of truth: this is the norm; this has been the modus operandi from top to bottom for 30 years now. They have to ban the dangerous websites to keep their deluded fanatics deluded. –AGF

  179. AG – either GHGs have (well established) forcing properties or they don’t. Which is it? You claim they don’t – contravening two centuries of scientific study. That’s the little nuthouse you live in.

  180. 1600GMT
    C O’Neill: “That would be the moderate amount of orbital forcing over the past 1,000 years.”
    Sure. Find a single authority that agrees with you.
    Problems:
    1) How many W/m^2 has insolation been reduced in the last thousand years at what critical latitude?
    2) With orbital forcing the southern hemisphere receives more insolation while the north receives less. Yet the LIA was global, not northern.
    3) What caused the warmth before and after the LIA?
    4) What about TSI?
    5) What about North American depopulation?
    Arrogance? Yup.

    K O’Neill: Straw man. Salby is an outlier, criticized by Singer here: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/02/climate_deniers_are_giving_us_skeptics_a_bad_name.html#ixzz1nn0SciyO

    Where do you get the silly notion that skeptics uniformly deny your sacred physics? The alarm is not based on primary forcing; it’s based on hypothetical feedbacks.

    But the primary forcing should be seen empircally in the lower troposphere, which is another reason UAH is critical. If UAH don’t measure it, it aint happening. Moreover we expect divergence between surface T and TLT, and all we see is convergence, apparently due to repeated adjustments.

    “Nuthouse,” says the doomsday cultist who approves the banning of books of the free thinkers. And who must be educated from scratch. –AGF

  181. “Marco cites Peterson, Connolley and Fleck’s childish contrivance. Let’s take a look:”

    Ah, the dismissal because the result is not to AGF’s liking.

    ” 1) Their chart has Bryson and Dittberner in both the cool and neutral columns just a year apart.”

    That’s what happens if they say something different just one year apart.

    ” 2) It has Schneider in the cool and warm columns 3 years apart.”

    Ibid.

    ” 3) It has Idso in the warm column.”

    That’s because Idso actually predicted warming.

    ” 4) Bryson, for one, published about a dozen articles per year. His output alone would overwhelm the sparse scattering of papers presented by PCF.”

    Well then, go ahead, cite those papers of Bryson in the investigated time period in which he predicted cooling. It must be easy if he published about a dozen a year. There is a good reason you will not find many papers: Bryson did a lot of work on paleoclimate and *not* on future climate.

  182. agf:

    This isn’t even funny anymore.

    You were never very funny. Mainly just stupid.

    C O’N has now invalidated PCF because the papers were written by quacks.

    Where did I say the papers were written by quacks (apart from Bryson and Idso)? You’re just making shit up as usual.

    Schneider wasn’t a true cooler

    No shit Sherlock. But that doesn’t stop some science denialists from pretending that Schneider was a 70’s scientist “predicting the next ice age”.

    faster than I

    Take your time. If you weren’t so interested in making speedy responses then they might not have so much crap in them.

    Anyone who can’t see through it

    Just a pity you can’t actually argue it.

    If I were to demand a few examples of predictors of global warming from the 70s–not of possibilities but prognoses of dangerous warming

    You’re funny. The only substance we ever got from you clowns were predictions from the 70s of the CONDITIONAL possibility of global cooling but now that you no longer deny that’s all you’ve got, you move the goalposts onto demanding predictions from the 70s of dangerous warming. Sorry but I’m not going to take your bait. Your claims of scientists “from the 70’s (unconditionally) predicting the next ice age” have been shown to be a completely dishonest sham and there is no point in trying to move on until denialists have disowned this dishonest sham. Have you disowned the dishonest sham of scientists “from the 70’s (unconditionally) predicting the next ice age” yet?

    Until you do you can get lost.

  183. the moderate amount of orbital forcing over the past 1,000 years.”
    Sure. Find a single authority that agrees with you

    It’s just amazing. These science denialists like to say “it’s the Sun” when it suits them but then when circumstances change they turn around and say “find a single authority” that says it’s the Sun.

    You just can’t make up self-contradiction like this.

    Anyway, Imbrie stated a cooling trend from the Milankovitch cycles that started 6,000 years ago: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980Sci…207..943I

    The wikipedia article on Milankovitch cycles also has other citations e.g. “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling” by Kaufman et al.

