Now ol' Pig, there never was a consensus on a 'new ice age'.
What 1970s science said about global cooling
A new paper exposing the myth of 70s global cooling
Over time, William Connelly has been steadily
documenting 70s research predicting global cooling. It's a rich resource but as
he admits, could be more accessible. Now he has collaborated with Thomas Peterson and John Fleck to publish
The Myth of the 1970's Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, due to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The paper surveys climate studies from 1965 to 1979 (and in a refreshing change to other similar surveys, lists all the papers). They find very few papers (7 in total) predict global cooling. This
isn't surprising. What surprises is that even in the 1970s, on the back of 3 decades of cooling, more papers (42 in total) predict global warming due to CO2 than cooling.
Figure 1: Number of papers classified as predicting future global cooling (blue) or warming (red). In no year were there more global cooling papers than global warming papers.
So in fact, the large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than climate science predicting cooling, the opposite is the case. Most interesting about Peterson's paper is not the debunking of an already well debunked skeptic argument but a succinct history of climate science over the 20th century, describing how scientists from different fields gradually pieced together their diverse findings into a more unified picture of how climate operates. A
must read paper.
