4 ms·

The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall

The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out). But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admitted the existence of uncertainty it was uncertainty of the form, we don't know why temperatures are falling, we don't know how bad it'll get but it'll probably be bad, etc. So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could? Here's some quotes from articles published in the 60s and 70s [1] New York Times, 1961: "Scientists agree world is colder. After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder" Washington Post, 1970: "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come. That's the long long range forecast being given out by climatologists". New York Times, July 1970: "The US and the Soviet Union are mounting large scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid." (this one also discusses geo-engineering with the goal of melting the poles) Letter to the US President, 1972: "we feel obliged to inform you of the results of the recent scientific conference held here recently ... a global deterioration of climate by an order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by mankind is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has a natural cause" The Post-Crescent, 1973: "'Clearly we are living in an unusual time and cannot, based on past evidence, expect the present warm age to last much longer' [said] Imbrie, [who] is a part of CLIMPA, a new three institution climate research team (Brown, Columbia and Oregon State Universities) engaged in a global study of climactic change under the sponsorship of NSF-IDOE". etc. There are more examples at the link. https://realclimatescience.com/1970s-global-cooling-scare/ https://realclimatescience.com/1970s-global-cooling-scare/

blkhawk 4y ago
Uh, why are you linking a lot of NY times and random letters. You are aware that news media often misunderstands science or gets it wrong by amplifying the most surprising and interesting conclusions one might take from research? This whole "they told us the world is cooling" thing is an almost completely US-only phenomenon.
Eupraxias 4y ago
This is a big part of the problem. I was a child in the 70's and 80's, and it was a constant drumbeat about how climate change was going to freeze the planet. It was rather hard to take it seriously when the narrative suddenly shifted to how climate change was going to melt the planet. I never hear discussion about the discrepancy, so the whole thing has been quite a head-scratcher!
- blkhawk 4y ago
  well the takeaway is to not trust news media to report on science correctly and be doubly sceptical when its interesting or "newsworthy" results. That means there never was a discrepancy - it was just interesting so the news media reported on it. If you want an explanation of it you should not look with climate science - look at media studies or may be publications about great advertisement campaigns. To me the whole thing shows parallels to the is smoking bad for your health thing. If doctors are undecided it cannot be too bad - right? Also I can at least confirm from me being German and of similar age that the whole thing was not a thing in Germany at all. By asking a friend from the UK I can at least suspect that it wasn't prevalent there either (he knows about it but that is from US-sources).
ben_w 4y ago
> So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Doch[0]. Todays newspaper reports are also generally disconnected from reality. To illustrate with a tech news story as this is a tech news site, I saw one news story about the Raspberry Pi which had more errors than sentences, including the price, the OS, the RAM, the processor, the country of manufacture, and claimed it came with a hard drive. In general this problem is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... > Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? You can try doing a poll of the scientists or their publications and seeing what those say. In fact, it's the scientists' own work doing this, and absolutely not the newspapers, which make me aware of the actual scientific consensus. Though I should point out that this whole concept only matters if you're specifically trying to study the social dynamics of the scientist themselves (and those consuming their work) rather than the actual science itself — while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking. > Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? Yes. Also, as scientists exist in the physical world, you can try email and such. Also, they published their work, including how they reached their conclusions. Here is one of many such studies: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 > What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could? Which "they" is this? The newspapers again? Because scientist absolutely don't say it's impossible for a virus to escape from a lab in general, including any who are also saying there's no evidence in favour of any specific outbreak *actually* being caused by that. [0] German word that needs to be adopted into English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch

blkhawk 4y ago

Uh, why are you linking a lot of NY times and random letters. You are aware that news media often misunderstands science or gets it wrong by amplifying the most surprising and interesting conclusions one might take from research? This whole "they told us the world is cooling" thing is an almost completely US-only phenomenon.

Eupraxias 4y ago

This is a big part of the problem. I was a child in the 70's and 80's, and it was a constant drumbeat about how climate change was going to freeze the planet. It was rather hard to take it seriously when the narrative suddenly shifted to how climate change was going to melt the planet. I never hear discussion about the discrepancy, so the whole thing has been quite a head-scratcher!

blkhawk 4y ago
well the takeaway is to not trust news media to report on science correctly and be doubly sceptical when its interesting or "newsworthy" results. That means there never was a discrepancy - it was just interesting so the news media reported on it. If you want an explanation of it you should not look with climate science - look at media studies or may be publications about great advertisement campaigns. To me the whole thing shows parallels to the is smoking bad for your health thing. If doctors are undecided it cannot be too bad - right? Also I can at least confirm from me being German and of similar age that the whole thing was not a thing in Germany at all. By asking a friend from the UK I can at least suspect that it wasn't prevalent there either (he knows about it but that is from US-sources).

ben_w 4y ago

> So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Doch[0]. Todays newspaper reports are also generally disconnected from reality. To illustrate with a tech news story as this is a tech news site, I saw one news story about the Raspberry Pi which had more errors than sentences, including the price, the OS, the RAM, the processor, the country of manufacture, and claimed it came with a hard drive. In general this problem is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... > Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? You can try doing a poll of the scientists or their publications and seeing what those say. In fact, it's the scientists' own work doing this, and absolutely not the newspapers, which make me aware of the actual scientific consensus. Though I should point out that this whole concept only matters if you're specifically trying to study the social dynamics of the scientist themselves (and those consuming their work) rather than the actual science itself — while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking. > Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? Yes. Also, as scientists exist in the physical world, you can try email and such. Also, they published their work, including how they reached their conclusions. Here is one of many such studies: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 > What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could? Which "they" is this? The newspapers again? Because scientist absolutely don't say it's impossible for a virus to escape from a lab in general, including any who are also saying there's no evidence in favour of any specific outbreak *actually* being caused by that. [0] German word that needs to be adopted into English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch