I assume the author is the Betty Friedan. This would be about 5 years before she wrote The Feminine Mystique, easily one of the most influential books in modern history.
It's kind of fascinating to see her here at 37, working in obscurity, knocking out fairly pedestrian writing assignments, when in just a few years she's going to change the world.
The author of this story seems to have only talked to two scientists, Ewing and Donn. Others at the time were measuring and modelling CO2 absorption rates and emissions:
There is another cover going around mentioning "The Big Freeze", but it refers to a particularly cold winter in the US during the 70s, and not about the so called Global Cooling
I was learning about global warming in grade school in the early 1980's, for whatever that's worth. I had never heard of "global cooling" until decades later when people who purport to not believe in global warming started using it as a talking point.
I have a distinct memory of two of my friends in college in the mid-80s talking about this. One was reading the paper. He announced without looking up that there is a new Ice Age coming. The other guy jumped up, looked out the window, and said, "Where!?"
It was just another crackpot theory used to fill space in the newspaper. Back then, the serious neurotics used the threat of nuclear annihilation to make themselves sick with worry.
That’s not what a black body is - that’s a body in thermal equilibrium
Wikipedia disagrees.
"A black body or blackbody is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence. (It does not only absorb radiation, but can also emit radiation. The name "black body" is given because it absorbs radiation in all frequencies, not because it only absorbs.)"
Note the line 'As the temperature of the blackbody increases, the peak wavelength decreases'
Just because some things can be approximated for varying degrees of usefullness as absorbing and emitting equally well on all frequencies (which the earth is really bad at anyway), does not mean they are stable in temperature.
This makes me wonder if the current political “backlash” against global warming is because many politicians are ... old.
If they were taught in school that the earth is cooling, and we know from research that people are very unlikely to change their mind about things after 35 ... well why would they believe it’s now warming?
Cause and effect is a bit of a baffler here though. The summary stats/top 20 figures suggest there is a TX bias to funding which in turn suggests to me that oil companies are funding politicians from their own states. Ted Cruz, Ted (R-TX) and Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) combine to a disproportionately large $1 mil, and probably represent a lot of people who are quite happy in the oil industry.
So it seems reasonable that despite the money the people who are receiving it might rationally support O&G regardless because it is great for their constituents.
It isn't because of what they were taught in school though, that much is pretty clear.
I think there's something here, just like how you stop liking new music.
There were a bunch of articles in the 70s talking about the potential of an ice age. So much so that I remember my dad (69yo) talking to me and my brother about global cooling/ice age when we were kids in the 80s.
He bought the articles in his 20s but now can't be bothered by climate change, because "it was just cooling 40 years ago..."
"This makes me wonder if the current political "backlash" against global warming is because many politicians are ... old."
It's more of a mix of anti-environmentalism (as environmentalism is closely associated in the public mind with the global warming denier's boogeymen -- liberals and the left), ignorance of climate science, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theorizing that's rife on right-wing media, a desire to recklessly exploit natural resources, and a belief that counteracting global warming will harm businesses and cost taxpayer dollars, which they'd rather spend on the military or on handouts to corporations.
You're strawmanning the position. It's not that those skeptical politicians believe what they were taught in school-- it's that they see that the science can change, and that calls of doomsday can turn out to be wrong.
Even Al Gore's doomsday predictions in the late 90s turned out to be woefully inaccurate. I'm all for being a good steward of the planet, but I think it's reasonable to wait in order to:
- Make sure this is a serious risk, and not just something we can adapt to
- Let technology develop so we can combat climate change effectively and without bankrupting the world.
Furthermore, I see environmentalists who are anti-nuclear, anti-iron-fertilization, and anti-atmospheric-sulfur-injection. If global warming is truly an _existential_ threat, then why aren't these projects appreciated by the run-of-the-mill environmentalists?
For the last point - you need to stop emitting before you deploy your hail-Mary countermeasures. Otherwise you only delay the inevitable for a few years.
This has been one of those conversations I've followed for a while. One of the most provocative things about climate change was the notion that Global Warming could accelerate an ice age.
