A brief history of climate panic and crisis… both warming and cooling

Watts Up With That? ^ | July 29, 2014 | Anthony Watts

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

From But Now You Know. There is most certainly a pattern to climate change…but it’s not what you may think:

For at least 114 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

(A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

One of my textbooks in college was written by Paul Ehrlich. Required reading by my professor who was fresh out of Berkley. Any wonder I dropped out?

[pepsionice]

If your mechanic did his analysis like climate experts....then one day your issue would be brakes, and the next day it’d be the muffler. And later you’d discover that the car was perfectly ok except for the gear-shift knob being loose.

[ETL 2]

Here's a sunspot chart showing the various peaks and dips throughout the past centuries. Note the "Medieval Max". It corresponds to the "Medieval Warm Period". The "Maunder Minimum" corresponds to the "Little Ice Age", and the "Modern Max" to the recent warming trend we had been experiencing, at least until the past 15 years or so.

"Changes in carbon-14 concentration in the Earth's atmosphere, which serves as a long term proxy of solar activity. Note the present day is on the left-hand side of this figure."--wikipedia

[trisham]

"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."

~Epictetus

God bless this site, this Free Republic.
Please click the pic

[ETL 2]

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.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

[end]

The Cooling World:
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

Original Newsweek article with scary maps and graphs:
http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf

[raybbr]

I remember predictions that half of the US would be covered by ice by now? Does anyone have any links to that effect?

[UCANSEE2]

” Note the present day is on the left-hand side of this figure.”

WELLLLLLLLLLLLL.......... it is not. It is on the right hand side of this figure.

Or were you just trying to point out their error ?

[I want the USA back]

The media is in the business of scaring people. The politicians are in the business of using the scare to their political advantage.

[Sacajaweau]

Apparently the earth has hot flashes.

Which explains "Mother Earth" and "Mother Nature".

Just a normal thing folks. Why are politicians trying to fool us?

[ETL 2]

I realized that after I posted. I think it may have been a caption from some other graphic that I had saved.

[ETL 2]

Sorry, I don’t. But I have noticed that in any looming climate crises they dream up the “solution” is always the same: global governance, global socialism.

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

IMHO this is about power and control of the masses. The people pushing this agenda have all the money they want. They would be kings.

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

Agreed. Your mechanic would keep hanging parts, hoping to find the right one, all the time charging you for his hours and the new parts that didn’t work. A inexperienced mechanic does these things, in the case of global warming, the folks pushing it are well aware that it is BS.

[Chewbarkah]

As the UN and any fool can see, climate change is caused by capitalism. Rising temps, falling temps — don’t get hung up technicalities. Capitalism sustains vast human population levels to benefit the rich. End it...For the Children.

[UCANSEE2]

Thanks.