| Subject: |
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RealClimate on 1970s global cooling |
| Name: |
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Dave Gardner |
| Date Posted: |
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Jul 7, 08 - 5:14 PM |
| Email: |
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djgardner@btinternet.com |
| Message: |
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I took a rare look at the RealClimate blog the other day and noticed this post from a few months ago claiming that scientists didn't really believe in global cooling in the 1970s:
link1
It's based on a line of argument developed by William Connolley, the former British Antarctic Survey employee (who seems to have now left what one would have thought was his dream job to go and work in the IT industry), pointing out that in a sample of scientific papers from the mid-60s to the late-70s there were fewer papers predicting global cooling than global warming. So they would have us believe that the present day AGw consensus was also operating in the 1970s as well, and the global cooling scare of the 1970s was mainly an invention of the news media of the time.
This argument seems to me to be based on two implicit assumptions:
1) The number of scientific papers that you see on a topic is the main indicator of how much interest there was in a topic.
2) The scientific establishment had very little influence over the news media in the 1970s and so a minority scientific opinion could masquerade as the mainstream opinion.
In regard to the first assumption, my view is that the number of scientific papers that you see on a topic tends to reflect how easy it is to write a paper on that topic and how easy it is to get funding. Global warming very much lends itself to computer analysis and there was an explosion of interest in mathematical modelling in the 1970s. Also theoretical studies tend to be relatively cheap and so are easy to fund. Global cooling is more empirically-based and doesn't really lend itself to churning out papers - if you think global cooling is caused by a lull in sunspot activity then you pretty much have to wait years for the next lull in sunspot activity to occur.
To give an example of how the number of papers doesn't necessarily reflect the interest in a topic, consider seismology. The holy grail of seismology is actually to predict earthquakes but you wouldn't get that impression from an inspection of the seismology literature. It's too difficult to write papers on predicting earthquakes in the present state of knowledge, so they don't. The vacuum is filled by a load of amateur earthquake predictors instead.
The best way of determining what the mainstream climate science opinion was in the 1970s would be to ask people who were involved in the field at the time. Nigel Calder gave this rebuttal of Connolley's approach:
link2
In regard to the second assumption, I would say that the scientific establishment of the 1970s was as good at keeping mavericks and minority scientific opinions out of the popular news media then as it is today.
An example is provided by the relativity sceptics in the 1970s. There were a number of elderly physicists in the UK, notably Herbert Dingle, Louis Essen (inventor of the caesium atomic clock) and G Burniston Brown, who were very sceptical about relativity and regularly wrote letters to scientific journals, particularly about the 'Clock Paradox'. The scientific journals suddenly stopped publishing their letters in the early 1970s. The relativity sceptics then tried to fight their cause in the mainstream media, with Dingle and Essen both writing books for the general public. Bernard Levin (the equivalent of somebody like Jeremy Paxman today) was reputedly interested in helping Dingle. But the whole thing quickly petered out and strangely the popular news media didn't take up their cause. Given this example I can't believe that the global cooling stories in the 1970s were some minority opinion not endorsed by the scientific establishment of the time. |
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