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Putting a Global Warming Canard on Ice
February 27, 2008
One of the canards that global warming deniers have been trotting out for years goes something like this. "Back in the 1970s, all the scientist were predicting that an ice age was imminent. Now, all the scientists say that global warming is coming. Since they were so wrong 30 years ago, why should we trust them now?" Or words to that effect.
Climatologists and lay people who follow climate science closely have known all along that this objection is utter nonsense. It's an urban legend that arose from misreporting of carefully nuanced discussion in the scientific literature at the time about the direction of climate trends. That misreporting took place in the popular press -- what famous climate skeptic Rush Limbaugh likes to call the "drive-by media."
The canard has had legs in the drive-by media - e.g., see George Will's Washington Post column of December 22, 2004 -- so an inordinate amount of time has been expended trying to knock it down.
Now, a climate scholar has released the results of a survey of circa-1970s climate research papers that may finally let the air out of this myth's tires for good. Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center found that fewer than 10 percent of the papers supported the hypothesis that the earth was headed for a cooling cycle. Forty-four leaned toward a warming cycle, while the remaining 20 did not go in either direction.
Climate scientists at that time were fully aware that burning fossil fuels could load with the atmosphere with enough carbon dioxide to bring on global warming. But they didn't have enough evidence then to say for sure. There wasn't enough data to justify such a conclusion, and the analytical tools they had at their disposal simply were not up to the job of modeling the climate's maddening complexity.
The '70s were a cool decade. Buffalo natives will never forget the monster blizzard of 1977. So ears were bound to perk up at scientists talking about ice ages, even if they carefully emphasized that, due to insufficient information, any projection they made wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on.
Things are much different today. Since the 1980s, climate scientists have been gathering data from the far ends of the earth and thousands of points in between. Supercomputers used for running climate models today are as far removed from their clunky '70s ancestors as a Formula One race car is from a donkey cart. Scientists have developed multiple lines of evidence to substantiate their conclusion, as reported in last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, that global warming is "unequivocal" and chances are 9 in 10 that human activities are the cause.
Time would be much better spent discussing climate solutions than watching reruns from the 1970s. This year's presidential campaign between John McCain and whoever emerges from the Obama-Clinton slugfest is one such opportunity.
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