[BartSimpson]

Tricks Tricks:

Newsweek's correction of the above article, 2006.

https://www.newsweek.com/climate-change ... ils-111927

Yeah, fuck 'em. They don't get to undo what they did thirty years prior just because the PC goalposts moved from cold to hot.

[Tricks]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Tricks Tricks:

Newsweek's correction of the above article, 2006.

https://www.newsweek.com/climate-change ... ils-111927

Yeah, fuck 'em. They don't get to undo what they did thirty years prior just because the PC goalposts moved from cold to hot.

Political correctness? I wasn't aware that had anything to do with climate science.

[BartSimpson]

Tricks Tricks:

Political correctness? I wasn't aware that had anything to do with climate science.

I suppose then you've lived in a hole for the past twenty years.

[Tricks]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Tricks Tricks:

Political correctness? I wasn't aware that had anything to do with climate science.

I suppose then you've lived in a hole for the past twenty years.

More likely you and I have a far different definition of PC. For you, it's clearly anything you disagree with.

[llama66]

I've heard the Earth is warming since at least 1984 or 1985.

[N_Fiddledog]

You may have a point, Tricks. It may have moved beyond political correctness.

We're at the point now when the high priests of the Warmist faith are talking about imprisoning or at least deprogramming those who doubt the dogma.

That would be going beyond just hoping to shame the condemned as something akin to holocaust deniers.

But so far, I think Bart's right. If you're expected to feel shame as a doubter of something put forward as "the consensus" that would be getting penalized for the crime of being "politically incorrect."

[llama66]

I think 'discussing' the semantics of whether climate change is PC, detracts from the discussion of what the fucking planet is doing, is it warming? or is it cooling?. Both could be bad for us. We could either broil to death or we could freeze to death (in extreme cases).

[N_Fiddledog]

Is that what you wanted to discuss. Warming or cooling?

Best guess goes something like this.

If you mean this month, last measure says cooling.

If you mean over the last twenty years if depends on which data you want to use.

If you mean over the last 150 years available data says warming.

If you mean since the Holocene maximum - cooling.

If you mean over the life of the planet we seem cold.

[BeaverFever]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Here's an interesting article from Newsweek...

$1:

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 drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports

Punchline is the date: April 28, 1975

And how much of this thirty-two year old alarmism is echoed in what we hear today? The last paragraph sounds 'ominously' just like some of the claptrap we hear from the same people today.

An old trope that’s been circulating the conservo-sphere for over a decade. Here is the author’s response:

$1:

My 1975 'Cooling World' Story Doesn't Make Today's Climate Scientists Wrong

It's time for deniers of human-caused global warming to stop using an old magazine story against climate scientists.

Peter Gwynne, Contributor


(Inside Science) -- "The central fact is that, after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." – Newsweek: April 28, 1975

That's an excerpt from a story I wrote about climate science that appeared almost 40 years ago. Titled "The Cooling World," it was remarkably popular; in fact it might be the only decades-old magazine story about science ever carried onto the set of a late-night TV talk show. Now, as the author of that story, after decades of scientific advances, let me say this: while the hypotheses described in that original story seemed right at the time, climate scientists now know that they were seriously incomplete. Our climate is warming -- not cooling, as the original story suggested.

Nevertheless, certain websites and individuals that dispute, disparage and deny the science that shows that humans are causing the Earth to warm continue to quote my article. Their message: how can we believe climatologists who tell us that the Earth's atmosphere is warming when their colleagues asserted that it's actually cooling?

Well, yes, we should trust them, despite the views of detractors such as comedian Dennis Miller, who brought my story to The Tonight Show in 2006. Several atmospheric scientists did indeed believe in global cooling, as I reported in the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek. But that was then.


Dennis Miller, left, during an interview with Jay Leno on December 5, 2006
Margaret Norton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

In the 39 years since, biotechnology has flowered from a promising academic topic to a major global industry, the first test-tube baby has been born and become a mother herself, cosmologists have learned that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather than slowing down, and particle physicists have detected the Higgs boson, an entity once regarded as only a theoretical concept. Seven presidents have served most of 11 terms. And Newsweek has become a shadow of its former self.

And on the climate front? The vast majority of climatologists now assure us that Earth's atmosphere is not cooling. Rather it's warming up. And the main responsibility for the phenomenon lies with human activity.

"There's no serious dispute any more about whether the globe is warming, whether humans are responsible, and whether we will see large and dangerous changes in the future – in the words of the National Academy of Sciences – which we didn't know in the 1970s," said Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He added that nearly every U.S. scientific society has assessed the evidence and come to the same conclusion.

The recent National Climate Assessment takes an equally emphatic view.

"What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now," it states. "While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases."

I'm sure it's clear by now that I accept the views of the National Academy, National Climate Assessment, Mann, and the huge majority of his fellow climatologists. Nevertheless, websites devoted to denying the existence of human-caused climate change – or at least promoting the idea that nothing should be done about it – continue to use my article to validate their thinking. In fact the article has reportedly become the most-cited article in Newsweek's history.


