The New Ice Age, Continued
The global cooling scare of a few decades ago is written off as a product of bad science, without much peer-reviewed support. But Maurizio Morabito went back and tracked down information on the 1961 meeting of the American Meteorological Association, which lamented … yes, the prospect of a cooling temperature.
Timely but alas flawed contribution by Thomas Peterson of NOAA, William Connolley of the British Antarctic survey and science reporter John Fleck, reporting on the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society” about the apparent lack of peer-reviewed papers predicting global cooling, between 1965 and 1979 (it’s reported here in Nature’s Climate Feedback blog).
Unfortunately, it really does look like Messrs Peterson, Connolley and Fleck simply have not looked well enough… or have conveniently restricted their search just enough to miss a 1961 article describing a Global Cooling consensus among scientists at a meeting supported also by…the American Metereological Association.
The article, written by Walter Sullivan for The New York Times (cited by Peterson et al. for his 1975 climate-related articles), refers to a 5-day Conference co-chaired by Rhodes W. Fairbridge of Columbia University and Charles G. Knudsen of the United States Weather Bureau, in the January of 1961.
The Sullivan article makes for a great read. The ongoing, decade-long temperature plateau may not be the equivalent of a new ice age, but it certainly deflates claims of rapid catastrophic warming. Forty years from now scientists might be similarly looking back in wonder at the unnecessary hysteria over expected warming that never materialized.