The Washington Post Continues to Publish George Will's Climate Change Disinformation at thinkprogress. Just keeping track of these things, you understand. I thought the 70's-cooling mole had been well whacked, but no.
Refs
* Now out in BAMS: The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus
* Global cooling: Inhofe talking sh*t* again
* Fuckem's Razor and the solution to the climate question
* etc. etc.
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This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I'm reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears…
The science of climate change is difficult and everyone agrees there are uncertainties and a contested point or two. But some points are asserted over and over again and aren't really contested. They are just plain false. Yet no matter how often they are refuted they rise again from the dead, true…
My paper with Tom Peterson and John Fleck (trailed here) is out in BAMS; you can get it now (for free! [Update: also direct from BAMS]).
Nice, isn't it:
And thats just the first page!
For those who weren't paying attention, you may wish to read:
The RC post that John Fleck wrote recently
My RC…
Note: This is another lightly revised version a piece I wrote some years ago at the oldest incarnation of this blog. It answers a question I get a lot - if people have been saying that the oil is going to run out for years, and if 30 years ago people thought we were going to have an ice age, why…
The First Rule of Denialism is that no mole stays whacked.
Moles never stay whacked and what gets debunked gets rebunked (was that Hank or Ray?).
Will mocking asks Huntsman if he would have believed climate scientists in the 70s on cooling-
Had Huntsman listened to the balance of the scientific evidence in the 1970s, he would be looking pretty good 30 plus years later. Contrast that with Will, who manages to still get what was said *then* wrong *today*, even with the benefit of hindsight!
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/the-conservative-face-of-sc…
Geo. Will musta flunked physics @ Union College.
> rebunking
Goes way back; frequently rediscovered.
> mole
http://www.pbfcomics.com/archive_b/PBF216-Thwack_Ye_Mole.jpg
"Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
Somewhat on-topic coffee-keyboard event, h/t CapitalClimate at thingsbreak
Re: The 1970s cooling mole ... and yet, I can remember sitting in a university lecture hall in 1974 or '75, listening to a senior professor reminding us that we were in an interglacial, and that there was no reason to assume that the ice sheets weren't coming back. There was even a discussion of which climate would be tougher for us; Eocene tropical forests, or a few hundred meters of ice over Des Moines. As I recall, his view was that Des Moines would prefer the Eocene. Granted, this fellow was no climate specialist, and hell, he may have been the only academic in North America taken in by the popular meme. But BAMS historical reviews notwithstanding, the cooling idea certainly was out there ...
[Yes indeed, it was out there. And various people have various recollections. But the issue (from my point of view at least) is what the science said at the time, and how scientists reported it -W]
It's incredible that there are people out there who believed the media about global cooling then and still believe the media today.
Certainly older, but not wiser.
Re: #8
It is true that (in the 70's) there was a view among *geologists* (not so much among climate scientists) that our current interglacial would be similar in length to the previous interglacial, the Eemian.
The Eemian did last only about 11,000 to 14,000 years, and because we're already about 12,000 years into the Holocene, it was considered possible or even likely that this could end any day. This view was amplified when it was found (in ice-cores) that the Eemian had had a quite sudden ending - it seemed as though it had receded suddenly into an ice age.
About fifteen years ago it became clear that the Holocene is MUCH more similar to the interglacial about 400,000 years ago - the orbital parameters are nearly identical. That interglacial did last WAY longer: at least 30,000 years.
In particular the eccentricity of the earth's orbit is the same now as it was 400,000 years ago while the other parameters are changing very slowly as well.
The view from climate science was quite different from geology: changes in the radiative balance of the atmosphere are occuring way faster than any changes in orbital parameters.
To put it bluntly - climate science was right (the majority expected warming) while geology was wrong (ice age).
Thanks, Bob, I found that perspective very interesting.