Even way back in the seventies scientists knew this current man made global warming was likely to happen. The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyse, we've reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree
A 1974 Time magazine article Another Ice Age? painted a similarly bleak picture: "When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." Peer-Reviewed Literature However, these are media articles, not scientific studies. A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). The large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than 1970s scientists predicting cooling, the opposite is the case. Figure 1: Number of papers classified as predicting global cooling (blue) or warming (red). In no year were there more cooling papers than warming papers (Peterson 2008). Scientific Consensus In the 1970s, the most comprehensive study on climate change (and the closest thing to a scientific consensus at the time) was the 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report. Their basic conclusion was "…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…" This is in strong contrast with the current position of the US National Academy of Sciences:"...there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring... It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities... The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action." This is in a joint statement with the Academies of Science from Brazil, France, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. In contrast to the 1970s, there are now a number of scientific bodies that have released statements affirming man-made global warming. More on scientific consensus... National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Environmental Protection Agency NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies American Geophysical Union American Institute of Physics National Center for Atmospheric Research American Meteorological Society The Royal Society of the UK Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society American Association for the Advancement of Science
As FC once again ignores that we have previously posted links to many more scientific papers than 7 supporting global cooling in the 1960s and 1970s. Do you really enjoy continually attempting to re-write history with your fabricated version of reality?
So global cooling predictions in the 70s amounted to media and a handful of peer reviewed studies. The small number of papers predicting cooling were outweighed by a much greater number of papers predicting global warming due to the warming effect of rising CO2. Today, an avalanche of peer reviewed studies and overwhelming scientific consensus endorse man-made global warming. To compare cooling predictions in the 70s to the current situation is both inappropriate and misleading. Additionally, we reduced the SO2 emissions which were causing global cooling. The question remains whether we will reduce the CO2emissions causing global warming.
I was a freshman in high school in 1970 and I witnessed the whole sorry spectacle. There wasn't much talk about global cooling alright, but that's because they couldn't shut up about the new ice age that was coming upon us. It was all about the new ice age and 'earth day'. The whole school was decorated up about it just like a high school I was in last winter was all decorated with posters about the climate change BS. When we hear these clowns say it's a myth that cooling was predicted back then, I know first hand just what kind of liars they are.