Why scientist used to believe in a new ice age in the 70's and now they believe in global warming?

Have you been watching "A Financially Convenient Hunch"?

Scientific fact can change (ie, the world is flat, the elements are earth wind water and fire) but scientific imaginary situations and speculations change daily.

You should take care of the environment, but not because of some made-up apocolyptic threat. Do it because you like living in it.

Don't worry about it, in 30 years someone on yahoo answers will ask why in 2007 scientists thought we would die of global warming when there was no scientific backing, and in 2037 they will be concerned about global average temperatures (not warm, not an ice age) that will cause the world to be destroyed because a meteor named Goldilocks will say that it is just right and come to join us.

The idea that the Earth was going to plunge into another ice age in the 70's was entirely propagated by the media. It had very little, if any, support from the scientific community at all. However, many global warming skeptics argue that, because scientists predicted an ice age forty years ago, they can't be trusted to be correct now.

There was a cooling trend, seen from the 1940's from the 1970's, during what historians call the "Post-war economic boom". The cooling was brought about by increased levels of aerosol pollutants, such as sulfates used as refrigerants, and a slight increase in volcanic activity (dust and sulfates released in volcanic eruptions block sunlight from hitting the planet's surface and cause cooling). But it was hardly enough to throw the planet into an ice age.

In fact, even in the 70's scientists were aware of human caused warming and were far more concerned with it than any small cooling trend (Global warming theory has been around since the late 19th century, when Swedish Chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated the effect a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would have on the climate). The idea of an imminent ice age was almost laughable. There were no major academies or scientific institutions supporting it, there was no widespread scientific consensus over the issue, and there were no peer reviewed articles written on the subject.

Knowing this it seems somewhat ridiculous that skeptics bring the issue up at all. Even if scientists =had= wrongly predicted an ice age in the 70's, that wouldn't be grounds to simply dismiss the entire theory of global warming offhand.

"Scientists" (the whole community) didn't say that in the 70s.

It was a just a few guys with no good data and no backing from the scientific community. They were, in fact, just like the "skeptics" of today. More details:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

Compare that to the almost complete agreement of the scientific community today. Solid proof below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570...

"The fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists. I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist."

Dr. James Baker - NOAA

Think this guy can't understand data, and is easily fooled?

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)

Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut and the first Commander of the Naval Space Command

It is true..I was a young adult in the late 1960s and me and my friends lived through it and know what happened. People started complaining that leaded gas was contributing to smog, polltution and global cooling..They took the lead out of the gas then came the catalytic converter on cars. In 1974 the cars were made smaller in part because of the gas crisis and because a 4 cylinder car polluted less than a 8 cylinder. We have lived through it and know what happened..The global warming crowd has an agenda and they're pushing it

Bebop they persist with one yet another for the period of sessions of 100s of great quantities of years - in terms of multi-century tendencies they do no longer. that's been warmer than it rather is today for different multi-century sessions because of the fact the final Ice Age, we don't understand the total clarification why, yet we do understand that CO2 stages have been decrease. that doesn't disprove AGW. It does recommend you may no longer purely infer it from the present correlation. And it is your burden of knowledge to coach that the activities you desire to chop back reason the wear in question, no longer mine to justify doing what i desire to do. besides, in terms of the hundred thousand 3 hundred and sixty 5 days cycles, the temps rose first, then the CO2 stages went up. additionally Venus' ecosystem is ninety 8% CO2 and greater greenhouse gases. Ours is one centesimal of a p.c.. And Venus whilst needless to say uninhabitable is approximately 14 cases as warm. So, some hundred thousand cases greater greenhouse gases gets you 14 cases as warm - - there are patently diminishing returns fantastically early on - - that would desire to look to recommend which you will no longer infer that a upward push of a million/11,000th of the ambience is going to be cloth - that's yet you may no longer infer that, and that inference is what you have have been given.

