{"id":536,"date":"2008-03-07T10:14:01","date_gmt":"2008-03-07T15:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/03\/the-global-cooling-mole\/langswitch_lang\/in"},"modified":"2021-07-16T10:37:22","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T15:37:22","slug":"the-global-cooling-mole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/03\/the-global-cooling-mole\/","title":{"rendered":"The global cooling mole La excusa del enfriamiento global<\/lang_sp>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By John Fleck<\/a> and William Connolley<\/a><\/p>\n

To veterans of the Climate Wars, the old 1970s global cooling canard – “How can we believe climate scientists about global warming today when back in the 1970s they told us an ice age was imminent?” – must seem like a never-ending game of Whack-a-mole.\u00a0One of us (WMC) has devoted years to whacking down the mole (see here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>, for example), while the other of us (JF) sees the mole pop up anew in his in box every time he quotes contemporary scientific views regarding climate change in his newspaper stories.<\/p>\n

Una traducci\u00f3n est\u00e1 disponible aqui<\/a>
T\u0142umaczenie na polski dost\u0119pne jest tutaj<\/a>.<\/p>\n


The problem is that the argument has played out in competing anecdotes, without any comprehensive and rigorous picture of what was really going on in the scientific literature at the time. But if the argument is to have any relevance beyond talking points aimed at winning a debate, such a comprehensive understanding is needed. If, indeed, climate scientists predicted a coming ice age, it is worthwhile to take the next step and understand why they thought this, and what relevance it might have to today’s science-politics-policy discussions about climate change. If, on the other hand, scientists were not really predicting a coming ice age, then the argument needs to be retired.<\/p>\n

The two of us, along with Tom Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, undertook a literature review to try to move beyond the anecdotes and understand what scientists were really saying at the time regarding the various forces shaping climate on time human time scales. The results are currently in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Doyle Rice has written a nice summary in USA Today<\/a>, and an extended version based on a presentation made by Tom at the AMS meeting in January is on line<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During the period we analyzed, climate science was very different from what you see today. There was far less integration among the various sub-disciplines that make up the enterprise. Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1<\/a> for details):<\/p>\n