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« Vulture funding? | Main | All quiet on the climate front »
Category: climate communication
Posted on: March 7, 2008 4:53 PM, by William M. Connolley
My scientific swansong is a paper with Tom Peterson and John Fleck about the famous 70's cooling myth. John and I wrote up a post for this on RC as the global cooling mole, and its now been added to wiki so it must be true :-).
Someone there has found but not fully ref'd two Science articles from the 50's that maybe predicted cooling, so there may be further to take this story. And of course, a full analysis of the old media coverage would be interesting.
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Comments
I don't know if you are already aware of this one (fiction, admittedly). It made a distinct impression on me at the time. "The Moving Snow", by Ian Weekley (1974). "The end of 1989 looked like being a bad winter. snow started to fall in the Lincolnshire wolds as early as October. And it went on falling. this was not just the start of another bad winter, but the beginning of a climate crisis that was dramatically to change the face of Britain...
[Nope, hadn't seen that one. Is it any good as a story? -W]".
Posted by: TonyH | March 9, 2008 4:48 AM
I don't recall if you've got Muller's Ice Age book:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/fth/gw.html
Down that page, Muller writes:
"Scientists realized that the ice age would eventually return. Some of them enjoyed scaring the public about the impending catastrophe. In Figure 1-7 we show the cover from a magazine of the 1940s ..."
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/Image1.jpg
There's a level of funny here rarely attained intentionally.
Posted by: Hank Roberts | March 9, 2008 9:36 PM
Here's the missing link that belongs in the middle of that prior post: http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html
The rest of that quote is
"... In Figure 1-7 we show the cover from a magazine of the 1940s showing the consequences of the return of the ice age to New York City. (One of the authors of the present book, RAM, saw this image as a child, and it made a lasting impression.) Unfortunately, the art genre of returning ice has been superceded, in the public forum, by paintings of asteroids about to hit the Earth, usually with a curious dinosaur momentarily distracted by the unusual scene. But, as we mentioned earlier, the more likely scenario for the early 21st century, is the continued gradual growth of global warming."
Those scientists* scared that kid. Shame on science.
Look what became of him as a result.
________________
*Gernsback was as much a scientist as Monckton is.
Posted by: Hank Roberts | March 9, 2008 9:42 PM
Nice swan song! BTW, I think wiki could use a "History of Climate Change Science" article.
Posted by: Brian Schmidt | March 11, 2008 4:59 PM
Clever use of Wiki for furthering one's research. I'd never thought of using it as a tool like that, maybe I'll look into it... but then I run the risk of getting Wiki-obsessed and distracted away from what I really should be doing. I'm like that, lol!
Posted by: Nin | March 12, 2008 8:54 PM
On the popular press stuff, this rant from Rush Limbaugh includes some references I hadn't seen before.
Posted by: Steve Bloom | March 12, 2008 11:46 PM