One guy predicted an ice age back in the 1970's, and he wasn't even an important climatologist, he was a weather analyst for the CIA.. I'm still waiting for the people who say all the scientists are wrong about a really straightforward trend, other than endleswsly recycling their same old set of myths. It seems they like the sound of their own voices 'way too much to do that.

Hey Wazup. I think back in the 70s, it was just a few in the scientific community that were talking about an up coming ice age. Just as it is now, there is only a small minority that are pushing the global warming thing. I think the media makes it look like one big voice because they won't air anyone else's facts or opinions. Therefore, we get the impression this is bigger than it really is - which is one thing the media wants. Who's going to pay attention to the news media if everything is alright? CNN is great at this type of manipulation. Good question.

So interesting to see all these opinions, considering almost all the opinions are just rant. Like for example, people are stating there was no evidence for a supposed Global Warming and Ice Age coming.

FALSE!!! LOL, there is data that shows the CO2 levels as well as the global temperature from soil samples and tree rings for the last 453k years.

Reports and data all come from the 50's, 60's, and 70's, so this is not a new theory or propoganda based claim, this is from studies and research as well as the orbital points of Milankovitch co-insides with the other data relating to the comings and goings of Ice Ages.

THIS IS NOT A THEORY!!!

This is only a re-iteration of data results found, and a relationship being shown from our planets orbital mechanics that the Ancient Greeks knew about, Mayans, peoples of India, and Egyptian astronomers...

*** Hipparchus has been credited with discovering precession of the equinoxes, although evidence from cuneiform tablets suggest that his statements and mathematics relied heavily on Babylonian astronomical materials that had existed for many centuries prior. The exact dates of his life are not known, but astronomical observations attributed to him by Ptolemy date from 147 BC to 127 BC.

(36" per year; the rate accepted today is about 50" per year or 1° in 72 years)

Orbital mechanics require that the duration of the seasons be proportional to the area of the Earth's orbit swept between the solstices and equinoxes, so when the orbital eccentricity is extreme, the seasons that occur on the far side of the orbit (aphelion) can be substantially longer in duration. Today, northern hemisphere fall and winter occur at closest approach (perihelion), when the earth is moving at its maximum velocity -- while the opposite occurs in the southern hemisphere. As a result, in the northern hemisphere, fall and winter are slightly shorter than spring and summer -- but in global terms this is balanced with them being longer below the equator. In 2006, the northern hemisphere summer was 4.66 days longer than winter and spring was 2.9 days longer than fall.[10][citation needed] Apsidal precession slowly changes the place in the Earth's orbit where the solstices and equinoxes occur (this is not the precession of the axis). Over the next 10,000 years, northern hemisphere winters will become gradually longer and summers will become shorter. Any cooling effect in one hemisphere is balanced by warming in the other -- and any overall change will, however, be counteracted by the fact that the eccentricity of Earth's orbit will be almost halved[citation needed], reducing the mean orbital radius and raising temperatures in both hemispheres closer to the mid-interglacial peak.

I CHALLENGE YOU TO LOOK AT THE FOLLOWING LINK AND TELL ME THE LAST 400 YEARS OF ASTRONOMY IS JUST PROPIGANDA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_orbit

Almost every known Astronomer and physicist is here on this page with various formulas and observations applied...

If you have any more questions or wish to discuss this issue please feel free to contact me at gordonrutherford@live.com...

Kind Regards,

And BTW, not saying I am perfect, but if your going to make such bold statements, at least look things up first. It took me longer to type this than to find all the proof backing this up. LOL

They didn't. Very few scientists made any kind of long-term speculation based on the short-term global cooling which ended in the '70s. Most of the speculation was made by the media. Read the links below for further details.

Maybe because they've learned things in the last 30 years, and because super-computers for climate-prediction models didn't exist in the 70s. The first microprocessor chip wasn't even invented until 1971, after all. I had a professor who was doing climate modeling in the 80s, and the best he had to work with was an IBM 370, which probably had less memory than the cell phone in your pocket. Better tools means a greater ability to interpret the data, and while the data may not have changed, the ability to interpret it has.