Survey says 70's Global Cooling Consensus is a Myth
The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists is a myth, according to a survey of scientific literature of the era. I found this story in Wednesday's online edition of USAToday by Doyle Rice. This subject has been previously brought up on numerous occasions within the comment section of this blog.
Indeed, major publications such as Newsweek, Time, the New York Times and National Geographic published articles in the 1970's about the possibility of a new ice age, but Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965-1979 and found the following.......
7 supported global cooling.
44 predicted warming.
20 were neutral in regards to future climate trends.
Excerpts from the USAtoday article...........
The study concludes, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
"I was surprised that global warming was so dominant in the peer-reviewed literature of the time," says Peterson, who was also a contributor to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report.
The research will be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
