> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
But seriously, what relevance does a minority scientific hypothesis (even in the 70's, the majority of climate science focused on global warming from greenhouse gasses, not cooling from aerosols) from 50 years ago have when better data and 50 more years of experience show a clear warming trend, that is entirely anthropogenic, and which is today causing deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, storm surge, and more?
Your weather forecast for next week is already impacted by the global warming that has already happened.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge, and science therefore changes and new facts and tools and theories and methods are developed.
We are now much better at modeling than we were 50 years ago. Just like how the scientists of the 1970s were miles ahead of the scientists of the 1920s.
"Science got something wrong" is not a valid reason to discount it, because science necessarily gets things wrong. But it gets more right over time.
There's widespread consensus in scientific communities now, and there has been for decades - humans are warming the earth. How much? We're not sure, but it's absolutely demonstrable that we are.
These are standard talking points that people parrot and both of them are misleading. There did exist a global cooling idea and it was in some pop sci magazines, but it was never a serious prediction by the climate change community. Even in back in the 1970s we had a pretty good idea how much warming would result from adding co2 into the atmosphere:
To your second point, predicting the total heat of the Earth is also easier than predicting what the weather will be at one spot on the globe in any given moment. The former has only a few inputs (the sun) and outputs (back to space!) But how that heat swirls around in the atmosphere and moves to and from the oceans is pretty complicated.
teraflop|2 years ago
> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
lambda|2 years ago
But seriously, what relevance does a minority scientific hypothesis (even in the 70's, the majority of climate science focused on global warming from greenhouse gasses, not cooling from aerosols) from 50 years ago have when better data and 50 more years of experience show a clear warming trend, that is entirely anthropogenic, and which is today causing deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, storm surge, and more?
Your weather forecast for next week is already impacted by the global warming that has already happened.
Humboldtsnee|2 years ago
We are now much better at modeling than we were 50 years ago. Just like how the scientists of the 1970s were miles ahead of the scientists of the 1920s.
"Science got something wrong" is not a valid reason to discount it, because science necessarily gets things wrong. But it gets more right over time.
There's widespread consensus in scientific communities now, and there has been for decades - humans are warming the earth. How much? We're not sure, but it's absolutely demonstrable that we are.
jackmott42|2 years ago
https://theconversation.com/40-years-ago-scientists-predicte...
To your second point, predicting the total heat of the Earth is also easier than predicting what the weather will be at one spot on the globe in any given moment. The former has only a few inputs (the sun) and outputs (back to space!) But how that heat swirls around in the atmosphere and moves to and from the oceans is pretty complicated.