In popular literature, one of the more under appreciated factors in various models is the moisture carrying capacity of the atmosphere. Basically as the mean atmospheric temperature rises, the more moisture it can carry. This leads to the formation of clouds as different temperature air masses meet, and precipitation when the temperature drops below the dew point.
When you run different climate models, if the clouds form in the stratosphere the overall temperature goes up (more CO2 below the clouds to reflect IR back to the ground) if the clouds form in the troposphere the temperature goes down (clouds create a higher albedo and more energy is reflected into space rather than absorbed).
One of the papers discussing inter-glacial periods expressed essentially the same view as the Harper's article which was that kicking off an ice age would require a tremendous amount of material in the troposphere to reflect sunlight, and a bunch of water to condense into snow to boost the albedo of the surface to prevent it from absorbing solar energy and re-radiating it as heat.
In the 80's, when people looked at the possible after effects of a nuclear exchange between the US and the then USSR, it was suggested that the level of soot and ash thrown into the air would cool the planet to a point to enshroud it into a "nuclear winter." Later papers have looked not at nuclear exchanges but simply volcanic activity or firestorms of one form or another.
The duration of these effects is tied to both the amount of sunlight obstructed and reflected and the resulting weather effects.
Using those models it seems plausible that prior to the presence of humans, if the global temperature rose, it would dry out vast tracks of forests and grasslands in the mid-lattitudes, those tracks would be set on fire by lightning creating a tremendous soot load on the atmosphere. Once the soot layer forms, the temperature falls, and the atmosphere drops its moisture as precipitation. If the temperature is low enough it becomes snow, and gets compacted into ice. The ice become glaciers and it takes a while for the cycle to reset.
For me, it is an interesting aspect of climate dynamics on the water cycle as a feedback loop sort of problem. I have yet to see any paper that suggests the 'venus mode' (runaway greenhouse effect leading to boiling the oceans) is any more or less likely than the 'snowball mode', other than we have a geologic record of the planet going snowball mode on its own several times over the last million years.
Considering the next ice age is inevitable in normal circumstances. What terraforming options do we have to prevent an ice age? Maximizing the greenhouse effect by releasing more CO2 sounds like something worth exploring?
I also had similar thought to this. Were coming up on a minimum period in the solar cycle that produced a mini ice age, Grand solar minimum. I wonder if our co2 blanket will counteract the reduction in global temps we saw during the last grand solar min.
That is the rub isn't it? We are currently over generating green house gasses (relative to non-anthropocentric sources), so whether we want to or not we are "exploring that option."
It's what stimulated ice-core sampling. Before it, 60 years ago, science knew much, much less about climate, let alone climate history. (Plate tectonics was just coming into vogue!) IGY stimulated evidenciary techniques that forced a drastic revision of what we 'knew' before it.
The argument advanced here is that, counter-intuitively, warming climate triggers an ice age, because open Arctic waters feed the glaciers through increased snowfall. So it was climate cooling and the freezing of the Arctic that ended the Ice Age.
Close, but not quite. It's not "warming climate", but warm water flowing freely into the open Arctic Ocean that they say causes glaciation... the over-all climate still has to be cold enough for that moisture to eventually fall out of the atmosphere as snow in order for the glaciers to start growing.
Not clear they considered the warming ocean as separate from warming climate.
“The rate at which our weather has been warming in recent years could be temporarily slowed down,” they told me. “We don’t know the exact rate at which the sea is now rising. We need long-term world-wide evidence which the International Geophysical Year may give us to assess accurately the changes that seem to be taking place in the ocean and the ice.”
For snow to stop forming at higher latitudes the climate would have to heat up quite a bit.
“The answer, we believe, is chat until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold."
Can anyone explain this bit to me? Even if the magnetic pole was in the middle of the pacific, wouldn't snow and ice still accumulate at the geographic poles, because that's where the sun is weakest/absent for months?
I think the idea is that the position of the earth relative to the sun would’ve moved with the pole movement, right? As in, “the middle of pacific” would’ve been the top of the world.
