Remember this?
There was a chill across the world, and it wasn’t just the cold war. From the 1940s to the mid-70s, the planet seemed to be in the grip of a global cooling. For a while, almost every outbreak of extreme weather was blamed on it. Some members of a new scientific discipline, climatology, predicted a new ice age. Yet before the 70s were out, temperatures were rising and many of the soothsayers for a new ice age were warning of global warming instead. It is a strange, and now largely forgotten episode. Some say it shows climate scientists are scaremongers and shouldn’t be believed, whatever they are predicting. So what happened three decades ago? And why should we believe the climatologists now?
Global cooling was a real phenomenon – and it changed global history. In the winter of 1941, it stopped the German army’s advance on Moscow: grease froze in German guns and thousands of soldiers died from cold. Hitler’s failure to take Moscow marked a turning point in the second world war. Without the freezing 40s, Hitler might have triumphed. But by the 1970s, no one was giving thanks for global cooling. As snow banks built across the Canadian Arctic and pack ice grew in the North Atlantic, there was concern bordering on panic about where this might be leading.
I remember the brutal cold January winter of 1977. It was used as proof we were entering THE COMING ICE AGE!
I remember the brutal cold January winter of 2014! It was used as proof we were causing GLOBAL WARMING!
There are also other brutal cold winters used for the same.