NASA and the National Climate Assessment

Those that reject climate science ignore the fact that, like other fields, climatology has evolved since 1975. The certainty that our atmosphere is indeed warming stems from a series of rigorous observations and theoretical concepts that fit into computer models and an overall framework outlining the nature of Earth's climate.

These capabilities were primitive or non-existent in 1975. In fact my report reflected a real strand of climatological thinking back then. I was far from the only science writer to cover the possibility of global cooling. Time, Science News, and the New York Times, among other media outlets, wrote about it, because some climate scientists had genuine reasons to believe that the global climate might be cooling and had published scholarly papers on the matter.[/b]

Speaking personally, though, I accept that I didn't tell the full story back then. Indeed, the issue raises questions about the relationship between science writers and scientists as well as the attitudes toward science of individuals with political agendas.

"Three independent strands of science at the time got conflated in the articles: analyses of direct temperature data that showed a decline in temperatures particularly over the Northern Hemisphere since the 1940s; a very high level of pollution by sulfate aerosols that cooled the planet; and evidence that the timing of ice ages was caused by wobbles in Earth's orbit," explained Gavin Schmidt, deputy chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Indeed, he added, "some parts of the article are OK even today."

At the same time, however, evidence had emerged of increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a gas known to warm the atmosphere.

"The science was sort of speculative [in 1975]," Mann recalled. "A National Academy of Sciences report concluded there wasn't enough information at that particular time because we had two competing forces – aerosols and greenhouse gases. It wasn't entirely clear which would win out."

Ironically, efforts to clean up the atmosphere made it possible to resolve the scientific mystery and convince climatologists that human activity is warming the planet. Policy actions such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 in the United States and similar initiatives in other countries aimed to reduce the amount of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere. Since those compounds primarily reflect heat, their reduction effectively gave carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases more control over the Earth's temperature.

NASA scientist James Hansen was the first to sound the alarm. In 1988, he pointed out that a sort of Faustian bargain had cleaned up the atmosphere but at the cost of worsening the greenhouse problem.

(Click image to enlarge)

Climate Change Timeline

Hansen and other climatologists began to develop models of the climate which showed the influence of human activity, via the burning of fossil fuels, on global temperatures.

Observations and analyses since then have confirmed and strengthened the models and the broad understanding of climate change, along with the portion that's due to human activity. Richard Somerville, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego, summarized the findings in an email.

"There are many lines of observational evidence that the world is warming, including globally rising air and ocean temperatures, retreating glaciers worldwide, increasing sea level, decreasing Arctic Sea ice extent, and mass loss on the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica," he wrote. "In addition, an entire new body of climate science called 'detection and attribution' convincingly shows that the observed climate changes have distinctive space-time patterns that are consistent with causes due to human activities."

The counterattack had started by the beginning of the 1990s. The purported evidence against global warming included the news articles on cooling by myself and others.

Some commentators, such as Dixy Lee Ray, former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, asserted that the articles represented climate scares that inevitably turned out to be untrue – as would the idea of global warming, they asserted.

Others took a less subtle route. The articles proved, they argued, that the atmosphere was cooling and that there was no reason to change that conclusion. In that view, climate science never changes.

However, both types of warming deniers, along with policymakers who have consistently opposed any regulation designed to reduce acid rain, the destruction of the ozone layer, and other perceived ills, have consistently used the articles – particularly mine – as ammunition.[/b]

But that's just one line of attack. Mann suffered another starting in 1998, after he published an article in the journal Nature; that included a "hockey stick" model that demonstrated a dramatic increase in the rate of recent global warming.

"I was at the receiving end of the attacks from many of the same individuals, think tanks, and organizations implicated in past attacks on other climate scientists, such as [late] climatologist Steve Schneider," he wrote in an email. "The attacks on climate science and on me specifically have escalated for a simple reason: As the scientific evidence becomes clearer and the threat becomes clearer, it takes yet more disinformation and propaganda to obscure the truth. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by fossil fuel interests seeking to muddy the waters. That has, in turn, provided cover for politicians doing their bidding in opposing any attempts to regulate carbon emissions."

Opponents of Mann and his fellow climatologists also seek to highlight areas of disagreements among climatologists. Certainly those disagreements exist. But they don't affect the reality that human activity is the primary trigger of warming in recent decades.


Take, for example, research on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather.

"It is a very nuanced subject, and a legitimate controversy," Mann said in an interview. "There really are different schools of thought, each of which are credible and making arguments in good faith. Jennifer Francis at Rutgers argues that there is a connection with loss of sea ice, and others are skeptical."

Schmidt agrees.

"It is a genuine debate," he said. "Scientists don't just sit around congratulating ourselves on what we've done. We look for things at the cutting edge between known and unknown. It's a complex terrain and that's what makes it interesting."

Certainly, the disputes have become more nuanced. But their existence provides opponents of scientific findings that they find unpopular with opportunities to muddle the facts.

