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And that is the case in climate studies, thermometers are frequently placed in locations that introduce errors, so the data has to be adjusted; the locations are not spatially uniform so the data has gridded; and on top of all that, the thermometers recorded Tmin and Tmax so historically the data point, Tave was the midpoint between Tmin and Tmax. The reality is any real direct measurements is very remote to climatology.

Your post makes a

( ) theoretical (X) specious ( ) crackpot ( ) incoherent

argument denying anthropogenic global warming. You are wrong. Here is why you are wrong.

(X) Your post contains one or more logical errors
(X) Logical fallacy
(X) Your post contains one or more factual errors
( ) Online searching has failed to find scientific support for the posted theory(s)
( ) Your source or reference is not from the field of climate science
( ) Your source actually never said that
(X) Citation please
( ) An idea is not responsible for the people who support it
( ) The mothership is not coming to save us
( ) Please use a keyboard that you know

Specifically, you fail to understand that

( ) Global warming is a long-term global trend
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate

( ) Local trends have little to do with long-term global trends
( ) Short-term trends have little to do with long-term global trends
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_uncertainty_analysis

( ) Peak temperatures only happen every once in a while
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

( ) The Earth is warming up
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasa-giss_1880-2009_global_temperature.svg

(X) Surface temperature measurements are valid and meaningful
(X) http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/temperature-record-reliability-attack.php

( ) Other planets are not warming up
( ) http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/theres-global-warming-on-mars-too.php

( ) The sun is not warming up
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar-cycle-data.png

( ) CO2 levels have increased 35% in 150 years due to human activity
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

( ) Factors other than CO2 also affect climate
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

( ) The absorption of infrared radiation by greenhouse gases is well understood
( ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

( ) Water vapor is fully represented in all climate models
( ) http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/climate-scientists-hide-water-vapor.php

( ) Scientists did not predict an ice age in the 70s
( ) http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

( ) CO2 fertilization effects are far too weak to offset current rates of increase
( )

One article in a non-scientific rag equals major concern? Don't think so.

You probably weren't even alive back in the 70s,
Don't go making a bet on that with me.

but I was
As was I.

and I remember it very well.
Pfffft. Apparently not.

I was in college working on degrees in biology and chemistry
Apparently, getting your "science" from TeeVee.
"Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No.
If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here."
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

gewg_

In 1975, American Scientist, Nature, and New York Times were publishing story after story about the imminent New Ice Age that would plunge the world into subfreezing temperatures for the next 100 years.

That's not true, please check your sources again. Some pop sci pieces on the subject appeared, but no serious scientist ever claimed that a new Ice Age was imminent.

You can read about the history of the 1970s global cooling scare on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Here's Newsweek talking about its own coverage of the issue, and quoting William Connolley:

The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today.

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/72481

And finally here's Connolley himself:

Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No. If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here.

From http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage

I'm referring to this quote: "I've now done some stuff with random series rather than the MBH proxy series. This has the advantage of allowing you to create as many proxies as you like. I'll hive that off to a separate page: here. What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a 'hockey stick' shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different."

In the other link, the eigenvalues are supposed to be accessible via a link, but I can't get figure 1 to display. Again, don't know if this is just me. Regardless, they're saying much the same thing. The eigenvalues of the MM fit to red noise aren't statistically significant.

But the real point is that the same answer emerges from more straight-forward analyses that don't rely on PCA at all (which avoids all these issues). In fact, as I've mentioned in my article, multiple independent analyses have been performed, all of which agree that the hockeystick shape is accurate.

It is asserted that if you use random, trendless data, you also get the same answer. See the graph near mid-page at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.archive.html.

I can't get that graph to load (but my net connection has been flaky lately so it could be my fault.) At any rate, it sounds like a claim that MM have made: that sending "red noise" into the MBH98 program results in a hockeystick. The main problem is that the extracted trend explains very little variance relative to the trend extracted from real data. Here's a 4-part primer on PCA to help people understand the basics.

Do you have any comment on the link I gave regarding the Nature correction?

I read some of it, and their complaints sound very similar to what other scientists go through when trying to get their research published. Peer-review is often an unpleasant process because it's based on confrontation, but this is true for everyone. In this particular case, I think Nature was right to reject their article based on the mountain of evidence against their claims.

