Ahhh. Another name caller. Just what we need around here. The fact is that the global cooling scare was far more than "some speculation" I was there and an adult at the time. There were dire warnings of drastic declines in food production, and political strife resulting from food shortages. Hardly a day went by that this study or that study wasn't either on the front page, or in the A section of the news papers and good old walter cronkite warned us every night.
Scientists from numerous disiplines warned governments to begin implement emergency actions to head off the impending threat. Some of those actions are as follows:
The largest scale enterprise that has been discussed is that of transforming the Arctic into an ice-free ocean. As was noted earlier, this has been very carefully studied by the staff of the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad.
The Soviet engineer, Borisov, has been the most active proponent of the much-publicized Bering Strait dam. The basic idea is to increase the inflow of warm Atlantic water by stopping or even reversing the present northward flow of colder Pacific water through the Bering Strait.
Two kinds of proposals have been discussed, a dam between Florida and Cuba, and weirs extending out from Newfoundland across the Grand Banks to deflect the Labrador current as well as the Gulf Stream.
The Pacific Ocean counterpart of the Gulf Stream is the warm Kuroshio Current, a small branch of which enters the Sea of Japan and exits to the Pacific between the Japanese islands. It has been proposed that the narrow mouth of Tatarsk Strait, where a flood tide alternates with an ebb tide, be regulated by a giant one-way 'water valve' to increase the inflow of the
warm Kuroshio Current to the Sea of Okhotsk and reduce the winter ice there.
Dams on the Ob, Yenisei and Angara rivers could create a lake east of the Urals that would be almost as large as the Caspian Sea. This lake could be drained southward to the Aral and Caspian Seas, irrigating a region about twice the area of the Caspian Sea. In terms of climatic effects, the presence of a large lake transforms the heat exchange between the surface and atmosphere. Of equal or greater importance in terms of climatic effects, is the
land region transformed from desert to growing fields, with accompanying changes in both its reflectivity and evaporation.
The proposed North American Water and Power Alliance is a smaller scale scheme. It would bring 100 million acre-feet2 per year of water from Alaska and Canada to be evaporated by irrigation in the western United States and Mexico. The possible climatic effects are highly speculative. For example, would the increased moisture in the air fall out again over the central United States, or would it be transported to some other region?
There were other schemes that were also considered seriously. The fact is that there was far more than "some speculation" about global cooling. Scientists from numerous disiplines jumped on the bandwagon. And there were a plethora of "scientific" papers done on the subject. Pseudoscientific is the more accurate term, just like the pseudoscience that passes for climate science today.