  184. 0330GMT
    C O’N: “Anyway, Imbrie stated a cooling trend from the Milankovitch cycles that started 6,000 years ago”
    Yet the LIA followed the MWP and was followed by early 20th century warming. So what do you think you’ve explained, you moron? Of such intellect are the doomsday cultists.

    And Marco is no better. Marco, pinhead, Bryson didn’t change from warmer to cooler and back to warmer from year to year. You show that they did–I’m not stupid enough to believe such nonsense. And neither are PCF: they’re just a bunch of liars who figured they could say anything and get away with it, with gullible doomsday cultists like you to eat it up. –AGF

  185. AG the Denier writes; ” The alarm is not based on primary forcing; it’s based on hypothetical feedbacks.”

    Wrong. The *physics* is based on primary forcing *and* associated feedbacks. There, fixed that for you.

    So, you accept the forcings of CO2, a GHG, but deny the forcings of water vapor, a GHG. ?!?

    Meanwhile, the globe warms, all denier memes lose traction, and the beat goes on. Cooling anyday now. Really, anyday.

    Much like the screams of hyperinflation, skyrocketing interest rates, dollar debasement, and job destruction from the ACA or stimulus package. Always wrong. Always on the wrong side of history.

    Economic reality deniers and climate change deniers are two peas in a pod. Very small, not very bright peas.

    It’s the sun! It’s cosmic rays! It’s the wind! It’s anything but CO2.

    AG – if it ain’t CO2, then what is the primary forcing causing 2015/2016 temperatures to be so much higher than the 97/98 El Nino?

  186. agf:

    Yet the LIA followed the MWP and was followed by early 20th century warming.

    Stupid, I told you the type of forcing that could have led to the LIA. Yet again you move the goalposts and ask about something else. I’ll pander to you this time because you are so incredibly stupid. GHG forcing didn’t become sufficient to cause statistically significant global warming until at least the 21 year period 1917-1938. (1917 was a cold year.) So you can go to hell with your stupidity on this subject now.

    Bryson didn’t change from warmer to cooler and back to warmer from year to year.

    Amazing. You defend your agreed crackpot. A consequence of your stupidity.

  187. “Marco, pinhead, Bryson didn’t change from warmer to cooler and back to warmer from year to year.”

    He changed his views in the articles in that period. It’s that simple. You can read the papers yourself. Of course, it is much easier for you to just dismiss it, because your poor ideology cannot handle facts that are contrary to your ideology.

    The fact is that *you* are the one that is a pinhead, and *you* think you can just get away with lying.

    This is you, AGF:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJh6EQ5gv7g
    “rest assured, Hy Brasil is not sinking”

  188. 0600GMT
    K O’Neill: “So, you accept the forcings of CO2, a GHG, but deny the forcings of water vapor, a GHG. ?!?”

    Of course I never said anything remotely similar, but straw men and lies are the best he can babble. O’Niell you indescribably retarded idiot, if water vapor or clouds provided any feedback like the doomsayers predicted, why do 97% of the models run hot? And I repeat, you fool, I never said CO2 doesn’t do anything. That’s just a mindless doomsday dogma, held by religious fanatics. I said, most skeptics allow for primary GHG forcing. NOBODY agrees on any figure for ECS. Do you understand the significance of that, you fool? Your camp has never agreed on how much feedback GHG’s should produce. Why else do you think the models are all over the place, you idiot?

    The other O’Neill persists in even greater stupidity (if that were possible), claiming I moved the goal posts. I asked what forced the LIA, K O says orbital cycles, which is what Bryson and Kukla and the rest of the coolers said, and what Mitchell allowed for. If that were true we would certainly be due for another LIA or big one in short order, but there is no danger of KO’s head exploding–he’s far to stupid to recognize his own tail. Hey idiot–what caused the MWP? You have to be able to answer that before you can answer the other question. You’re absolutely hopeless.

    One idiot to go–Marco: “He changed his views in the articles in that period. It’s that simple.”

    No commentary necessary. Fools are never aware that they are fools. Even so I might engage in a little civility if I were not dealing with perpetual liars who don’t know the meaning of the word. –AGF

  189. “AG the Denier is really just a comic actor.”

    I wonder how likely it is he is an engineer. More than a few times we’ve had instances where the limited knowledge of science fails to muzzle the stupid and flat-out wrong stuff they’ve said.