Are you telling me the ice age scare was a media phenomenon? But of course global warming (not relabled climate change because the initial label was no longer accurate) could NOT be the same media phenomenon? Looks like you're choosing to only accept the evidence that support the argument you want to believe, doesn't it?

If you have any scientific basis for the ice age scare, feel free to prove the author of the website I linked to wrong. So far I've seen nothing, which makes it a media phenomenon.

AGW, on the other hand, has an enormous amount of scientific material published. This is a simple fact, regardless of whether you think the material is ocrrect or not. While AGW is also a media phenomenon to some extent, it's not primarily one. It's based on science, first and foremost.

I for one think this is all another media induced snowball supported by FLIMSY and narrowly viewed evidence. The pro-AGW theory has spawned cult-like behavior that allows no dissent, and to me that usually means that there's something wrong with the theory.

I agree that some AGW proponents can be overly zealous. So can AGW sceptics, who then become AGW deniers. I'm not really interested in ignorant lip-flappers from either side, only the science and the politics that is firmly based on science.

Here's what NOAA has to say about the holocene maximum:

In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today, but only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere. More over, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and know without doubt that this proven "astronomical" climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years.

Climatologists did not worry about an imminent ice age in the 70s. It's a myth.

I believe I read that the last time CO2 reached "400ppm", the Earth entered an ice-age, which is what the Russians were predicting in the early 70's.

Uh... got a link for that? As far as I know, the last time the earth had a CO2 concentration above 300 ppm was at least 500,000 years ago.

And I'm not sure what you mean by Russians. The ice-age in the 70's quote makes me think you're referring to global cooling, which can be traced back to Newsweek. There are aerosol-induced forcings that cause what is currently referred to as "global dimming" but they're not strong enough to counter the greenhouse gas effects.

The overpopulation scare turned out to be stupid scaremongering.

The planet is over its sustainable carrying capacity. The fact that we've been able to use unsustainable technologies to support too damn many people for a few years, doesn't mean we're not overpopulated - any more that the fact that you can still use your credit cards doesn't mean you're not broke.

The Global Cooling crisis also turned out to be more stupid scaremongering.

There never was a "Global Cooling" crisis. Never. There were a few extra-cold winters on the East Coast of the U.S. in the mid 1970s which got the popular press all chattering about a returning ice age, but there was never any scientific consensus, or even suspicion, of near-term global cooling. It's a talking point with no basis in reality, and you show your ignorance when you attempt to invoke it.

I think they tried something about a "silent spring" a little before that, but all that did was cause first-world nations to stop selling effective pesticides to the third-world nations who still needed them

You need to stop getting your science news from idiots like Michael Crichton, ok? DDT is still available for mosquito control, but indiscriminate use of insecticides fails for the same reason as indiscriminate use of antibiotics: species adapt.

>Don't take my word for it, look it up.

Always good advice.

Science News, October 25 2008, page 5: retrospective on 1970's climate change literature.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37590/title/Cooling_climate_%E2%80%98consensus%E2%80%99_of_1970s_never_was
citing a review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by climatologist Thomas Peterson and collaborators.

Peterson expected to find predictions of cooling and the reality of what was in the literature came as "a surprise to us", according to Peterson. "[S]keptics had repeated their arguments so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times".

Another place to look things up is this bibliography of 1970s climate science literature. Most of the papers of the time boiled down to "we don't know", with the occasional "this interglacial is due to end in the next couple of thousand years".

The kindest possible interpretation is that some people got Newsweek confused with the scientific literature and then somehow got hold of a megaphone.

Sorry, it was a dead-tree item. Also, they weren't predicting "Gobal Freezing" - they were predicting global warming back then as well. You may be thinking of "Nuclear Winter" ... :-)

As you can see from this link, scientists wren't predicting global freezing ...

1970's ice age predictions were predominantly media based with the majority of scientific papers predicting warming.

Most predictions of an impending ice age came from the popular press (eg - Newsweek, NY Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine). As far as peer reviewed scientific papers in the 1970s, very few papers (7 in total) predicted global cooling. What surprises is that even in the 1970s, on the back of 3 decades of global cooling, significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming due to CO2. More on 1970s science...

