The 1970s Cooling Scare Was Real
December 24, 2021
By Paul Homewood
An excellent summary of the 1970s cooling scare:
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“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I remember all that clearly. Maybe they were right about particulates. So we reduced them – smokeless zones etc and maybe that worked???
The result then could be our warming and maybe we are making that worse by continuing to reduce particulates.
Perhaps we should be burning more coal again to cool things down???
Excellent summary of what really happened back then.
During Earth Watch in 1970, the view was that pollution was causing global cooling and carbon monoxide was a real problem. So they decided to fit catalytic convertors to car exhausts to change the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. Aah, unintended consequences at work.
An excellent summary. Yesterday evening I watched a programme on BBC4 about the big freeze-up of winter 1962/63. I can recall that winter very well, but the programme showed it was much worse than I remember. No wonder people were concerned about cooling and another Ice Age. If we have another winter like 1962/63, the country will be far less able to cope and it will be a monumental disaster. Bring on global warming (or just UK warming).
I remember that winter (Northern England) and it was the pits but Dad always used to say 1947 was worse because there were still igloos in the streets in May.
Agreed. It was, indeed, the pits. And we didn’t have the cold weather gear that’s available now. Near where I lived, the TIDAL section of the river Dee on the Flintshire/Cheshire border froze. The tide then broke the ice into monstrous cubes which groaned as they ground against each other. The local saying was that the snow started on boxing day, and began melting at Easter.
You’re right, David, I was in the RAF at Bath and it was clearing runways from Boxing Day to Easter. We tried very many novel ways to clear them: two in particular come to mind – a jet engine mounted on a trolley towed behind a tractor while we erks tried to sweep the melt-water back into the jet stream while dodging flying ice blocks!! And then, a commandeered tarmac layer that would melt the ice and snow – which soon froze as sheet-ice which no aircraft could possibly land on, let alone take off from! Ah, this e were the days! (Not).
I too remember that winter. We had severe frosts for several days before Christmas and the Thames froze right across at Staines though not solid enough to walk on. It was rumoured that a car had been driven on the ice at Windsor. A local gravel pit had frozen enough to be walked on and I cycled there to explore on Boxing Day. The first small flakes of snow fell as I cycled home and we had a big fall that night. A popular detention towards the end of the spring term was to clear snow off the hockey pitch, it had been cleared and a fixture arranged but then cancelled following a further 4 inches of snow. We played no hockey that year but I believe it thawed rapidly during the Easter holiday.
A programme from the days when the BBC was a respected and trusted organisation – unlike the woke lying mess it has become.
I was kind of watching it but I noted that the power had failed and the problems that caused people. Worrying given we are just one problem away from grid failure now. And amazing as it may seem, Dr North has pointed out today that there are two gas power stations sitting idle touting for non-grid customers or to be dismantled and exported to where morons don’t run things. As the next generation auction is not until spring they can’t be used to prop up the grid. And being gas they are not going to be cheap to run at the moment. They plants went bankrupt due to government energy policy.
When you say that we are just one problem away from grid failure, you are spot on. Up here in South West Scotland, High on the hills and overlooking the Irish Sea, out local bit of the grid was exposed to two storms in the last few weeks. One of the properties just higher up than us was without power for a week. I have a generator with a completely separate circuit around the house which is also connected to inverters & a battery bank charged by a wind generator, my standby generator & solar array.
After sitting in the dark for a few days soon after moving here, I decided to take no chances.
There were heliocentric analogues of 1963 in 830 and 1010 AD when the Nile froze, a couple of severe winters in 1600 and 1601, and the 1783-84 winter. Extreme hot and cold events regularly occur at T-squares of the four gas giants. 1963:
I started working on this stuff as a grad student in the late 1970s. One of my great regrets is that I was a couple of years too late to start a research funding proposal: “There is a scientific consensus that global cooling presents a catastrophic threat’. Mind you, there was a bloke at Sussex who published two books within about five years of each other, one predicting catastrophic cooling and one predicting catastrophic warming. Capitalism at its finest.