Not sure if they gave any indication of when the pacific was thought to be the North Pole, but the line of hotspot created underwater mountains from the Siberian traps to Hawaii certainly support a huge amount of movement of the surface of the planet around the core. It doesn’t feel that far fetched, depending on suggested time frame.
I just traced a parallel line (matching the Siberia to Hawaii one) from the North Pole and it does indeed land out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Incredible stuff.
This is an interesting article and a lot of what was talked about is correct, this wasn't pushing any agenda, it's just the conclusion isn't quite accurate. The warming of the arctic does indeed push colder temperatures south, and there's an area int he north Atlantic that has seen drops in average temperature in recent years. This process may in fact have been part of how ice ages started in the past.
The incorrect conclusion that we are headed for an ice age that they came to was likely based on a lack of the information we have now. Namely the fact that the increase in temperature isn't just part of the regular cycle of heating and cooling, we're at the top of a heating trend, but the increase of greenhouse gasses is driving temperatures up more than a process like this will cool it down. There'll have been and likely will continue to be some colder winters in the northern hemisphere for a bit as the process starts to kick in, but the overall temperature trend is still getting warmer and isn't going to stop for something like this.
The Harpers story here is that people are the reason why the climate is changing, with the solution being authoritarian control over the people. This is simply a game of using asymmetric knowledge to tell a story to justify a power structure that benefits a select few.
In reality, the Universe is Electric. The Sun goes through cycles. The Solar System travels through the Galaxy, creating cycles. The Galaxy travels through the Universe, creating cycles.
The cyclical variance of inputs of thermal, solar wind, xrays, cosmic radiation, magnetic fields has & will continue to drive the climate & geological change on Earth & the other planets in the solar system. There are also the unknown unknowns as well.
Your explanation is meaningless. What trend could I not dismiss as simply being part of your cycles?
There are many fish populations which are on the brink -- but not to worry, we don't need to worry about overfishing, fish populations are cyclical. We don't need to worry about CFCs, the ozone hole is clearly just part of an atmospheric cycle.
Rather than breezy armchair theories, about how about finding some plausible evidence that climate scientists are making this all up?
It’s used against economics as well. “The free economy just has cycles. It’s naturally regulating. No external factors need to help right depressions. (Etc)” political economy moved away from that mindset, initially, after the Great Depression. It ultimately took a world war to pull the US out.
> Rather than breezy armchair theories, about how about finding some plausible evidence that climate scientists are making this all up?
Too easy.
The lack of accurate prediction capabilities of their models. Also the lack of consistency with their models. In contrast, Solar Physicist Valentina Zharkova accurately predicted the sun going into a minimum using a Double Dynamo model with 4 eigenvectors which cohere & interfere. Her model also accurately predicted the cooling that occurred in the past few years due to the approaching solar minimum. In her free time, she created a more accurate model than anything the IPCC ever produced.
The lack of experimental evidence. The Electric Universe theory has experimental evidence with plasma interacting with atmospheric gasses. Also experimental evidence of cosmic radiation with heating water, seeding clouds, etc.
See Henrik Svensmark's reproducable physical experiments. It's not just a bunch of computer code which ultimately means nothing without experiment or predictive capabilities.
Despite Henrik Svensmark having compelling physical experimental evidence, which the IPCC models lack, he somehow lost his institutional funding. He is now independently funded.
Perhaps the science is not "settled" after all...Is that what the authorities told Galileo when he dared to claim that the Earth was not the center of the Universe?
I clicked on the youtube link -- and you found a solar physicist who supports your claims and aha, that proves the climate scientists are all wrong? Why does it seem that skeptical physicists are always taken as credible sources, yet climate scientists are subject to hyperskepticism?
The funny thing is that the Koch brothers funded Berkeley physicist and climate change skeptic Rich Muller a few years back. Muller, being an egotistical physicist, was sure that he was smarter than the muddle headed climatologists and would disprove their models and find all sorts of errors. After a year, Muller wrote up his summary ... find that indeed, AGW was a real thing, and the various correction factors that had been used by climatologists for thins like urban heat island effect were both justified and reasonable.