Rasool and Schneider's ice age "projection"

The main study cited by skeptics is Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate (Rasool 1971). The paper doesn't actually predict an ice age. Instead, it projects a possible scenario - if aerosol levels increased 6 to 8 times then sustained those levels for several years, it may trigger an ice age. Historically, what happened was aerosol levels fell. While it's unclear whether Rasool's calculations re aerosol cooling were accurate, one inaccuracy was they underestimated climate's sensitivity to CO2 by a factor of 3.

In the decades since their 1971 paper, many studies constraining climate sensitivity calculate that if atmospheric CO2 was doubled, global temperatures would rise around 3C. These studies employ different methods (modelling, calculations from empirical observations) looking at different time periods (the 20th century, the Holocene, past ice ages), different aspects of climate (surface temperature, mid-tropospheric temperature, ocean heat intake) and response to different forcings (volcanic, CO2, solar). More on climate sensitivity...

Or better yet, read this.

This is a complete myth.

The target of your own link refers to a NewsWeek article (April 28:th, 1975) which supports the cooling theory.

The article warns that important food producing areas of the world would be negatively affected by the lower temperature (North America and the USSR(!)).

Sorry, it wasn't: it was pretty speculative, and it got a little press, but that was all (see here). It was a briefly interesting theory at the time, and it's important to understand what causes ice ages, but the evidence shows that what's happening now is global warming.

You can read about the history of the 1970s global cooling scare on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

Here's Newsweek talking about its own coverage of the issue, and quoting William Connolley (whose website you linked above):

The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today.

From http://www.newsweek.com/id/72481

And finally here's Connolley himself:

Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No. If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here.

From http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

1976: National Geographic predicts global cooling.

No it didn't. Did you read the page you linked?

The parent is so far off base it's not even funny. Just take a look at the website the photo of the National Geographic Magazine was located at. (here's the page for the November, 1976 edition). Here's a summary of the website by the way:

The purpose of this page is to provide a counter to the mythology that "journals were stuffed full of articles predicting an imminent ice age in the '70's". [...] Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No

The parent is so far off base it's not even funny. Just take a look at the website the photo of the National Geographic Magazine was located at. (here's the page for the November, 1976 edition). Here's a summary of the website by the way:

The purpose of this page is to provide a counter to the mythology that "journals were stuffed full of articles predicting an imminent ice age in the '70's". [...] Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No

The same fucktards that ... predicted a global ice age during the 70s are the same fucktards behind global warming.

Cite please?

1976: National Geographic predicts global cooling.

Today: National Geographic predicts global warming.

It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.

Quite simply, there is no comparison.

If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.

(From: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222)

It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.

Quite simply, there is no comparison.

If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.

(From: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222)

It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.

Quite simply, there is no comparison.

If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.

(From: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222)

It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.

Quite simply, there is no comparison.

If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.

(From: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222)

>But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age.

That argument can be made, but only by ignoring the actual literature on climate from the last generation.

>30 years ago when my parents were in school they were saying we're headed to another Ice age.

See the bibliography of climate forecast literature from the 70s.

The world would be covered in ice by now.

Yeah, except that never happened. Basically all the media scare from that period can be traced back to a single 1971 paper by Rasool and Schneider — it was hardly some scientific consensus at the time. The link goes to someone who has made a thorough effort to track down all those media stories and the science they cite, as well as other scientific papers at the time. The idea that the climate community thought "the world would be covered in ice by now" — implying, of course, that they were wrong before and therefore can be safely disregarded now — is a myth being peddled by those with a political agenda.

Note that your link is, ah, shall we say "sparse" in its supporting links to the scientific literature.

We're talking about trade policy, and, wow, you managed to work in global warming, "the media" and George Soros. I salute you, winger.

Anyhoo.. you're totally wrong, or at least, at odds with the facts, since facts, truth, and debate in general occupy some fuzzy, extracranial space for people like you. The European Union numbers 500 million, or 2/3 larger than Am'rca, so there would most certainly be people to buy the damn imports. Europe's trade deficit with China is close to that of the United States, as you will find in this report by the Congressional Research Service dated January 4 of this year. Or you could just Google "china trade balance" and read the first 60 or so things that come up, it's all there.