  190. If so, the odds are that he’s an electrical engineer. They seem to be the most avid at biting off the hand that’s fed them their careers. Quite hypocritical, and somewhat astonishing.

    What is it about EE’s that the field attracts so many hugely insecure types?

    There is another explanation, suggested by Og himself: “Fools are never aware that they are fools.” I think he’s trying to self-diagnose as an advanced case of pernicious Dunning-Kruger disease.

  191. agf:

    I never said CO2 doesn’t do anything. That’s just a mindless doomsday dogma

    How would CO2 not doing anything cause a doomsday? Surely if increasing it does not cause it to get any warmer than it is now then there would be no doomsday. You are seriously illogical.

    I asked what forced the LIA, K O says orbital cycles

    It was me who pointed out orbital forcing. You have a memory problem too as well as a logic problem. You really are all-round stupid.

    If that were true we would certainly be due for another LIA or big one in short order

    Certainty is a symptom of stupidity. agf is too stupid to consider that CO2 forcing can change faster than orbital forcing.

    I still haven’t seen agf disown the dishonest sham of scientists “from the 70’s (unconditionally) predicting the next ice age” yet, even though he chooses not to get lost.

  192. “No commentary necessary.”

    And yet you give commentary *without even having read the articles in question*. This is typical of people like you: you are so afraid that the facts contradict you, that you have no option but to make stuff up, such that it soothes your mind and you can retain your preferred delusions.

    I also would like to note for lurkers that AGF completely ignored my challenge to find all those scientific papers by Bryson that predict cooling, even though it should be so easy if AGF is right. After all, AGF claims Bryson published a dozen a year in the period in question, and that those should be enough to dismiss the results in the paper I cited.

  193. Certainty is a symptom of stupidity. It’s also a key characteristic of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.

    “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
    — Bertrand Russell

  194. @253. A G Foster :

    And another load of BS: StevoR – April 5, 2016

    Asimov took the threat of cooling seriously, as reported here:
    https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=TP1jAAAAIBAJ&sjid=LvkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6686,3866860&hl=en

    Actually no.. That;s not Isaac Asimov that’s the editor of the Spokane Daily Chronicle misrepresenting Asimov’s book and overlooking the fact that Asimov was NOT in fact predicting global cooling but quite the reverse. The book also covered a lot of other things with only a passing reference to possible ice ages and possible solutions rather than saying it was anything truly likely.

    I’ve already referred you to Isaac Asimov’s own words on this issue here in 1977 but, once again, watch :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz1g55H6XgA

    & in 1989 here :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEPhf0SHQEk

    What part of what Isaac Asimov said in those clips and others do you not understand exactly?

    I also refer you again to the actual quotes from the book itself noted in my comment # 219.

    Furthermore, I’ll add – looking at the actual text – that Asimov has a footnote at the bottom of page 311 which reads :

    To be sure, the greenhouse effect is countered by the fact that industrial activity is also putting more dust into the air. This causes the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space than it ordinarily would, and this would tend to cool the Earth. Indeed, we have had some unusually cold winters in the 1970’s. In the end though, the warming effect of the carbon dioxide is sure to win the race – especially if we take measures to clean up the atmosphere when its pollution reaches dangerous levels.

    (Emphasis added.)

    Source : Pages 311, ‘A Choice of Catastrophes : The disasters that threaten our world’, Isaac Asimov, Hutchinson & co, 1979.

    Asimov was, as we now know correct and farsighted here in accurately explaining both the phenomenon of global dimming and global warming and predicting that the later would indeed win out over the former.

    Getting the truth out of a doomsday cult that bans the books of skeptics is like pulling badgers’ teeth. –AGF

    What do you know of pulling out badgers teeth? What a weird metaphor you make & whatever have badgers ever done to you (or you them) I wonder?

    And who here has called for books to be banned?

    Not giving another online platform to promote Denier disinformation and websites is another thing altogether.

  195. @279. Marco :

    I also would like to note for lurkers that AGF completely ignored my challenge to find all those scientific papers by Bryson that predict cooling, even though it should be so easy if AGF is right. After all, AGF claims Bryson published a dozen a year in the period in question, and that those should be enough to dismiss the results in the paper I cited.

    Yes indeed – and there’s a lot of other challenge sand facts that AGF keeps ignoring too.

