Putting 'Global Cooling' to Rest

One of the most common retorts I get to stories I write on the projected outcomes of global warming is the old “How can we trust the scientists are right when they were predicting a new ice age in the’70s?” It’s one of the main arguments skeptics use in their claims against the science of climate change.

I’ve addressed this argument before, but thought it worth bringing up again because the scientists over at RealClimate.org have a post about a literature review done on studies of climate from 1965 to 1979 (which is currently in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society). They found only 7 articles that predicted cooling would happen, 20 that were neutral, and 44 that predicted warming.

As the authors of the post, John Fleck (a journalist who has written about climate change) and William Connolley (a climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey) say, “The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.”

Neither they nor I think that this study will lay this particular skeptic point to rest, but it pretty clearly refutes it.