Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No
If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here.
A couple of the SCOPE reports (13 and 27, from memory) are worth a look. NEW! [2005/01] RealClimate post - this may be a slightly more comprehensible intro to this subject.
NEW! [2004/11/10] National Geographic, 1976
[2004/07/09] Flohn, 1979, Quat Res
[2004/04/20] A climate book by H H Lamb (or bits of one)
[2004/01/02] Short note on the 1970 SCEP report.
[2004/02/07] Misc stuff from non science journals (so far only holds a newsweek 1975 article).
[2004/01/02] Short note on the 1970 SCEP report.
[2003/08/26] World Climate Conference, 1979 (esp Hare).
[2003/08/08] Kukla and Matthews, Science, 1972.
[2003/06/17] Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy (I've only just got round to uploading it)
[2003/05/03] Howorth, 1905
[2003/04/16] G.J. Kukla, Nature, 253, 600-3, 1975: "Missing link between Milankovitch and climate"
[2002/09/26] Quaternary Research, 1972: "The end of the present interglacial"
[2002/04/25] Some notes from Imbrie&Imbrie, 1980
[21/12/2001] Asimov: from a lecture in 1974
[04/09/2001] Lowell Ponte: the cooling. An analysis
[04/09/2001] A look at chapter 16 of Imbrie and Imbrie: Ice ages: solving the mystery
[30/06/2001] Review of the not-very famous US National Academy of Sciences 1975 Report
[28/06/2001] An article by Alison George, based on a talk I gave, in the Grauniad, or I have archived it here. Its not actually terribly clear: some time I must rant about journalists...
To clarify a little: I am interested in "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's by scientists, in scientific journals?". That means articles in scientific journals and reputable books. I am not particularly interested in what appeared in the popular press or on TV and do not intend to discuss it here (but see context), since I do not regard these as reliable sources for scientific information.
Note that many of the oh-there-was-an-ice-age-predicted type articles tend to focus on non-science articles for their sources: newsweek, for example. This is cheating on their part. Newsweek isn't science, of course. If newsweek was quoting peer-reviewed journals, then they should go back to those.
We also need to know what we mean by "imminent". Since the question arises in the context of the greenhouse gas/climate change debate, "imminent" is a timescale comparable to greenhouse-type timescales: ie, the next century or so. See below for my take on long-term predictions.
Comments, clarifications and corrections to this page are welcome see comments or mail
wmc@bas.ac.uk.
If you think you have a new reference that may be interesting, please send it to me. I don't guarantee to check it out immeadiately: you will need to have patience. However, I will list all outstanding references below: Just in: these 2 both mention a 1972 letter, amongst other things. Interesting! I haven't read them properly yet.
http://www.meteohistory.org/2004polling_preprints/docs/abstracts/reeves&etal_abstract.pdf
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ESER/People/yinon/courses/climate_variability_lecture.pdf (seems to be dead; the wayback machine obliges)
The purpose of this page is to provide a counter to the mythology that "journals were stuffed full of articles predicting an imminent ice age in the '70's". An article by the John Birch Society seems to be an example of the kind of thing [oops, they've changed the page! I should have copied the old one... happily, JS points me to: the web.archive.org's archive of it] (see also "The New Australian", or
Frontiers of Freedom [local cache]), and it even appears in milder form in the 1999 Reith lectures. The relevance of this claim is that "greenhouse sceptics" are fond of claiming that "all scientists" were predicting cooling a decade ago and now they've switched to warming. However, closer probing reveals few of these articles.
The argument has two very seperate strands: the "orbital-forcing" strand, wherein the cooling was to occur as a result of variations in the Earths orbit around the sun, and the "aerosols" strand, which supposed cooling in response to a massive increase in the aerosol loading of the atmosphere. In fact there is a variant of the first idea, rapid climate change during interglacials, see Flohn, 1979.
Let me say now that I have no quarrel with the large volume of perfectly sensible scientific literature that examines the Milankovich hypothesis and the probable connection between orbital forcing and past glaciations. The coincidence of the periods of the orbital forcing and the ice ages seems so close that (in common with received opinion on this subject) I believe that orbital variations have caused the ice age timing over the last, say, 3 Myr. Hays et al, Science, v194, #4270, p1121, 10/Dec/1976 is an excellent paper on this subject (see below). It is worth pointing out, though, that although the coincidence in timing virtually compels belief in the connection, there is still a problem in that the strongest response (at 100 kyr) corresponds to the weakest forcing, and as far as I am aware this problem has not been resolved. Nor do I take issue with the contention that, in the absence of anthropogenic forcing, it is natural to predict a gradual return to ice age conditions in the future (though quite how long that might be is uncertain. The "all interglacials last 10 kyr" (or 12, or whatever) idea is wrong. Various sources (Loutre and Berger) say that due to the predicted orbital configurations, the prediction (in the absence of anthro forcing) is for this interglacial to last 50 kyr or more. Jan Hollan has a page showing some nice graphs about that at
No soon Ice Age, says astronomy. What I do assert, though, is that predictions for the immediate future (immediate in this context being the next few centuries) need to include anthropogenic forcing from CO2 increases in order to be meaningful, and that people were aware of this in the 1970's. Simple efforts to combine anthropogenic and Milankovich forcings are confounded by the problem mentioned above, and I believe (no ref. available) that current radiative forcing from CO2 release already exceeds that from Milankovich forcing. Any attempt, made in the light of todays knowledge, to predict the likely course of climate for the next several thousand years would need to include an assumption/prediction/model of future CO2 levels, which at the moment seems impossible over that time span.
Science-type stuff