    Come on Foster, how about actually addressing the challenge Marco raised there and the challenge pose din #270 by Kevin O’Neill :

    1. So, you accept the forcings of CO2, a GHG, but deny the forcings of water vapor, a GHG. ?!?

    &

    2. AG – if it ain’t CO2, then what is the primary forcing causing 2015/2016 temperatures to be so much higher than the 97/98 El Nino?

    Plus

    3. Have you disowned the dishonest sham of scientists “from the 70’s (unconditionally) predicting the next ice age” yet?

    From #267 Chris O’Neill.

    Among other things.

    Badger got your tongue /typing fingers now AGF?

  196. PS. From the Spokane daily Chronicle editorial linked in #253 by AGF and included in the quote from that in #281 – third paragraph :

    The author claims that a change in the average temperature of only one or two degrees could trigger the next ice age, but chances are that such a catastrophy (sic) would not occur for a couple of thousand more years.

    Emphasis added.

    Additionally, the penultimate paragraph notes :

    .. the author suggest that men in the future may even use giant mirrors, placed in near space, to reflect sunlight that ordinarily would miss the earth (sic) onto earth (sic) during the cooling phases and reflect sun rays away from earth (sic) if ice-melting threatens.

    Emphasis added.

    (As I understand it, Earth should be capitalised being a proper name and to distinguish from a synonym for soil.)

    Again, this is an editorial which basically misrepresents and over emphasises one small part of an excellent book speculating on various potential future catastrophes of many sorts including entropy over astronomical aeons, the heat death of the cosmos, the (then expected) “big Crunch”idea, black holes destroying or disrupting our solar system and planet, the chances of our Sun colliding with another star, asteroid and comet impacts and changes, etc .. from a scientific perspective.

  197. 0330GMT

    Still searching for intelligent life. StevoR quotes Kevin O’Neill saying: “1. So, you accept the forcings of CO2, a GHG, but deny the forcings of water vapor, a GHG. ?!?”

    I repeat, idiot, I never said any such thing. If you don’t believe me try to find where I said such a thing as the pinhead Kevin claims I said. How can you be so stupid?

    So if you can’t even get that right why should I take your word over the Spokane editor who reports Asimov took the cooling threat just as seriously as he took the warming threat in his book, ” A Choice of Catastrophes – The Disasters That Threaten Our World”?

    As for PCF, I must speak as to children. The issue is alarmism. PopTech addresses this issue admirably. PCF barely touches it. Alarm is part and parcel of the press, not of scientific papers. Accordingly PCF intentionally confuse parameters to make a case that there was no cooling alarm in the 70s.

    How does Idso end up in the warmers’ column? By publishing to the effect that aerosols can’t explain present cooling (like Mitchell). He thought aerosols would combine with CO2 to warm the air. For PCF that merits a warm ranking, when in fact Idso’s position on pollution left the cooling period unexplained: neither CO2 nor aerosols were sufficient to stop the cooling, and pollution control couldn’t help. At least Bryson had a solution: stop polluting. Idso and Mitchell had none. And according to a later historian: “While Mitchell continued to insist that humanity was ‘an innocent bystander’ in the cooling of the past quarter-century, in 1971 he calculated that our emissions might begin to cause substantial cooling after the end of the
    century” (p.8, notes 3, 5: https://www.aip.org/history/climate/pdf/Aerosol.pdf –this paper doesn’t make it into PCF) .

    Returning to the pedagogy, a sampling which can at any time portray Bryson as a warmer is a farce, pure and simple. This does not have to be explained to intelligent people. When the radical cooler Bryson shows up in a neutral column, a capable thinker naturally asks, what gives? Did Bryson go on a forced sabbatical? Was he made to recant while muttering under his breath, but it’s really cooling? Did he find some flaw in his earlier calculations which he later resolved? I leave it to you idiots to explain it. Thinkers have better things to do. –AGF

  198. AG – who wrote ““Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, NOT BECAUSE WE’RE PUTTING MORE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE AIR,”

    Hmm … seems like a denial of the radiative transfer properties of GHGs to me.

  199. agf:

    It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution

    You’re just making shit up as usual. The industrial revolution was starting in a lot of countries in the early 1800s (even before 1800 in Great Britain). Also, there was zero trend in global temperature from 1850 to 1910, let alone anything statistically significant. So even with the early CO2 emissions to help, “coming out of the Little Ice Age” was producing ZERO global warming over that period.