Which brings me to what really tickles me pink about you, and others like you, viz. where do you get off being so self-righteous when you've obviously spent so little time actually reading primary source material and forming your own thoughts? Bill O'Reilly's talking points do not an argument make. Take that whole diatribe in the middle there, about global warming. Literally every point you make has been thoroughly refuted, and I'm not talking in a polemic, debatable fashion--you can go look these things up for yourself, and anyone who takes the time to do so (as I have) has to admit what you're saying is bunk. The 1970s Ice Age "consensus" consists of about 20 publications, almost all of them in the popular (not scientific) press. The notion that the medieval warm period compares to what we're seeing now is flat wrong. Solar radiation has been constant for the last 30 years, during which time the most significant warming has been recorded, so no correlation there. There is scant evidence that Mars is warming, and even if it is, human activity is a much more convincing explanation for our own warming. Etc. etc. etc.

That's not to say that convincing counterarguments to the anthropogenic warming hypothesis cannot be made, but these are not those, and you do not know them. Your slavish repetition of these canards makes it clear that you're not in the game for any sort of self-enlightenment, or desire to get at the truth, but simply to score points and massage your bruised ego by screaming at the George Soroses of the world. You're shouting at cars. Why? A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

From the article you quoted, >>the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s. This claim is like a Terminator, it just keeps coming back no matter how many times someone posts the bibliography of climate articles from the 1970s.

Here's the root cause of the hysteria, right here. The reason the claim keeps coming back isn't because it was science; it is because of the pot-stirring done by the popular media. Your average person doesn't read scientific journals. They read Newsweek.

Scientists today aren't generally predicting these horrific consequences; they're a lot more likely to snort and laugh and tell you it's entirely overblown. But when you come here, that is, interface with the public, there is post after post explaining how the human race is going to drown, and "we have to do something", and so on and so forth. This is also hysteria, and it is no more scientifically based than the nonsense from the 70's (and yes, absolutely it was nonsense, that's the entire point.) And of course the government uses it as a means to keep the citizens focused on anything but the reaming they're getting from the legislature, along with the other big three scare tactics, terrorism, pedophilia, and immigration. The popular media follows suit, and Joe Average jumps up and down, drools and shakes his fists in response.

As for the rest, I've made several other posts; please see them for more. I'm willing to discuss, but not to discuss the same things in several directions.

There hasn't been "dead silence" about Mars. I've heard about it a lot. A whole lot.

We don't have to rely on Mars to get data about solar energy flux over the last >25 years. We have direct satellite measurements of solar output. Check it out.

If we didn't have satellite data, we would want to check our natural satellite for solar-induced temperature changes. Unlike Mars, the moon doesn't have abedo changes like Mars does.

>the predictions of the climate models have been very, very poor

They've underestimated the amount of rise in sea level, true.

>CO2 rises lag warm periods

It's a positive feedback system, warmth brings out more CO2. The effect of CO2 and other "greenhouse" gases is simple physics, not climatology. Apply thermodynamics to the earth without the effect of a warming atmosphere and you would get a global average temperature about 30 Celsius lower than we've actually got. CO2, methane, and (here's where things get so complicated you need supercomputers) water vapor are the reasons the oceans aren't frozen over.

There are still big uncertainties about a system with multiple coupled feedback loops on different time scales, but the remaining uncertainties are how much, how fast, and how serious the effects will be.

From the article you quoted,
>>the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s.
This claim is like a Terminator, it just keeps coming back no matter how many times someone posts the bibliography of climate articles from the 1970s.

>but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

It will be a cold day in July before I take that argument seriously.

The average temperature in July is much more reliably known than the small-scale noise of tomorrow's weather.

The climate in Saudi Arabia is a lot easier to predict than the weather.

The people who keep bringing weather forecasts into the discussion have known all their lives to plan for cold and snow in winter, rain in the spring, and sunlight in the summer. They're not actually confused about the difference between climate and weather.

>alarmist climatologists are batting at exactly 0%. Why should I believe them now?

Are you referring to the fact that the previous IPCC report was wrong about sea level increases? They *underestimated* them. Or are you pulling out the old line about a cooling scare in the 70s? Here's a bibliography of scientific literature on climate from the 1970s.

A reasoned discussion has to be based on facts, and it has to use reason.

Quick question to ask yourself: what new information, if it were to be discovered, would change your mind? If you can't think of any, you're not engaging in reason. A climatologist would say "well, if someone found a previously unknown negative feedback mechanism with a time constant such that it hasn't taken effect yet, then we'd all have to lower our temperature forecasts".

