The quotation marks around "scientists" is appropriate here. I notice you have not cited extensively, if at all, from the professional peer reviewed literature of the 1970's. Of perusal of that literature would tell you there was no professional consensus on the issue of climate change. I already addressed this here http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/sho...3&postcount=16 . The 70's was 30-40 years ago. What field of modern science hasn't advanced through enormous strides in the last 40 years? In the 1970's computer models were in their infancy. Computers themselves were in their infancy. The memory and the computational speed that are required to numerically solve the complex partial differential equations that describe climate evolution just weren't available in the 1970's. Neither was the satellite data that now supplies a continuous feed of climatological and meteorological data that covers the entire globe as well as continuous feeds of data on solar output. The older, "traditional" sources of climate data (ice cores, trees rings and other fossil evidence) have also been more thoroughly investigated and more thoroughly understood. In the 70's no professional consensus was possible. Indeed in the 70's both cooling and warming were hypothesis under consideration. Even then warming was the more viable hypothesis, (since the greenhouse mechanism was well understood) though there wasn't yet a concern with runaway warming. Because of a local dip in temperatures the ice-age scenario captured the public's imagination. News sources then, as today, were eager to publish the latest possible doomsday hypothesis that wasn't yet ruled out by the then current evidence.Quote:
We were told by "scientists" that the world was heading into another ice age and we were all going to die.
Thirty to forty years later climate scientists are in basic agreement: the Earth is experiencing a climatic shift. Less of the heat radiated by the Earth's surface is making it beyond the atmosphere and escaping into space. These observations are quantitatively consistent with the predictions of climate models based on the chemistry and physics of insulating gasses in the atmosphere.
The deniers are desperate. One denying tactic is to cast aspersions. One such attempt was climategate. Independent investigations have exonerated the climatologists who have been maligned by the hackers (and their backers) who have illegally broke into the email records of several English universities in a vane attempt to dig for scandal that wasn't there. Another such attempt is to point to an 35 year old hypothesis, the "next-ice-age-hypothesis" which has been examined and eliminated and claim, "look what those nincompoop 'scientists' told us forty years ago!" Usually when a hypothesis can be eliminated it's called progress. Only a denier could spin it the other way. Yes, the deniers are desperate. Some cling to the claim there's no climatic heat imbalance at all. Some claim the entire fucking solar system is warming, based on evidence so scant it makes ones head spin. Some claim global climate change is a United Nations ploy to establish world government. That's what all this denying is really about: fear that there may be good reason for human beings to cooperate to secure their mutual welfare__fear that 'rational' self-interest may not be the panacea that libertarians claim it to be. Some people would rather several hundred million people die than change their 'world view'. Some people would rather several hundred million persons die then suffer a profit loss.