Alan Wilkie – well known TV weatherman on the Australian Channel 7 of a few decades ago. Enjoy the four scanned pages from his 1976 book describing global cooling and the associated bad effects breaking out here and there around the globe.
These days we are constantly badgered by utter twaddle about “global warming”. I am interested to hear readers views on what a “mainstream” informed person was saying three and a half decades ago. (Edited 6 Dec)
Our Changing Weather Patterns
Page 47
Page 48
Ice Ages
Page 50
Page 51
My reason for posting this just now is the fascinating 1974 CIA article uncovered by Maurizio Morabito.
The more things change , the more they stay the same.
As you say, a lot of what Mr Wilkie wrote was twaddle. But not nearly as bad as the twaddle we get today: Wilkie gives plenty of recognition to uncertainty, and finishes on a very un-alarmist note. Also, in those days many people had the sense to realize that a lot of what they read in the field of popular science was mainly entertainment, or at least speculative. And if they didn’t have the sense, the authors at least knew how to cover themselves.
One remark at the end of Wilkie’s article is very interesting: “after an examination of tens of thousands of [satellite] pictures taken between 1960 and 1970 it has been established that the north polar ice cap has spread over an additional area of some 4 million square kilometers, which is though-provoking to say the least, as it is an increase of 12% in ten years!”
Now if that is true then the maximum loss of arctic sea ice in recent years – it was down 3 million square kilometers from the average for a few days in the fall of 2007 – is still smaller than an INCREASE registered in the 1960s. link
Does anyone know of any attempt to reconstruct arctic sea ice extent back to the beginning of satellite records in 1960?
Don’t forget the book “The Cooling” by Lowell Ponte published in 1976. Stephen Schneider highly recommended it and on the back cover says “Lowell Ponte’s provocative work is a good place to start.”
I have a copy of “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice” published in 1974 by the BBC and written by New Scientist Editor Nigel Calder. You cant get any more main stream than that!
From the jacket blurb “The threat of a new ice age turns out to be more ominous than the experts thought, even a few years ago. Ice sheets have buried northern lands far more frequently and rapidly than anyone had imagined until now – and a great glacier marched up the English Channel”.
The book itself is a bit more balanced.
Newsweek ran this story about global cooling in 1975:
Sorry, my previous link didn’t work. Here’s the URL.
denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
It wasn’t only Newsweek. National Geographic and even Readers’ Digest ran stories on this…
I made this image up some time back to record what the “consensus” was back then on temperature trends.
[Img]http://i34.tinypic.com/2wei1j9.jpg[/Img]
It shows the Newsweek, Readers’ Digest and National Geographic temp trend graphics as well as (what I believe) is the source doc – the 1975 NAS report “Understanding Climatic Change: A program for action”.
The interesting thing is that (albeit for Northern Hemisphere) the mid 20th C “hump” was much more pronounced – up by some 0.3C compared to say HadCRU / GISS.
I have wondered for some time if (at least some of) the “divergence problem” can be attributed to the adjustment of the station temps… Maybe, just maybe the “raw” data comes out of CRU and the effect of the adjustments can be verified.
Sources for above:
Fig A: Figure A.6 from p148 of the 1975 NAS report “Understanding Climatic Change: A program for action”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DSCN4904-nas-a.6_crop.jpg
Fig B: Newsweek, April 28 1975 “The Cooling World” p 64
firstfriday.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/newsweek-global-cooling.jpg
Fig C: Readers’ Digest, March 1977 What’s Happening To Our Climate
newsbusters.org/node/12137
Fig D: National Geographic, November 1975 pp 614-615
www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/DSCN1557-nat-geog-1976_1200x900.JPG
Since I put the mosaic image together, the NAS Document has now been put online at Google Books:
books.google.com/books?id=wD0rAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA148&dq=budyko+1969+fig+a6&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
cheers
Saturday Review also had a nice article “The Ice Age Cometh” by James D. Hays in their April 1973 issue.
In the New York Times on May 21, 1975, an article called “Scientists ask why world climate is changing: Major cooling may be ahead” appears.
I think Fortune and other magazines also had articles along these lines.
Sawyer, J.S., 1972: Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the “Greenhouse” effect. Nature, 239, 23-26.
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v239/n5366/abs/239023a0.html
Broecker, W.S., 1975: Climate change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming? Science, 189, 460-463.
blogs.ei.columbia.edu/climate/files/2009/10/broeckerglobalwarming75.pdf
Wilcox, H.A., 1975: Hothouse Earth. Praeger Publishers, New York, 181 pp. Will, G.F., 2004: Global Warming?
www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7269582
do you know if Peter Coyne is still alive – Yes he was a day or so ago Graeme – do you want me to pass him your email?