Other quick question: what do you think is the baseline temperature increase from a doubling of CO2? If you think it's less than 2 Celsius, on what facts do you base that assessment?

If you don't like proposed policy measures, the response of reason is to propose different ones (build fission plants? Roll with the punches?) instead of pretending the scientific data is a conspiracy by people you hate.

Quick question: have you ever known a working scientist? Political party members get promoted for going along. Scientists only get PhDs, promotions, and tenure from publishing _new_ information.

Go ahead and do that Lexus-Nexus search and report back to us any articles in scientific journals. Wait, I'll save you the effort. Read Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No.

Timothy Ball and Richard Lindzen are idiots. Lindzen argues against Global Warming the same way Intelligent Design supporters argue against evolution. Timothy Ball uses the tired "1970's global cooling consensus" argument (see here and see here), specifically quoting Lowell Ponte, and he also overstates his qualifications. I also found another article by Ball where he lists reasons why global warming is good for Canada and actually says "Thank goodness for global warming."

It was more than a single article, but it was still only a few articles. The most prominent was in Newsweek, and also one in Time.

In fact, despite the media scare in the 1970s, scientists were not predicting a coming ice age. The general idea was that natural effects were causing a cooling, but there wasn't enough information to tell whether manmade effects would offset that cooling (from the greenhouse effect), or contribute further to it (from aerosols and particular matter). After 10-15 years it became evident that they produce an overall warming. Also, much of the manmade cooling effect was removed with tighter pollution controls.

You can read more about the history of "global cooling" here, here, and here.

I haven't, but William Connelley has been collecting information on this story since 2001. Unless he's just lying, so far no one has come up with citations of actual scientific papers supporting the imminient Ice Age story beloved of the tabloid press and global warming deniers.

Read here and here for more on what scientists themselves were saying at the time. In short, they knew there was a natural cooling trend, but they also knew they didn't have a good handle on manmade greenhouse gas emissions, and they also knew that their climate models weren't up to solid prediction. They said that on the basis of extrapolating the past trend alone, cooling would result. However, they also said that they couldn't predict cooling based on modeling, and that they didn't know whether anthropogenic emissions would outweigh the cooling. Some decades of continued data collection, improvement in statistical techinques, and better climate models later, they now can say with credibility that warming will continue over the next century at least.

P.S. Forgot my links to what scientists (as opposed to the media) were saying in the scientific literature at the time: here and here.

Bullshit

Welcome to the latest round of FUD from the petro-chemical/creationist/right-wing cabal.

Recently they've been taking quotes from articles on milankovitch cycles wildly out of context. They are also now 'finding' evidence for milankovitch cycles in the fossil record, and presenting them as new evidence of past non-anthropogenic global warming.

We know there have been past episodes of warming and cooling. We also have evidence that periods marked by a rapid tripling of CO2 levels are associated with mass extinctions (but I dont think Ive seen anything concrete on whether the die-off caused the CO2 rise or vice versa).

Bullshit

Well... either that or it will turn out to be something made up by 6 Washington DC lawyers like it is. I have a newsweek article with excerpts from the leading scientists of the 1970s that said we're all going to freeze to death.

A journalist sensationalizing a topic does not a "fact" make.

Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No

Climatologists don't write headlines, journmalists do. Climatologists know the difference between weather and climate. One good, or bad, year doesn't make much difference to climate.

global cooling alarmism of the 1970s.

Another media-created story. See Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No

NO, it DID NOT. Some newspapers printed stupid stories about that. Not "Science". Read this for the story of how this myth has propagated and been spread by various "warming sceptics".

>Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, a

Here's a bibliography of 1970s era scientific papers about climate change.

>We may or may not have a role in the warming.

If it's possible to put as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we have and *not* get a climate effect, that would be one of the most astonishing scientific results in history.

There is big difference between "this is a potential issue that needs more research" and journalists sensationalizing out their wazoo in popular rags.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

The Monbiot article explains
o The textbook Stefan-Boltzmann equation doesn't apply to a reflecting body
o The original article leaves out time-delayed effects
o The original article compares a graph of average worldwide temperature to a graph of European temperatures

>nothing to see

Plenty to see, even though it's not a point by point rebuttal. A point by point rebuttal would have mentioned Monckton's claim that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 70s. The facts are readily available and even summarized on the web at the global cooling bibliography.