The contradiction appears there, in the abstract of his paper. He realized that greenhouse gas physics should trap warmth and CO2 was going up, but accepted tha

The contradiction appears there, in the abstract of his paper. He realized that greenhouse gas physics should trap warmth and CO2 was going up, but accepted that the world had actually been cooling for decades. So how could he explain this contradiction? He presented a hypothesis that maybe it was a volcano-related natural phenomenon, in which cooling caused by volcano exhaust was offsetting the warming effects of CO2, and that over time CO2 would overpower volcano cooling to create rising temperatures. But it was just a guess. The main reason this is important is for the meta-level issue of what claims about consensus really mean. Newsweek didn't really care if the world got colder or warmer, they just wanted to sell papers. Mitchell wasn't misrepresented by the article nor me, as defrost claims. The article doesn't even quote him, it simply cites temperature data from one of his studies as a way to establish what trends existed at the time. Newsweek does so accurately because that's exactly what Mitchell's data did show, as my citation of his paper establishes. By Mitchell's own words, in 1975 the world had not only been cooling for decades but was still cooling! Now defrost might argue that the Newsweek article was deceptive because, in fact, there was at least one scientist who rejected the "ice age doom is imminent" consensus as irresponsible. Indeed, claims about consensus are always very dubious for that exact reason, it's so rarely true. By 1975 there were certainly more than just Mitchell! But a Newsweek reader of the time couldn't have known that. They were being told that scientists in general believed in global cooling. Indeed nobody could deny the world was cooling, as that's clearly what the facts showed, so you'd have been a cooling denier if you'd said otherwise. If anyone had objected by raising Mitchell as a counter-example they'd have been told he was fringe, that his theories were outside the mainstream, that he was delaying action to prepare for the ice age and that even he accepted long term global cooling was real! It can all be very confusing because to learn anything from this, you have to learn to doubt what you "know" is right based on what a handful of people have told you other people believe. Which is hard! But there's an even more confusing meta-level issue. Look at modern graphs of temperature: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ Look at the period between 1940 and 1975. The cooling Mitchell was writing about, that Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, that so many academics researched and reported on, that governments funded investigations into, that people proposed covering the Arctic with coal dust to fight - it's gone. The graph is flat. According to modern climatologists the cooling trend Mitchell was trying to explain with volcanos never existed at all ... and anyone who says otherwise is a malicious liar.