"The American political system has always had a rather odd connection to the role of expertise," Schmidt added. "There's a clear strand in American discourse that is anti-intellectual and anti-expertise."

While the affair reveals much about the relationship between politics and science, it also casts a shadow on science writing.

"There's too much handwaving in science journalism," Schmidt noted. "Scientists don't spend a lot of time when talking to journalists about what their research doesn't mean. One of the fault lines between science and journalism is how you pull together the bigger picture. So a reticence on the part of scientists to fill in the big picture, and over-enthusiasm on the part of journalists to say what does it all mean, means that the journalists don't get it quite right."

Here I must admit mea culpa. In retrospect, I was over-enthusiastic in parts of my Newsweek article. Thus, I suggested a connection between the purported global cooling and increases in tornado activity that was unjustified by climate science. I also predicted a forthcoming impact of global cooling on the world's food production that had scant research to back it.

The messages for science writers are to ask questions beyond the obvious and to seek out what the science doesn't imply as well as what it does. If I had applied those lessons back in 1975, I might not now be in the embarrassing position of being a cat's paw for denial of climate change.

Over my career I've covered subjects as diverse as cell biology, the world of physics a century after Einstein's birth, space commerce, and World Cup soccer. I've won prizes for my writing, including a lifetime award from the American Chemical Society. But I fear that my obituary will be dominated by that single article in Newsweek.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/my-1 ... ists-wrong

[DrCaleb]

Nope, sorry Beave. In Denier land, you can never take back a claim you made, even if better data is found to exist.

[raydan]

...and that's why the world is flat.

[BartSimpson]

Tricks Tricks:

More likely you and I have a far different definition of PC. For you, it's clearly anything you disagree with.

Political correctness is what it is.

Forty years ago it was fashionable to blame global cooling on industrial capitalism and then to propose the solution of global socialism.

Now it's fashionable to blame global warming on industrial capitalism and then to propose the solution of global socialism.

The politically correct part, as you may have noticed, is that the solution to every non-problem is global socialism.

And when people vote against that solution (as in the USA) the scions of political correctness lose their fucking minds and start screaming for blood.

[N_Fiddledog]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Nope, sorry Beave. In Denier land, you can never take back a claim you made, even if better data is found to exist.

Yeah Beave, the world is going to be destroyed by fossil fuels because cigarettes.

Another interesting one from the global socialists. Now tell us the one about Lysenko and how socialists will never use faux science for political purposes.

[Tricks]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Tricks Tricks:

More likely you and I have a far different definition of PC. For you, it's clearly anything you disagree with.

Political correctness is what it is.

Forty years ago it was fashionable to blame global cooling on industrial capitalism and then to propose the solution of global socialism.

No, it wasn't. There was no consensus among climate scientists like there is now. They weren't sure if the particulate would have more of an effect of reflecting the IR heat from the earth, or stopping the sun's energy from making it through the atmosphere. There were proponents of both sides. One side has clearly won, because of substantial evidence. Also, the sides were not even remotely even. Estimates put the literature coming out in support of it at about 10%. So no, it wasn't politically correct. It wasn't correct at all. And it was a deep minority that believed it.

$1:

The politically correct part, as you may have noticed, is that the solution to every non-problem is global socialism.

Global socialism? And you call us chicken littles. Drastic measures are needing to take place because no one is fucking doing anything in the largest carbon producing countries. You've got tiny places like iceland having near 100% green energy production. And you have complete gong shows of countries like china and the USA fucking it all up. Your entire generation is putting it's head in the sand while my generation is look at our future, and our kids' futures being fucked. Sorry if that offends your dumbfuck generation, but frankly, we don't give a shit. How's that for PC?

[Tricks]

Tricks Tricks:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Tricks Tricks:

More likely you and I have a far different definition of PC. For you, it's clearly anything you disagree with.

Political correctness is what it is.

Forty years ago it was fashionable to blame global cooling on industrial capitalism and then to propose the solution of global socialism.

No, it wasn't. There was no consensus among climate scientists like there is now. They weren't sure if the particulate would have more of an effect of reflecting the IR heat from the earth, or stopping the sun's energy from making it through the atmosphere. There were proponents of both sides. One side has clearly won, because of substantial evidence. Also, the sides were not even remotely even. Estimates put the literature coming out in support of it at about 10%. So no, it wasn't politically correct. It wasn't correct at all. And it was a deep minority that believed it.

$1:

The politically correct part, as you may have noticed, is that the solution to every non-problem is global socialism.

Global socialism? And you call us chicken littles. Drastic measures are needing to take place because no one is fucking doing anything in the largest carbon producing countries. You've got tiny places like iceland having near 100% green energy production. And you have complete gong shows of countries like china and the USA fucking it all up. Your entire generation is putting it's head in the sand while my generation is look at our future, and our kids' futures being fucked. Sorry if that offends your dumbfuck generation, but frankly, we don't give a shit. How's that for PC?

And yes Canada should be on the list of gong show countries not doing enough.