  200. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution

    Actually, that quote originally came from Bryson. Sadly, although probably not surprisingly, Bryson was not beyond making things up.

  201. agf:

    a sampling which can at any time portray Bryson as a warmer

    Unless you can show where in PCF Bryson was portrayed as a “warmer”, I will know yet again that you are making shit up.

    Bryson shows up in a neutral column

    Here is the first page of Bryson’s piece from 1974. People can make up their own mind about what Bryson was saying but I can’t see anything in that about any prediction for the future.

    In any case, who cares if you put everything Bryson wrote in the coolers’ column? It might inflate the number of “scientific” papers in “support” of cooling “predictions” but that just means that the cooling “prediction” papers column is heavily populated by papers from someone who everyone agrees was a crackpot. This is hardly supportive of the notion of a “scientific consensus” of a cooling prediction. Just means the cooling prediction was the prediction of an agreed crackpot.

    How does Idso end up in the warmers’ column?

    Pretty easy to find the answer to that question (unless you’re stupid like agf). Just look up the paper’s abstract:

    “Thus, anthropogenically produced tropospheric aerosols cannot be looked on as offsetting the warming tendency of increased carbon dioxide: their concurrent buildups must inexorably tend to warm the planet’s surface.”

    So it’s pretty easy to answer agf’s question, unless you’re stupid like agf of course.

  202. @284. A G Foster :

    Still searching for intelligent life. StevoR quotes Kevin O’Neill saying: “1. So, you accept the forcings of CO2, a GHG, but deny the forcings of water vapor, a GHG. ?!?”

    I repeat, idiot, I never said any such thing.

    So do you accept the forcings of carbon dioxide and not deny the forcing – feedback actually – of water vapour?

    Was that a “yes” or ‘no”then?

    Still seeking intelligence from you, dude.

    Also what;s your answer to the other two questions I asked you in comment #282 – and what do you have against badgers anyhow?

  203. 0625GMT

    Both O’Neill’s persist in attributing to me a quote that C O’Neill introduced and attributed to Bryson at #256. And StevoR attributes a quote to me which K O’Neill invented at #270. So far everyone who’s engaged me in discussion has proved a liar. Even when C O’Neill quotes me correctly he ignores the context: “Returning to the pedagogy, a sampling which can at any time portray Bryson as a warmer is a farce, pure and simple. This does not have to be explained to intelligent people. When the radical cooler Bryson shows up in a neutral column, a capable thinker naturally asks, what gives?”

    Calling Bryson a “warmer” would be hypothetical; showing up in a “neutral column” would be factual. And any who look at CO’s link will see that the “neutral” classification is more than stretched: it’s typical PCF bullshit.

    And StevoR demands some kind of confession from KO’s invention! Could it get any stupider? What a waste of time arguing with such an unparalleled collection of lying jackasses.

    There were plenty of cold alarmists besides Bryson. There were NO warming alarmists in the 70s–only a few non-alarmist warmers like Budyko. The cold scare of the ’70s was precisely analogous to the warm scare of the present and none of the deniers’ denials can make the old cold scare go away, no matter how much they lie. –AGF

  204. agf:

    O’Neill’s persist in attributing to me a quote that C O’Neill introduced and attributed to Bryson at #256

    No I DON’T. I pointed out immediately afterwards:

    “Actually, that quote originally came from Bryson. Sadly, although probably not surprisingly, Bryson was not beyond making things up.”

    Along with your other incompetencies, you also have a persistent reading problem.

    Also, I don’t directly attribute it to Bryson. I cited Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News who attribute it to Bryson.

    everyone who’s engaged me in discussion has proved a liar

    People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

    Calling Bryson a “warmer” would be hypothetical

    So your hypothesis that Bryson was a “warmer” is a farce. I don’t think anyone disagrees that your statements are a farce.

    And any who look at CO’s link will see that the “neutral” classification is more than stretched

    All you had to do was point out the words that Bryson used for a cooling prediction. The fact that you didn’t means he probably didn’t put one in that article. But what do I care? You can put every last damned paper by Bryson in the cooling column if you want. We agree that he’s a crackpot so his cooling predictions don’t mean jack shit. But that didn’t stop newspapers from using him as a “scientist predicting global cooling”.

    There were plenty of cold alarmists besides Bryson.

