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.
I vaguely remember in the last few years someone linking to a Time magazine cover published in the 80's about global cooling.