A stampede of woolly mammoths is imminent!

We all know about global warming, and some blogs, including mine have mentioned the "global cooling" crisis of the 70's as a counter argument, hinting that the media and politicians have blown global warming out of proportion simply to rile the public. This is another article discussing the topic and past Newsweek articles about global temperatures.

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster...well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

But in any case, climatologists now are mostly agreed that human impacts will swamp the effects of the Milankovitch cycles (the earth's heating and cooling). The question has been, which specific impacts?

In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and "aerosols" (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Hmmm, farmers and power plants were to blame in the '70s. Did we stop our agricultural way of life? Hardly.

Ironically, clean-air laws in North America and Europe had the effect of reducing aerosols (which cause acid rain), so the predominant influence on climate now is the buildup of carbon dioxide—which traps the Earth's heat in the lower atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

And CO2 also eats away at the ozone, allowing more sun to get in, burn us all and damage our Earth. Yeah yeah. Smoking is bad for you too.

The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism.

So who's to say that in 10, or even 30 more years, we won't have more advanced instruments and incredibly different data in the opposing direction, once again? I agree with Senator Imhof:

The implication he draws is that if you're not worried about being trampled by a stampede of woolly mammoths through downtown Chicago, you don't have to believe what the media is saying about global warming, either.