Global Cooling

[Trauma-san]

I think the earth is really cooling.  Here's a newsweek article that suggests it from 30 years ago; as we sit right now, the temperatures in the world are at about the same level they were in 1940.  In 1975, though, things were cold so all the idiots then thought that the earth was cooling down and would kill us all.  Of course today they all think that the earth is warming up and will kill us all.  Notice they also mention 'the little ice age' in the 1600's when it snowed for days on end and killed thousands of people.  These are chicken littles, use your own mind and think about the grand sceme of things: a world that has existed for millions of years with or without human beings can take care of itself.

"The Cooling World" - by Peter Gwynne
 
April 28, 1975 Newsweek
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.

The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon. 
 
 
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

 To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
 
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies. “The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
 

[Trauma-san]

and another from 74, Time magazine.

http://www.time.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657,944914,00.html

Another Ice Age?

Monday, Jun 24, 1974

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is the widening of this cap of cold air that is the immediate cause of Africa's drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest's recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.

Sunspot Cycle. The changing weather is apparently connected with differences in the amount of energy that the earth's surface receives from the sun. Changes in the earth's tilt and distance from the sun could, for instance, significantly increase or decrease the amount of solar radiation falling on either hemisphere—thereby altering the earth's climate. Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.

Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

Climatic Balance. Some scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the National Weather Service's long-range-prediction group, think that the cooling trend may be only temporary. But all agree that vastly more information is needed about the major influences on the earth's climate. Indeed, it is to gain such knowledge that 38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather. The study itself is only part of an international scientific effort known acronymically as GARP (for Global Atmospheric Research Program).

Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

The earth's current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past 700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of glaciers spreading over much of the planet. Temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5% of the time. But there is a peril more immediate than the prospect of another ice age. Even if temperature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries—the U.S., Canada and Australia —global food stores would be sharply reduced. University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."

[Javier]

How much is Exxon paying you?

[Trauma-san]

You're an idiot.  USE YOUR FUCKING MIND, man!  You don't see this buillshit?

Lemme explain it another way.

These people tell you the shit that is the backwards way to think.  You automatically believe it, because you don't want to be seen as a conformist, and would like to think that you're using your mind, when in fact you're just conforming to anti-conformity!  You believe the shit these people pitch you because it's pitched in such a way that it's anti-establishment.  In the modern world, nobody is special, so to feel special you believe what you feel is different than everyone else, but in reality, believing what your mind clearly tells you through logic is what's truly rebellious, because NOBODY DOES IT!

The truth is, the earth is cooling, and sometimes the earth is warming, it has nothing to do with us!  In the 70's it was pitched to the people in such a way that they were to believe the earth is cooling, now it's pitched in such a way that we're supposed to believe it's warming.  God gave you logic at birth, your mind can clearly see, logically, that the earth is going to do what it does, humans aren't evil, we're part of the earth!  You can't blame us for this shit anymore than you can blame the elephants in Africa, it's our intelligence that makes us so fucking stupid to think that we're special.  We're not at all, we're just another creature who's been gifted with a little bit of grace and insight. 

[Javier]

10k per rant?

[Trauma-san]

My previous comments stand stronger than yours, so I have nothing more to add, I've said it all very eloquently and have out debated you. 

[Javier]

The truth is, the earth is cooling, and sometimes the earth is warming, it has nothing to do with us!  In the 70's it was pitched to the people in such a way that they were to believe the earth is cooling, now it's pitched in such a way that we're supposed to believe it's warming.  God gave you logic at birth, your mind can clearly see, logically, that the earth is going to do what it does, humans aren't evil, we're part of the earth!  You can't blame us for this shit anymore than you can blame the elephants in Africa, it's our intelligence that makes us so fucking stupid to think that we're special.  We're not at all, we're just another creature who's been gifted with a little bit of grace and insight. 

No, the truth is that you are an idiot.  Compare the tools and information from the 70s to the present, there's a huge fucking difference.  Back in the 70s, that global cooling crowd wasn't as accepted as global warming today.  In fact, the global cooling warning never even reached the common acceptance of global warming today.  What the fuck are you going to share with the board next, that cigarettes don't kill people? 

[MontrealCity's Most]

The pole's melting is fact and would doubt that blocks of ice are melting because its too cold outside. And im not doing things for the enviorment out of fear. Im 24 years old not a 17 year old punk that dosent care of his surrouding becuase i think im invicible like many at that age.

[Sparegeez]

I don't know about ya'll but this has been the coldest Winter in the Bay Area in years.

[King Tech Quadafi]

trauma ure a fuckin idiot, u waste of sperm

[Sikotic™]

April 28, 1975 Newsweek

Monday, Jun 24, 1974

How about we get something a little more up to date next time.

[REGIME MOB 510]

April 28, 1975 Newsweek

Monday, Jun 24, 1974

How about we get something a little more up to date next time.

[7even]

You're just mad cause America is the country to take most of the blame, so you're trying to defend it indirectly with that Global Cooling thread

[Samoan Enforcer]

so you're saying we should release cans of hairspray out the window every morning to stop from it getting hotter?

[jeromechickenbone]

For all you guys saying that his info is outdated, did it ever occur to you that maybe our instruments for detecting temperature back then were a little fucked themselves?  So when these guys say, well the earth is .5% warmer now than it was 50 years ago, maybe it has something to do with the janky ass equipment they were using when they read the temp 50 years ago?  Maybe the temp hasn't changed, maybe our equipment is more accurate now? 

Who knows, but you can't discredit these articles based on the fact they came out 30 years ago without making the same reconciliation toward the theory you support as well.