Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 03/03/2011 5:58:04 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
I’m old enough to remember when scientists issued alarms over a coming Ice Age that would wipe out life on Earth on a massive scale. Senator John Barrasso’s memory holds up pretty well, too, and he reminded everyone of the consensus in the 1970s that the climate had begun to cool so significantly that, er, the world needed massive government interventions in energy production and consumption to survive it. Barrasso quotes from Newsweek and Time articles of the period. Senator Tom Udall attempts to ride to EPW Chair Barbara Boxer’s rescue by introducing an article that claims the global-cooling consensus of the 1970s was a “myth,” and Boxer urges Udall to add it to the record. But that’s just the set-up Jim Inhofe needed to complete this two-man demolition of “consensus” and to expose the main White House adviser on climate change as a chronic crank, as the Daily Caller reports:
The exchange started with Barrasso addressing the committee’s witness, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson.
“Forty years ago, the same scientists that are predicting the end of the world now from global warming were predicting the end of the world from global cooling,” said Barrasso. “So if we had committed the same amount of taxpayer resources and government manpower that the administration now wants us to commit to prevent global warming — if we’d done that prevent global cooling, we wouldn’t be the most prosperous nation on earth.” …
Still later, Inhofe got into the science debate by citing a 1971 study by Dr. John Holdren, who just so happens to be President Obama’s advisor on science technology. In that study Holdren wrote, “The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here.” Holdren went on to write that the effects could “generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
A visibly satisfied Inhofe then turned to Boxer, and stated, “So even the president’s people are agreed with me, Madam Chairwoman!”
The passage scanned at Zombietime is even more explicit about Holdren’s hysteria over hypothermia, emphases Zombie’s:
It seems, however, that a competing effect has dominated the situation since 1940. This is the reduced transparency of the atmosphere to incoming light as a result of urban air pollution (smoke, aerosols), agricultural air pollution (dust), and volcanic ash. This screening phenomenon is said to be responsible for the present world cooling trend—a total of about .2°C in the world mean surface temperature over the past quarter century. This number seems small until it is realized that a decrease of only 4°C would probably be sufficient to start another ice age.Moreover, other effects besides simple screening by air pollution threaten to move us in the same direction. In particular, a mere one percent increase in low cloud cover would decrease the surface temperature by .8°C. We may be in the process of providing just such a cloud increase, and more, by adding man-made condensation nuclei to the atmosphere in the form of jet exhausts and other suitable pollutants. A final push in the cooling direction comes from man-made changes in the direct reflectivity of the earth’s surface(albedo) through urbanization, deforestation, and the enlargement of deserts.
Remember — Holdren is one of the leading voice in the US on global warming now. He’s also Obama’s climate-change czar.
I haven’t seen that kind of a setup and payoff since Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made movies with Dorothy Lamour. That was during the period when American industry and economic expansion held the national consensus rather than Chicken Little hypotheses with chronically faulty models and contradictory results. Man, I guess I am getting old.
Update: Sen. Inhofe’s office wrote to correct the identification of Mark Udall in the video, which I got from the DC. It’s actually Tom Udall, his brother.
Unfortunately Carly Fiorina wasn’t up to the task.
Yeah... Time Magazine had a cover on it in 1973... I think.
LLS
From my memory this New Ice Age stuff never amounted to anything more than a few feature articles in the news magazines. It never came anywhere near the "Climate Change" aka "Global Warming" hysteria ... not even close. To be honest, I do not remember having any consciousness of it as a movement. ( I was in my 20's through most of the seventies, and finished grad school in 1979. )
Make that late 60’s & early 70’s, and yes, I remember it. Several SF novels and short stories later, and Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, & Michael Flynn answered it with “Fallen Angels” in which the new Ice Age hits because the Greens stopped us from continuing to build an industrial economy. Published in 1991, I still have the autographed teaser Jerry sent me when I was at Desert Shield/Desert Storm. It was written as a thank-you to SF fandom.
http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/067172052X/067172052X.htm will let you read it.
Jerry also claims the oldest blog in existence. And he still gets a lot of commentary on a lot of subjects...
“ping for later...I need to make some popcorn for this one.
