5 ms·

Having been there in the 80s I seem to recall the fear was global cooling, and that we'd all be dead before the turn of the century. Glad they were wrong then.

Having been there in the 80s I seem to recall the fear was global cooling, and that we'd all be dead before the turn of the century. Glad they were wrong then. Hopefully, we're wrong now.

hotpotamus 4y ago
What science was the fear of global cooling based on?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  None. There was not ever widespread anticipation of global cooling. There was one (1) mass-market magazine article about it that the dupes of fossil fuel propaganda campaigns have been pointing to for years. Rush Limbaugh talked about it constantly in the 1990s, then someone photoshopped up a bunch of fake magazine covers supposedly from the 1970s and your uncle, who is an idiot, has been forwarding those to everyone since. The only underlying science was some debate about whether air pollution, the kind you can see and scrape off your skin, was going to be so bad that it would offset the greenhouse effect. But Nixon effectively ended that debate with the Clean Air Act.
  - musictubes 4y ago
    Maybe it didn’t catch on and it certainly seems to have been disproven but there was some serious scientific discussion about an upcoming ice age. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1756074 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1756074 I mentioned it in an earlier comment but it was also in my science textbook in my elementary school days.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      My understanding is that we currently reside in an inter-glacial period within the ice age. If humanity has already engineered the climate of the Earth enough to exit the ice age, then that's quite an accomplishment.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    There was more than one mass-market magazine article. There were no mass-market magazine cover stories, and yes there are fakes going around of those. There were also newspaper articles on it regularly throughout the 1970's. As well as numerous works of science fiction, and TV episodes like "in Search of...The Coming Ice Age" from 1978 narrated by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGB5MMIAVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGB5MMIAVA. The science it was based on, of course, was the fact that ice ages are cyclical and we are well towards what would typically be the end of an interglacial period: "the last four interglacials lasted over ~20,000 years with the warmest portion being a relatively stable period of 10,000 to 15,000 years duration. This is consistent with what is seen in the Vostok ice core from Antarctica and several records of sea level high stands. These data suggest that an equally long duration should be inferred for the current interglacial period as well. Work in progress on Devils Hole data for the period 60,000 to 5,000 years ago indicates that current interglacial temperature conditions may have already persisted for 17,000 years." -- https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-long-can-we-expect-present-interglacial-period-last https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-long-can-we-expect-present-int... You also had the fact that some of the coldest (and snowiest) winters on record in the US were during the 1970's, most notably during 1977 when it snowed in Miami and the Bahamas for the only time in recorded history, and temperatures in much of the midwest stayed below freezing for over a month. So of course articles about a new ice age would attract readers, even though any return to ice age conditions would happen over centuries, if it wasn't disrupted by humans. It really was a lot of snow though, we were out of school for like two weeks in the spring of 1978.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Interestingly, 1980 was the hottest year recorded up to that point. I'll probably never forget that now that I mentioned it to my mom, and she remembered it being super hot because she backed her car into a tree while trying to park in the shade to escape it and that burned it into her memory.
- pulvinar 4y ago
  Most people then thought of nuclear winter as more likely. In the Fort Worth Star Telegram, 27 Sep 1981, is the article "World's mercury inching upward", discussing the science which wouldn't look out of place today. But it wasn't until the end of the 80s that the US government started to take it seriously.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    Unfortunately nuclear winter is still more likely, and that likelihood grows with each passing day.
- theChaparral 4y ago
  Think the OP misremembered it, It wasn't global cooling in the 80's it was nuclear winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
  - hinkley 4y ago
    No there was some global cooling whataboutism going on in the late 70's early 80's, but I didn't hear much about it until the late 90's, when we started talking about the 33 year solar cycle.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mikestew 4y ago
What's the saying, "if you remember the 80s, you weren't really there, man"? Or maybe it was the 60s. Anyway I, too, was there and despite trying desperately to forget the popular music of that era, I am quite confident that your recollection is wrong as it pertains to climate change. No, you only think you remember that Time magazine cover.
- hinkley 4y ago
  My recollection was that the warming guys spent the 70's trying to figure out how to be coherent, and at the first sign of the solar epicycle going the other way, a bunch of whataboutists started clanging the bell about climate cooling they could drown out the warming people. And it mostly worked. The first time I was ever mad about politics was in grade school, when some fake magazine for kids (probably one of the ads from Scholastic) had an interview with Ronald Reagan, and what the interviewer thought kids needed to know about Reagan was how crazy he was for jelly beans. If I had known the phrase, "What in the actual fuck?" I would have said it out loud. It would be 6 more years before someone summed up how terrifying the 1980's were and that man's name was Phil Collins (Genesis, Land of Confusion). But those bases were already loaded with... well, take your pick. You can go with Michael Keaton Movies about the crumbling economy or West German rock bands with a sprinkling of Sting ('Russians') while we all collectively crossed our fingers that we wouldn't wake up on The Day After.
  - rurp 4y ago
    The exciting news is that we're probably heading into another one of these terrifying periods: between Russia's aggression, growing conflict with China, accelerating climate change, and potentially catastrophic effects from AI. If we survive, whole new generations will have a lot of vivid memories to look back on.
- musictubes 4y ago
  It’s behind a paywall but here is an article from a 1958 issue of Harpers discussing a pair of scientists, Ewing and Donn, had a theory about how the last ice age was caused by melting arctic ice. They were primarily trying to figure out what would cause the ocean to heat up so much so quickly. https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/ https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/ I have a distinct memory of my “science” textbook in 2nd grade circa 1981 had a section on the upcoming ice age. Once I realized that the book was old enough to not include the moon landing I didn’t pay much attention to it. In any case, the idea about an impending ice age was in the science zeitgeist, at least the layman understanding of it well before the 80s.
michael1999 4y ago
The first UN climate treaty was signed in 1992. This is not new stuff. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Con...
mitthrowaway2 4y ago
Your recollection is incorrect. Concern about global cooling peaked in the '70s, and even then was still a minority position in the scientific community compared with concern about warming. In the '80s, cooling concerns were related to hypothetical scenarios like nuclear winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1980s
peterashford 4y ago
That was the 70's.