    You’re a compulsive liar agf. Apart from crackpot Bryson, you have identified exactly ZERO climate scientists who UNCONDITIONALLY predicted cooling.

    There were NO warming alarmists in the 70s

    You’re such a compulsive liar agf. Bolin 1976:

    “The growing disturbance of the global balance of carbon dioxide is without doubt mankind’s GREATEST SINGLE IMPACT on the environment”

    non-alarmist warmers like Budyko

    WTF is a “non-alarmist” warmer?

    BTW, thanks for acknowledging my answer to your question about how Idso ended up in the warmers’ column. Pity you’re not capable of answering your own questions.

  205. AG – I didn’t attribute the quote to you, I started it with “AG – who wrote …”

    It was a question. You, unfortunately, never clearly attributed the quote. I couldn’t tell if they were your words or Brysons’s. But the fact remains, you used the quote to support your argument. Generally one uses information one *agrees* with to support one’s arguments – otherwise one is arguing in bad faith.

    Now, if you disagree with Bryson on CO2 and the radiative properties of GHGs it’s very easy to clear things up by saying so. Of course you haven’t/can’t/won’t do so.

    Thanks for playing.

  206. 1600GMT
    Pulling a leg out of coolist alarm does not make Idso a warmer; it makes him a realist. The alarmists don’t care much whether it’s warming or cooling. They just want to sound alarm bells: we’re doomed, we’re doomed, and it’s all our fault. Here are some simultaneous parameters:
    1) Warmer/cooler
    2) Alarmist vs. agnostic
    3) Modeler vs. observer
    The alarmists of either stripe tend to be modelers while the agnostics are observers, epitomized by Bryson’s partner and rival, Verner E. Suomi, a pioneer in satellite weather data. Idso, Lindzen, and Landsberg, among others, were cautious and critical of the doomsayers, as Idso and Lindzen continue to be.

    A more rational appraisal than PCF would take to task doomsayers of any stripe, and not pick and choose criteria for the moment which ultimately have little to do with the study of science induced hysteria. For example, if an Idso paper is rated (uncharacteristically) warmist for downplaying the effect of aerosols, then a Budyko paper which accepts the cooling effect of aerosols, together with a high sensitivity of ice ages to minimal temperature changes (Budyko 68), should be listed in the warm column: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1969.tb00466.x/pdf
    By the same token when North, or Lindzen and Farrell take issue with the overly sensitive and ice prone models of Budyko and Sellers, they should be classed with the skeptical Idso, when of course Lindzen and Idso we really skeptical of climate instability generally.

    So we see again the farce that is PCF: as political advocacy it is useless to the history of science. Its intention is purely to obfuscate, to neutralize the rhetorically useful analogy of the cold scare to the warm scare. It is the forerunner to the junk science of Cook and Lewandowsky which the modern alarmists so gullibly advertise. It fails to provide or adhere to any logical criteria or definitions; it merely goes through the motions–sufficient to brainwash the masses.

    Even Mercer was nothing of the radical warmist that Hansen is. The IPCC could swallow Mercer; Hansen’s doom gets short shrift. As do his solutions. So I repeat, it matters little whether we sucker for the likes of PCF if nobody takes Hansen’s solutions seriously. –AGF

  207. 1610GMT
    Crap. I meant to say, ” then a Budyko paper which accepts the cooling effect of aerosols, together with a high sensitivity of ice ages to minimal temperature changes (Budyko 68), should be listed in the COLD column.”

  208. KO: “Now, if you disagree with Bryson on CO2 and the radiative properties of GHGs it’s very easy to clear things up by saying so. Of course you haven’t/can’t/won’t do so.”

    KO, you don’t even know what Bryson’s views were. You are not capable of posing a question worth addressing. None of you are. Nobody agrees on ECS. Nobody knows what fraction of modern warming is natural LIA recovery or GHG induced. Most skeptics would attach a non-negative value to it, as would Bryson. You’re a waste of time. –AGF

  209. agf falls back on the creationist action when caught repeatedly in lies and misrepresentations: “you just don’t understand reality”

    It’s pretty fair to say this moron has been bested.

  210. “Nobody knows what fraction of modern warming is natural LIA recovery or GHG induced.”

    AGF: The gift that keeps on giving.

  211. AG – completely ignores the point that he was quoting someone (? Bryson) in support of his denier argument. Now, AG, were you arguing in bad faith by quoting a statement you disagree with or are you a CO2/GHG denier?

