“Y.M.C.A.” is back and badder than ever. President-elect Donald Trump helped to resurrect the 1978 disco icon. Yet some in the media are not hitting the dance floor and the sphere of “settled science” is trying to bury the cultural climate of the 1970s.
Today’s popular narrative about climate change that contends that the public and scientists in the 1970s were not all that concerned about global cooling during that decade can be categorized as disinformation, or at least misinformation.
I was an undergraduate student of meteorology at Penn State in the mid-70s and, even with published papers to the contrary, there was a real concern about the emergence of a new ice age. (Beyond Penn State, some nonscience students were warned that soon polar bears might be roaming New York City. That turned out to be true, but thankfully the bears have been confined to the Central Park Zoo.)
Perhaps a majority of scientists weren’t overly worried that the downward global temperature trend since the 1940s would continue; however, I don’t recall much angst over imminent global warming either.
Also, stories in Time, Newsweek, and other popular magazines sensitized people to a worldwide cooling trend. And the public was primed for disastrous chilling with books confidently stating, “A handful of scientists denied evidence that the Earth’s climate was cooling until the 1970s, when bizarre weather throughout the world forced them to reconsider their views” (from The Cooling by Lowell Ponte, 1976). The book’s cover pondered: “Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?”
Or, from Our Changing Weather: Forecast of Disaster? by Claude Rose in 1977: “Northern hemisphere temperatures have been falling steadily since the 1940s. Glaciers are advancing once again. Scientists no longer debate the coming of a new ice age: the question now is when?” The front cover of this book teased: “Will our fuel run out? Will our food be destroyed? Will we freeze?”
After informing John Maddox, the editor of the prestigious journal Nature in 1989, of the contents of Our Changing Weather book, he replied:
“Many thanks for your letter but I am afraid we cannot publish it. The difficulty is that it is well-known in the scientific community that as recently as 15 years ago climatologists were more worried about the prospect of the ice age returning than by the greenhouse effect [aka global warming]….”
Furthermore, youngsters were prepped for a coming icy catastrophe. The dust jacket of an elementary school book, The New Ice Age by Henry Gilfond (1978), displayed six large thermometers lined up to show ominously declining temperatures.
Society at large was alerted to the dangers of cooling with a Christian tract posing “Need We Fear Another Ice Age?” by Walter Lang and Vic Lockman. And Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in the original Star Trek television series, even did a broadcast segment titled “In Search of the Coming Ice Age.”
Overall, without the aid of the internet in the 1970s, widespread, costly fearmongering about a frosty climate cataclysm was mitigated.
Eventually, the 1980s saw the scare that began with the “greenhouse effect” morph into overheated “global warming,” then the calamitous “climate change,” and now to all sorts of frightening memes and monikers.
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Considering the history of confident climate claims, the general populace has a right to be skeptical of what has been asserted as “settled science” regarding climate change.
No matter, regardless of impending warming or cooling, as a disco diva also sang in 1978: “I will survive.” My guess is that the planet will too.
Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, PA. He is also author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big To Fail (Stairway Press).