:-)”
Save me some, this should be some good reading.
Beautiful!!!....
It takes place in the near future, where the environmentalist wackos are in full control of the United States and are still pushing their "global warming" agenda even as glaciers are wiping out the northern part of the U.S.
It was published over 20 years ago, but does a good job of summarizing the attitudes of the hot air cult.
Yes.
Click on thumbnails for larger images.
I wrote a letter to Forbes after that piece describing the process as the time honored Chicken Little process. Al Gore was named as the Quacky Lacky of the story.
The letter is my only work published by Forbes
It turns out I was not only prescient but correct....... the sky is not falling
Holdren and Ehrlich aren't so well known for a bet Holdren, Ehrlich, John Harte, Holdren protege at Berkeley, and a fouth whose name has escaped, with Julian Simon. Simon wrote a remarkable book called The Ultimate Resource. Simon was an economist who had set out to document the coming dire shortages as we ran out of natural resources. As he examined the data he came to an astonishing realization; we aren't running out of resources. In the introduction to his book Simon offered a wager to anyone reading the book, up to twenty thousand dollars if they could identify a diminishing natural resource, as indicated by the increasing price of the resource. The Ehrlich gang accepted the bet, dividing the wager among five or six relatively rare mineral resources. They lost on all five over a period of either five or ten years, to eliminate spurious variations.
After Holdren and Ehrlich had lost the bet, Simon speaking to an audience of about fifteen people, noted that Ehrlich would be on Johnny Carson's show with an audience of several million that night. Catastrophe sells. Ehrlich was a scientific icon, dispite not just having lost the bet to Simon, but having written three or four of the most ridiculously wrong books about coming starvation, one of which was “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich was real big on forced sterilization, and was among those advising the Chinese to restrict population to one child. Both Ehrlich and his ACLU director wife were stalwarts in the "Zero Population Growth" cabal.
Holdren won a MacArthur “Genius award” for never having done science and for proselytizing Marxism, lecturing in the E.F. Schumacher tradition, with fellow Schumacher ideologue Amory Lovins. For Holdren and possibly for Ehrlich and Lovins, also an ardent Schumacher acolyte, “Small is Beautiful,” the Schumacher bible, led inevitably to Marxism. It made Holdren and Ehrlich wealthy, and appeals in many of the same ways that socialism does, arranging society so that the poor dumb citizens and subjects have better lives, in spite of themselves. Of course the poor must never have learned about all the money Gore, Kleiner Perkins, and the finance community will make trading carbon credits. How clever to have found a scam to allow the taxing of air!
It may all be a con game, playing on the wide audiences for catastrophe. What else could Al Gore, silver spoon and all, have done but sell fire and brimstone? What else is global warming but fire and brimstone? Obama and his old left comrades have to make it as bad as they can before we might buy their solution, socialism-Marxism-Communism, with them in charge. After all, they have been practicing for thirty years or more.
Holdren was part of the group that killed Rancho Seco, a brand new nuclear plant. The Sierra Club, before they were taken over by the hard left, promoted nuclear power because of its safety and complete lack of pollution. Its safety has been proved in sixty years of by far the best safety record of any energy producing technology. But selling fear is easier than selling a perfect safety record - no deaths from commercial nuclear power in over sixty years isn't news. Chernoble wasn't commercial. It had no containment. And yet, the coal which replaced the power generated by the graphite core reactor, similar to our first Fermi reactors, killed far more people from respiratory disease in just one year - about 200 - than died in the fire at Chernoble or from radio nucleotide release - about 20.
Holdren knows the truth, but wants the U.S. on a diet, like Michelle. No diet for him of course. Theresa Kerry rewards him lavishly with her first husband's fortune, and pays for the endowed chair at Harvard's Kennedy School.
The Cooling World-Newsweek | April 28, 1975
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states...........
Thanks my FRiend!!
And don't forget the population boom, swine flu of the '70's, and acid rain.
Man...Holdren has a History.
Republicans ramp up push to block EPA climate regulations
Global Warming on Free Republic
Sure I remember it.
There were some proposals at the time that ice at the north and south poles be painted with carbon black to change the earth’s albido.
No! Bush's fault! Always! .... remember.
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