“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Ar

“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.” – New York Times, July 18, 1970 “An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” – New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978 Here we have the paper of record making some rather official pronouncements and claiming the weight of scientific authority in said pronouncements. That sounds like more than "irrelevant pop science noise" to me. Now, hardly a month after that second quote, we also have this one: “A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” – New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978 Which is a fairly significant change in position that should not go unnoticed, but it does nonetheless leave me somewhat skeptical of Wikipedia's claim (I'm still reading the source of that claim). But even if the reporting on the state of climate science in the 1970s was wrong: why was it wrong? And what has changed to fix it?