I recall very well the ‘63 winter. It WILL happen again, but no one knows when
The wind prevailed from the north east for weeks on end, called Siberian winds at the time. First there was a covering of snow which facilitated temperatures to plunge way below zero (snow reflects the sun’s warmth) with ponds and rivers frozen so hard you could drive a tractor across. I pray that the wind continues to predominate from the south west. If the wind happens to lock from the north east in the next couple of months, with solar panels and windmills frozen up, the Texas incident would pale into insignificance. How can a government, even the one we are blessed with, leave us so exposed to such a potential disaster?
Stephen Schneider went from “the Coming Ice Age” in 1978 to “the Coming Heat” in 1981.
And as I recall Ibn (or Iben) Browning was touting his book “Climate and the Affairs of Men” (1975) in 1979 (a cold winter in USA) to talking about AGW in 1981.
Think you might want to row back on that frozen Nile claim, about as likely as the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. I saw this claim before and haven’t been able to find a scrap of evidence for it.
https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/852-21/mayor-de-blasio-signs-landmark-bill-ban-combustion-fossil-fuels-new-buildings Those who the gods wish to destroy!!!
Last week, CDN ran an article about peer review. I posit that Peterson, Connolley and Fleck (2008) is an exemplar of how it can be gamed.
https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2021/12/15/oh-what-a-tangled-web/
An excellent summary – what it leaves out is the reason why we have this switch-back between cooling/warming. Since the late 17th century we have been aware that predicting the future using algebraic methods is largely a fool’s paradise. Newton himself clearly demonstrates that in his ‘Principia’. The only systems that can be satisfactoraly approximated are those where the perturbations are very small and act over very long intervals of time. Where the perturbations are large and act over short periods with respect to the natural transient response of the system – the system becomes non-linear and the normal statistical assumptions of linear algebra no longer apply. We can retrospectively analyse data to discover trends over the period of that data but we cannot use that data to predict a future, unless we have a model that fully represents all the mechanisms acting on that data. This is clearly shown by Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, where by applying simple averaging to the data response, he wiped out all evidence of the mini ice age, the medieval optimum and any other relevant mechanisms acting on his data. Only a third rate mathematician could have made such an error. It is a well established fact that non-linear systems do not produce the same statistical responses as linear systems.
An excellent summary – what it leaves out is the reason why we have this switch-back between cooling/warming. Since the late 17th century, we have been aware that predicting the future using algebraic methods is largely a fool’s paradise. Newton himself clearly demonstrates that in his ‘Principia’. The only systems that can be satisfactorily approximated are those where the perturbations are very small and act over very long intervals of time. Where the perturbations are large and act over short periods with respect to the natural transient response of the system – the system becomes non-linear and the normal statistical assumptions of linear algebra no longer apply. We can retrospectively analyse data to discover trends over the period of that data but we cannot use that data to predict a future, unless we have a model that fully represents all the mechanisms acting on that data. This is clearly shown by Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, where by applying simple averaging to the data response, he wiped out all evidence of the mini-ice age, the medieval optimum and any other relevant mechanisms acting on his data. Only a third-rate mathematician could have made such an error. It is a well-established mathematical fact that non-linear systems do not produce the same statistical responses as linear systems.
What I want for Christmas:
Cheap energy
Energy independence for our country
Demand driven economy rather than rationing
Restoration of coal fired power stations and building of a few new ones.
Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy, safe and sane new year.
Amen to all of that sir!
Trump correctly pointed out that coal was easy to store and hard to destroy unlike most other forms of energy. That is why he said that it made sense from a national security standpoint.
I think it is too late for most UK coal fired power stations, but building new ones should be a priority.
I think it was supposed to have been Winston, in the 1940’s, who said “Britain is an island built of coal and surrounded by a sea full of fish. So why, with this Labour government, we have shortages of both coal and fish?”
The answer, of course (and to many other government-caused problems) is ‘Socialism’. Unless the UK gets a truly ‘Conservative’ government. the people will continue to shiver in the dark!
