Question about global warming

[Elfdart]

I keep hearing from Republitards that many years ago, scientists were predicting a new ice age, therefore all the stuff about global warming is bullshit.

I looked around for evidence of these scientists and haven't found anything. Were any climatologists predicting an ice age back in the 1970s or is this another urban legend?

I ask not only because so much anti-global warming agitprop is so dishonest, but because hucksters like Bjorn Lomborg and Benny J. Peiser claim global warming is a fraud, but aren't real scientists. Does anyone know?

[Ma Deuce]

Back in the '70s there were definitely concerns about "global cooling" (a retconned name for the phenomenon that has been used since the phrase "global warming" was popularized.), and and many of those concerns did come from climatologists. These concerns were not necessarily of a new ice age, but often about a temperature drop just bad enough to fuck up food production. The following Newsweek article from 1975 sums up the concerns of the time:

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[Spin Echo]

I keep hearing from Republitards that many years ago, scientists were predicting a new ice age, therefore all the stuff about global warming is bullshit.

I looked around for evidence of these scientists and haven't found anything. Were any climatologists predicting an ice age back in the 1970s or is this another urban legend?

I ask not only because so much anti-global warming agitprop is so dishonest, but because hucksters like Bjorn Lomborg and Benny J. Peiser claim global warming is a fraud, but aren't real scientists. Does anyone know?

Blame the paleoclimatologists. In the 70's they determined that the last two interglacial peroids lasted about 10,000 years. Considering the Holocene, the period since the last ice age, has lasted about 10,000 years we seemed due any day for the next ice age.

However, since then, paleoclimatologists have determined they assumed some things they shouldn't have. For example, studies at the moment estimate that the variations in the earth orbit (one the major causes of ice ages) will be smaller in the next hundred thousand years or so than those during the major ice ages and retreats. Most studies now estimate that we'll have a 50,000 year interglacial period.

[Darth Wong]

How many actual peer-reviewed scientific papers predicted this new ice age? We've got something like a thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers in the last 20 years supporting global warming; was there anywhere near this critical mass of scientific consensus on this "new ice age" speculation 30 years ago? I seriously doubt it.

There is a tendency among anti-scientific types to fail to differentiate between peer-reviewed scientific research and science-related public discourse. Whether this is due to dishonesty or outright stupidity is unknown, but you see it being done on all manners of science versus religious or political ideology.

[Medic]

There is a tendency among anti-scientific types to fail to differentiate between peer-reviewed scientific research and science-related public discourse. Whether this is due to dishonesty or outright stupidity is unknown, but you see it being done on all manners of science versus religious or political ideology.

If the Guardianand Washington Post are to be believed it is known: dishonesty. (found these contributing to the US Accused of of silencing climate experts N&P thread) Summary: public relations firms, thinktanks and other organizations funded by 1st by the Phillip Morris tobacco company and then by ExxonMobile go out of their way to selectively trumpet a bare handful of peer-reviewed studies, to include some with claims that are later debunked.

This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these groups, as a quick internet search will show you.

Industry documents released as a result of tobacco litigation show that in 1993 Philip Morris and its public relations firm, APCO Associates, created a nonprofit front group called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) to fight against the regulation of cigarettes. To mask its true purpose, TASSC assembled a range of anti-regulatory interests under one umbrella. The group also challenged the now widely accepted notion that secondhand smoke poses health risks.

TASSC eventually got ExxonMobile on board as a financier and in turn begat the "junkscience.com" site which:

has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press.

their methods?

As a memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

On one hand, science ran afoul of corporate interests long ago, and they found that plan of attack to be the best in confusing the public. Form following function, that statement can accurately describe the methods of creationists too, another special interest group that science has run afoul of. Though many creationists that merely echo these claims are probably just ignorant of the science, someone had to originally cherry pick for their various spurious claims, and that someone is exercising extreme intellectual dishonesty or a very powerful compartmentalization of the mind.

[momochan]

However, since then, paleoclimatologists have determined they assumed some things they shouldn't have. For example, studies at the moment estimate that the variations in the earth orbit (one the major causes of ice ages) will be smaller in the next hundred thousand years or so than those during the major ice ages and retreats. Most studies now estimate that we'll have a 50,000 year interglacial period.

Hmm. I was just reading an article about the Milankovitch cycles in the recent magazine of the American Natural History Museum in New York. Milankovitch cycles are the variations in Earth's tilt, orbital shape, and the like that have been correlated with past ice ages. At the end of the article, the author stated that if it were not for human intervention, we would indeed be cooling off now, slowly heading into another ice age.

If you think about it, then, that article in the '70s predicting a future ice age is actually an argument for manmade global warming. Astronomically speaking we should be getting colder now, and the fact that we are not suggests that something intervened -- and we're the ones with the smoking guns, er, power plants.

[Admiral Valdemar]

This was a common feature of US only tabloids in the '70s. It has no real merit beyond that, since no one else on Terra cared about such an idea and were formulating the global warming concept ready for the Gaia group emergence of the '80s.

[Teleros]

I keep hearing from Republitards that many years ago, scientists were predicting a new ice age, therefore all the stuff about global warming is bullshit.

No I'm pretty sure it was a worry back then - I've seen a few documentaries etc about it. Improved models and so on meant they were wrong, but it was a worry. The problem is when people assume that as said scientists were wrong then that they were wrong now.

because hucksters like Bjorn Lomborg and Benny J. Peiser claim global warming is a fraud, but aren't real scientists. Does anyone know?

Dunno about Peiser, but Lomborg's problem is with the more apocalyptic types (mainly Worldwatch Institute and / or Lester Brown), and the idea that global warming will mean nothing but trouble, not that it's a fraud.

[Darth Wong]

Personally, I think I'm going to have to start saving up for all of the "We told you so" postcards that we're going to have to send in a few decades to residents of coastal Florida and other American coastal regions that supported the climate-change pollyannas. They can receive them in their newly built underwater living domes.