So, to make this more concise, why do you find that Solar Physicist Dr. Valentina Zharkova is to be trusted than the IPCC reports? You claim her model is far more accurate than anything the IPCC has done ... yet your link says her model was presented in 2015. Second, the IPCC models have be wrong only in that they have intentionally been conservative in their estimates (for political reasons). If you believe that the IPCC models have overestimated warming effects, then you have bought into a popular lie.
The are many other problems with your claims, but it would take more time than I care to invest in it considering the information is already presented in the IPCC reports and you refuse to accept them.
It seems like the power structure would want to keep things going as they are now: more production, more consumption. Human-induced climate change instead would prompt fundamental changes which might threaten the current power structure. Furthermore, many environmentalist concepts seem to be bottom-up, local, and independent, not authoritarian.
Even if climate change was not man-made, the effects are already so drastic that we would have to man-make the climate, to offset whatever other forces are threatening life in many areas of the planet.
The last time global temperatures averaged 4 degrees higher there were palm trees at the arctic. At 8 degrees, clouds no longer form. Some estimates have us headed for the 3.2-3.5 range as an optimistic outcome. (Uninhabitable Earth)
The climate is getting colder & the Antarctic glaciers are growing, so no worries about palm trees in Antarctica. We will have lower food production (there goes the "green revolution"), more volcanic eruptions, more earthquakes, a magnetic pole reversal, with a weakened Heliosphere & Magnetosphere making us less protected against space weather though, so at least you will have that to be alarmed about.
BTW, ancient people around the world had some interesting & consistent art that looks strikingly like plasma discharge reproduced in laboratories. Maybe they were smarter than what we give them credit for?
I'm confused because you seem to have read a different article. In the one I read, people have no influence on the climate. It says ice-age cycles are inevitable. That humanity can adapt by building levees. There is no talk about political control.
The rest of your post is pseudoscientific woo about natural "cycles".
That's true in a literal sense since the article was from the 1950s. I'm mainly speaking to today's politics.
> The rest of your post is pseudoscientific woo about natural "cycles".
Please enlighten me on what "real science" is then. If there are no cycles in the climate, is it purely driven by randomness, exponential or asymptotic growth? How did Earth's climate even get into a state of stasis? Why do ice ages & warm periods occur & cycle back? Why/how do warming & cooling trends eventually reverse?
Does science not utilize models? Is there not experiments & observations to back up models? What about the Philosophy of Science? Does our preconceptions influence how we model phenomena?
The evidence is overwhelming that the climate change is being driven by human activity. There are all kinds of natural cycles and non cyclical events that affect the climate, but that's neither here nor there in our current predicament.
Nobody serious in the scientific community is making the counter argument anymore. The evidence is well presented, if you're not convinced feel free to peruse it. It's not my job to persuade you.
Sorry, but that is opinion & not a proof. It sounds more like a committee rubber stamped a policy & declared it as "settled". Similar to Galelio's time with a Geocentric universe model being the "settled science".
I don't need to persuade you either. You can have the wrong idea & it does not affect me unless you manage to convince enough people to take away my rights to free speech & property. The "high road" "let's not dignify their arguments" does not work if your models fail to predict anything & if the "Emperor has no clothes"; which is one of the reasons why we are seeing increased censorship.
Re: proof, think of it this way. If this has been so obviously proven, why are you unable to produce any evidence of the proof? Why are the standard climate models wildly divergent, under constant modification, & still unable to predict phenomena? One would expect consistency & predictability, like Newtonian Mechanics or Maxwell's Equations. Until then, it is at best, a tenuous, model that over time is becoming increasingly unbelievable as alternative models better fit the data & have physical experiments backing them. Also, "the map is not the territory".
It's kind of fascinating to see her here at 37, working in obscurity, knocking out fairly pedestrian writing assignments, when in just a few years she's going to change the world.