You are somewhat correct, Fonz, but I believe you are underplaying how widespread the "coming ice age" scare was. Our whole point in bringing up the global cooling alarmism of the 70s is to use it as an example of why we should be skeptical.
Environmentalist "the world is gonna end unless we do something drastic" scenarios are nothing knew.
Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation."
Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age."
The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool."
Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age."
The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
-“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”
-”The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”
Tell me this doesn't sound familiar?
But many scientists laugh at the panic.
Doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines but have proven to be completely false. Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change sound all too familiar.
But the media can't get enough of doomsday.
-- Harvard Biologist George Wald: "civilization will end within 15 to 30 years," and environmental doomsayer Paul Ehrlich predicted that four billion people--including 65 million American--would perish from famine in the 1980s
It was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy.
That prediction has gone the way of so many others. But environmentalists continue to warn us that we face environmental disaster if we don't accept the economic disaster called the Kyoto treaty. Lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council (another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists) explain: "Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas." And Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," depicts a future in which cities are submerged by rising sea levels.
Meteorologists are a standing joke for getting predictions wrong even a few days ahead. The same jokers are being taken seriously when they use computer models to predict the weather 100 years hence my skepticism.