    Thanks for playing.

  212. P.S. – it should be noted that the Bryson quote AG used has ALL CAPS that were not in the original.

    Hmmm … one might infer that AG was trying to emphasize his CO2 is not warming the planet denier views – but of course we’ll never know since he refuses to actually state his position.

    A reasonable person will of course remember that if it looks like a denier, walks like a denier, sounds like a denier – it’s probably AG … er, a denier 🙂

  213. agf:

    does not make Idso a warmer

    Stupid moron. The PCF list was not a list of people it was a list of papers and what those papers said.

    then a Budyko paper which accepts the cooling effect of aerosols, together with a high sensitivity of ice ages to minimal temperature changes (Budyko 68), should be listed in the cold column

    Aside from Budyko 68 probably stating the CONDITIONAL effect of aerosols, it was from 1968. Last time I checked, 1968 was not in the 1970s which is what the PCF list is about. Amazing the crap that agf tries to make into an argument.

    North, or Lindzen and Farrell should be classed with

    Stupid clown. The list was about papers, not people. I guess when you have your lies pointed out, e.g.

    There were plenty of cold alarmists besides Bryson.

    You’re a compulsive liar agf. Apart from crackpot Bryson, you have identified exactly ZERO climate scientists who UNCONDITIONALLY predicted cooling.

    There were NO warming alarmists in the 70s

    You’re such a compulsive liar agf. Bolin 1976:

    “The growing disturbance of the global balance of carbon dioxide is without doubt mankind’s GREATEST SINGLE IMPACT on the environment”

    then the only thing you’re capable of is trying to hide your lies with a smokescreen of non-sequiturs. You’re pathetic.

  214. 0240GMT
    There are two kinds of people here, those who drool out of the left side of their mouth and those who drool out the right. I just don’t see anyone or anything worth responding to. I’m swimming in slobber. –AGF

  215. @291. A G Foster : You still haven’t really answered that question regardless of who the quote was from.

    As #293 Kevin O’Neill correctly noted.

    You also have failed to answer the second question from #282 :

    2. AG – if it ain’t CO2, then what is the primary forcing causing 2015/2016 temperatures to be so much higher than the 97/98 El Nino?

    Please do so.

  216. Meanwhile in related news from reality :

    Last month marked the hottest March in modern history and the 11th consecutive month in which a monthly global temperature record has been broken, US officials say. Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that the string of record-setting months is the longest in its 137 years of record-keeping. … (snip) .. Planet-wide, the average temperature was 1.22 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 12.7C, NOAA’s report said.

    “This surpassed the previous record set in 2015 by 0.58F (0.32C), and marks the highest monthly temperature departure among all 1,635 months on record.”

    Source : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/hottest-march-in-modern-times/7340246

  217. 1350GMT
    StevoR:
    What on earth would make you ask whether I or Bryson or any other CACC skeptic doubts the GHG effect of water vapor? It overwhelms CO2, as the realists have been saying for decades, and there is very little CO2 IR bandwidth not covered by water vapor. Water vapor and cloud feedback have always been the great unknowns which the alarmists assumed to be positive and significant, but which time has shown to be fairly insignificant.

    As for the T rise in this Niño year SAT measured TLT is the highest measured–over its short history. But when NOAA depicted the radiosonde record to prove it, it left the first 20 years off the graph (google “Real Science” + “noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/”). 1959 was warmer than 2015. 1943 was not doubt hotter still.

    Why does NOAA do that? It’s no different from NASA GISS, which was run for years by James Hansen. Hansen and Obama have done to NASA and NOAA what Obama has done to DOJ: https://pjmedia.com/blog/every-single-one-since-2009-obamas-doj-civil-rights-division-hired-only-leftist-lawyers-hundreds/ (or google: “Every Single One: Since 2009, Obama’s DOJ Civil Rights Division Hired ONLY Leftist Lawyers(Hundreds!) ” ). GISSTEMP has been fiddled with to the point that it is good for warmist propaganda only, as the Carl et al fiasco proved beyond doubt.

    So supposedly unprecedented warming which is not unprecedented according to radiosondes or unadjusted surface T needs no apology by way of GHG forcing or LIA recovery or big Niños or PDO or AMO or any other natural cause. ECS to a CO2 doubling remains unknown.

