We are entering what is usually the hottest part of summer, and there is considerable discussion of how much hotter it might get in the future, thanks to global warming.
Thirty years ago, there also was a lot of concern about climate change. But some people remember that the concern then was the opposite — that the Earth was about to enter a new ice age.
It wasn’t as simple as that.
The November 1976 issue of National Geographic ran an extensive article titled “What’s Happening to Our Climate?” The answer, essentially, was: Who knows?
The U.S. National Science Board was quoted as having said, in 1974, that “During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.” And then in 1975, the National Science Foundation said, “Were the cooling trend to reverse . . . the Earth could warm relatively rapidly, with potentially catastrophic effect.”
And that was on just the first two pages of a 40-page layout.
So it isn’t as though scientists have changed their minds about what’s happening to global temperatures. And it isn’t true that everyone was predicting cooling 30 years ago. The main difference now appears to be that more scientists — and others — are convinced that they know what’s going to happen, and it’s not good.
What we are expected to accept as consensus now is that it’s getting hotter, we humans caused it, and we had better do something to “stop” global warming. Skepticism is out of favor.
National Geographic definitely was right about one prediction. “The COb level is already up more than 10 percent since 1850,” it said. “By the year 2000, experts say, it may have risen another 20 percent, enough to cause a 0.6 C (1 F) rise in average world temperature.”
That’s exactly what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in an October 2001 report: “. . . global temperatures have risen over the past 100 years by 1.0 F (0.6 C). The rise in temperature has been more rapid during the past 25 years, a rate approximately three times greater than the century-scale trend.”
That 1976 article also recognized a new “wild card” — human activity. It “may be beginning to affect weather and climate on a par with natural forces,” National Geographic said.
As one scientist told the magazine writer, “If nature is indeed trying to pull us into another ice age, we’re possibly warming up the world an equal amount with our carbon dioxide. I’d like to know which way it will go, for my grandchildren’s sake.”
Nature, though, still has a lot to say about what happens.
Mount Pinatubo’s messy eruption in 1991 dimmed sunlight around the world for months, cooling average temperatures by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit. But that’s nothing compared to 1815, when an Indonesian volcano caused global temperatures to fall 5 degrees. In parts of the northern hemisphere, 1816 became known as “the year without a summer.”
So, despite the “scientists have been wrong before” dismissive argument of the skeptics, there certainly was no consensus 30 years ago that the planet was entering another ice age. And the Earth is indeed getting warmer, though perhaps not as dramatically as the alarmists would prefer — to bolster their crusade for drastic self-sacrifice.
The peril is still more political than climatic. To argue that global warming must be “stopped” invites despair, surrender and a return to bad habits if the temperature continues to creep up despite our best efforts.
Cool the rhetoric. Stop preaching doom. Preach abatement and adaptation instead.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