This stuff really did seem scary back then but the sudden change to a warming scare convinced me of two facts:
The climate science is in no way settled.
The science supporting how we measure global temperature is weak and is constantly being manipulated.
I was just coming out of grad school (first round) in botany. We knew that in geologic time, another ice age was a possibility. Fortunately, when I went back 12 years later for my PhD the warming nonsense had not yet hit (1981). People should take a semester of paleobotany. They would understand climate change in a big way.
Well said Joan, as George Santayana said, ‘those who do not understand their history, are doomed to repeat it!’
Two subjects here. The prediction of global cooling happened. The “scare,” not so much. I was concerned, but not scared. Unlike today, there weren’t than many who tried to exploit the prediction to scare people into accepting totalitarian government.
Government has done far more damage in the name of climate change than climate change could do.
See also: Covid-19.
Having lived in a house without electricity and regularly cut off by snow almost every winter; but cut off for most of the first three months of 1963 We were reduced to virtually living in one room, unfreezing pipes most mornings. We didn’t get down to burning furniture but were sawing old fence posts on a Just In Time basis when the thaw began. You also learn that sugar in tea is a luxury, powdered milk is lighter to carry than liquid, After the donation of lamb by a sheep farmer neighbour on several occasions in 1963 and other winters, I can’t eat lamb even in a curry.
The coming Ice Age was a worry, but the predicted global warming I welcome as trudging, wet and cold through snow two feet deep with a backpack of vital supplies is the stuff of nightmares. I still carry two coats in the car through the winter, the idea of having to use both at once is horrific.
I remember it well. I was at Imperial College back in those days and I remember that the much of the talk in the bar was about climate change, but in those days it was not global warming, but global cooling and the possible coming of another ice age. I don’t remember much about blaming human activity then, but I think pollution reducing solar heating was discussed so it would be ironic if we are now blaming pollution for global warming. looking back, It was all good fun and gave us something to discuss while killing brain cells in the bar.
Earth is colder when the solar wind is stronger, as in the early to mid 1970’s, because ENSO and the AMO change inversely to changes in the solar wind strength. The ocean modes were both much colder, but the UK was toasting.
Attribution to a cooling effect of aerosols is illogical, as the analogue effect of volcanic aerosol events, produces El Nino conditions. And also the basis is highly questionable, as low altitude aerosols exacerbate land heatwaves considerably. As with the hot UK summer of 1783 with fumes and dust from the Laki eruption, heavy air pollution with the record high UK max temperatures in Easter 2011 and through UK 22-27 Feb 2019, and in the Moscow 2010 summer heatwave with forest fire smoke in the air.
Another emotionally blackmailing appeal from UNICEF on the TV saying £5 would save the life of a child in Yemen. So their CEO’s salary could save nearly 100,000 children?
The British public has already contributed millions, our money squandered away by the government to the UN etc. There should not be a single starving child or family without clean water or access to health care or education anywhere in the world if the money had been wisely used. There should be an enormous pool of resources ready to go for emergencies. Where has all the money gone? Why do NGOs/charities even still exist?
Cost of COP26 – about £100 million (probably a lot more) – or enough to save 20 million children (supposedly). How long would man’s largely irrelevant contribution to climate change take to kill 20 million? Where is the sense of proportion, value for money, cost/benefit analysis?
Why does no one call out this nonsense? Why do people keep giving?
I think the same could be said of very many charities. I stopped giving to all of them preferring to look after family closer to home and websites like this one.
I’ve supported Mission Aviation Fellowship in the past. They don’t use chuggers! The prospective pilots have to take at least two years off their well paid jobs, and then raise the funds themselves, basically they’re funded by pals and churches.
During those years TIME magazine had issues devoted to the cooling and impending ice age. The magazine covers are regularly dismissed by global warming alarmists as a hoax.
However….
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,944914-1,00.html
CDN is excellent. Two more of their videos not to be missed:
http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm
An excellent piece of work by Daly on Schneider.