    And many glaciers continue to uncover MWP forests as they melt, in both hemispheres. –AGF

  218. “What on earth would make you ask whether I or Bryson or any other CACC skeptic doubts….”

    Any other what skeptic?

    ” It overwhelms CO2, as the realists have be….”

    The what has been saying?

    What language are you writing to write in?

  219. “Aside from Budyko 68 probably stating the CONDITIONAL effect of aerosols, it was from 1968. Last time I checked, 1968 was not in the 1970s which is what the PCF list is about. Amazing the crap that agf tries to make into an argument.”

    Well gosh, it’s not as if he had a valid argument; he needs to use an imaginary one.

    The fact of the matter is that the few climatologists who wrote about the cooling effects of aerosols in the late 1960s and early 1970s all qualified their cooling projections on the likelihood that humanity would continue to spew sulfides into the atmosphere unchecked. Most climatologists agreed the warming effects of CO2 would be much greater than the cooling effects of SO2—- and gosh, they were 100% correct.

  220. AGF doesn’t know that Tony Heller is either really stupid or really evil. What he showed for that older radiosonde data is only the 100 mb level *where the stratosphere contributes significantly to the signal* and which is far above the other levels shown by NOAA.

    Now, why is that important? Of course, since you are so smart, AGF, you will know that the stratosphere is expected to cool when the troposphere warms due to an increased GHG forcing. Oh dear…Tony Heller provides you with data that *supports AGW*!

    When you use radiosonde data for the troposphere you get this:
    https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/ratpac850.jpeg

  221. 1645GMT
    Marco: What will you do with the first chart which shows 1/16 as hottest ever only at 500mb?

    Desertphile: The PCF chart starts in 1965. Aerosols were one of several lines of argument: 1) Insolation was steadily decreasing; 2) The present interglacial had already outlasted the average; 3) interglacials could end suddenly; 4) the LIA could be taken as a precursor to the norm. I already pointed out that Idso and Budyko rejected the efficacy of aerosols. I might point out that Hansen among many continues to blame the cool decades on aerosols, in spite of the fact that Asia has probably outmatched the previous output of the West. I think the consensus was that aerosols could usher in the next ice age sooner than it would otherwise arrive, just as GHG’s might be expected to delay the next big ice age or LIA. –AGF

  222. Moving the goalposts there, AGF?

    Come on, just admit it, you were fooled by Tony Heller, you know it, and you are embarrassed.

  223. 1850GMT
    Well Marco, one way to tell would be to extend the surface to 100mb graph to the present, and show that it’s compatible with ratpac850-300 (which it isn’t). Go for it. For the lazy here’s where 2015 rates by altitude:
    • Radiosonde data (58 yr record)
    – ~5,000 ft (850mb): 2nd warmest
    – ~10,000 ft (700mb): 3rd warmest
    – ~18,000 ft (500mb): warmest
    – ~30,000 ft (300mb): 2nd warmest
    – ~40,000 ft (200mb): 14th warmest
    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/briefings/201601.pdf
    (bottom). So would 2015 top an extension of surface to 100mb? Not very likely. Something’s fishy at NOAA.
    –AGF

  224. GISSTEMP has been fiddled

    along with HadCRUT4, Berkeley, NOAA, JMA, Karl, etc, etc. They’re all part of the global conspiracy y’know.

    1. “[….] GISSTEMP has been fiddled [….]

      V: along with HadCRUT4, Berkeley, NOAA, JMA, Karl, etc, etc. they’re all part of the global conspiracy y’know

      Even the world’s birds changed their migration habits to join the conspiracy! And the world’s ice masses are in an it too. Damn them!

  225. agf:

    I already pointed out that Idso rejected the efficacy of aerosols.

    A dishonest claim by agf as usual. Because they demonstrate his dishonesty and contradict his claim of NO warming alarmist (scientists) in the 70s, agf cannot bring himself to quote Idso’s words:

    “Thus, anthropogenically produced tropospheric aerosols cannot be looked on as offsetting the warming tendency of increased carbon dioxide: their concurrent buildups MUST INEXORABLY tend to warm the planet’s surface.”

    Idso only rejected the efficacy of aerosols relative to the INEXORABLE warming from carbon dioxide.

  226. agf:

    one way to tell would be to extend the surface to 100mb graph to the present

    Stupid clown. Doesn’t even realise that 100mb is usually well into the Stratosphere.

Leave a Reply to Chardin Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *