
April 2017 7 3
Predictably, the press
seized on these apocalyptic
cooling predictions, ignoring
1970s scientific consensus,
and campaigners inevitably
picked up on the journalism
predictions and, ignoring 1970s scientific con-
sensus, afforded credibility to the global cooling
theorists as they revelled in the story's sensa-
tionalist potential. Very soon, global cooling
found new advocates as reporters fell behind the
new narrative.
Even the reputable, 'quality' press foretold the
end of civilisation: 'New Ice Age Coming – It's
Already Getting Colder' (L.A. Times, Oct 1971);
'Scientist Sees Chilling Signs Of New Ice Age'
(L.A. Times, Sept 1972); 'Science: Another Ice
Age?' (Time magazine, Nov 1972); 'Ice Age,
Worse Food Crisis Seen' (The Chicago Tribune,
Oct 1974); 'The Cooling World' (Newsweek, Apr
1975); 'The Big Freeze' (Time magazine, Jan
1977).
The New York Times, in particular, left impar
-
tiality and journalistic standards out in the cold.
In the period from 1924 to 2005, The Times
reported four climate changes, each one contra-
dicting the last: 'MacMillan Reports Signs of New
Ice Age' (Sept 1924); 'America in Longest Warm
Spell Since 1776...' (Mar 1933); 'Scientists
Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A
Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevita-
ble' (May 1975); 'Past Hot Times Hold Few
Reasons to Relax About New Warming' (Dec
2005).
It was these inconsistencies and the prefer-
ence of sensationalism that obfuscated genuine
debate and misinformed the general public,
obscuring very real concerns over global warm-
ing. It could be argued that journalists were
simply reporting what scientists were saying,
but much of the information was misrepre
-
sented, only a minority of the scientific
community were referenced or quoted, and con-
flicting scientific literature was not referred to. It
was unbalanced, unscientific.
Campaigners inevitably picked up on the jour-
nalism. At the first Earth Day celebration in April
1970, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned “the
threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside
nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death
and misery for mankind”.
A number of 'solutions' were put forward to
counter the cooling, including pumping extra
CO2 into the atmosphere, diverting arctic rivers
and even melting polar caps by covering them
with black soot. However, climatologists – not
implausibly - believed these measures would
only create more problems than they would
solve.
The impact of CO2 was never forgotten and
some attempted to establish a sort of CO2/aero-
sol calculus. The opposing effects were weighted
in a 1971 paper by Rasool and Dr Steven Schnei-
der; the conclusion of this study was that an
increase by a factor of four in global atmospheric
aerosol could be enough to trigger another ice
age. Critics noted that the effects of aerosols in
the atmosphere had been overestimated in com-
parison to the warming effects of CO2.
In 1975, the NAS backtracked on its initial con-
cerns, reporting: “Our knowledge of the
mechanisms of climate change is at least as frag-
mentary as our data...Not only are the basic
scientific questions largely unanswered, but in
many cases we do not yet know enough to pose
the key questions’. The heat was cooling.
By 1980, predictions of an imminent ice age
had largely ceased, as scientists agreed it would
take thousands of years before the next one
occurred. Hot scientists welcomed their prodi-
gally colleagues back into the heat.
However outliers subsisted and in 2004 -
again in a gross misrepresentation of the facts
- The New York Times quoted the 1972 NAS report
as reading: “Judging from the record of the past
interglacial ages, the present time of high tem
-
peratures should be drawing to an end, leading
into the next glacial age”.
What the NAS report actually read was: 'Judg
-
ing from the record of the past interglacial ages,
the present time of high temperatures should be
drawing to and end, to be followed by a long
period of considerably colder temperatures
leading to the next glacial age some 20,000
years from now”.
In October 2006, Senior Editor of Newsweek
Jerry Alder – whose publication had been one of
the main promulgators of the ice- age myth –
admitted that a report on global cooling in 1975
was “spectacularly wrong about the near-term
future”, but went on to claim that even Isaac
Asimov had concerns over climatic change and
food production.
The conclusion drawn must be that there was
indeed a significant drop in Northern Hemi-
spheric temperature during the 1970s, that a
minority of scientists favoured the view of over-
all global cooling, and that the press
misrepresented scientific papers and failed in
their duty to provided balanced, informed
reporting.
Today, 97% of climate scientists believe that
the Earth is warming, that it is largely driven by
anthropogenic factors, and that the situation is
dire. Few of the minority believe in global cool
-
ing. Scientists know that temperatures have
risen since the onset of the Industrial Revolution,
that CO2 and other gases are the main driving
force, and that the fate of our planet now rests
in our hands.
The technology we now have and knowledge
we have accumulated were largely not available
thirty years ago. Climate sceptics will point to
the 1970s as 'proof' that climate change is a
hoax, but will fail to acknowledge the facts as
laid out by twenty-first-century science. The
Earth is warming fast, and has been steadily
warming since the mid 1800s when the indus-
trial revolution began – of that there is no
question.
The real question now is whether the public
will trust the media to report the science.