Having been there in the 80s I seem to recall the fear was global cooling, and that we'd all be dead before the turn of the century. Glad they were wrong then. Hopefully, we're wrong now.

hotpotamus 4y ago

What science was the fear of global cooling based on?

jeffbee 4y ago
None. There was not ever widespread anticipation of global cooling. There was one (1) mass-market magazine article about it that the dupes of fossil fuel propaganda campaigns have been pointing to for years. Rush Limbaugh talked about it constantly in the 1990s, then someone photoshopped up a bunch of fake magazine covers supposedly from the 1970s and your uncle, who is an idiot, has been forwarding those to everyone since. The only underlying science was some debate about whether air pollution, the kind you can see and scrape off your skin, was going to be so bad that it would offset the greenhouse effect. But Nixon effectively ended that debate with the Clean Air Act.
- musictubes 4y ago
  Maybe it didn’t catch on and it certainly seems to have been disproven but there was some serious scientific discussion about an upcoming ice age. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1756074 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1756074 I mentioned it in an earlier comment but it was also in my science textbook in my elementary school days.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    My understanding is that we currently reside in an inter-glacial period within the ice age. If humanity has already engineered the climate of the Earth enough to exit the ice age, then that's quite an accomplishment.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  There was more than one mass-market magazine article. There were no mass-market magazine cover stories, and yes there are fakes going around of those. There were also newspaper articles on it regularly throughout the 1970's. As well as numerous works of science fiction, and TV episodes like "in Search of...The Coming Ice Age" from 1978 narrated by Leonard Nimoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGB5MMIAVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kGB5MMIAVA. The science it was based on, of course, was the fact that ice ages are cyclical and we are well towards what would typically be the end of an interglacial period: "the last four interglacials lasted over ~20,000 years with the warmest portion being a relatively stable period of 10,000 to 15,000 years duration. This is consistent with what is seen in the Vostok ice core from Antarctica and several records of sea level high stands. These data suggest that an equally long duration should be inferred for the current interglacial period as well. Work in progress on Devils Hole data for the period 60,000 to 5,000 years ago indicates that current interglacial temperature conditions may have already persisted for 17,000 years." -- https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-long-can-we-expect-present-interglacial-period-last https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-long-can-we-expect-present-int... You also had the fact that some of the coldest (and snowiest) winters on record in the US were during the 1970's, most notably during 1977 when it snowed in Miami and the Bahamas for the only time in recorded history, and temperatures in much of the midwest stayed below freezing for over a month. So of course articles about a new ice age would attract readers, even though any return to ice age conditions would happen over centuries, if it wasn't disrupted by humans. It really was a lot of snow though, we were out of school for like two weeks in the spring of 1978.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Interestingly, 1980 was the hottest year recorded up to that point. I'll probably never forget that now that I mentioned it to my mom, and she remembered it being super hot because she backed her car into a tree while trying to park in the shade to escape it and that burned it into her memory.
pulvinar 4y ago
Most people then thought of nuclear winter as more likely. In the Fort Worth Star Telegram, 27 Sep 1981, is the article "World's mercury inching upward", discussing the science which wouldn't look out of place today. But it wasn't until the end of the 80s that the US government started to take it seriously.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  Unfortunately nuclear winter is still more likely, and that likelihood grows with each passing day.
theChaparral 4y ago
Think the OP misremembered it, It wasn't global cooling in the 80's it was nuclear winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
- hinkley 4y ago
  No there was some global cooling whataboutism going on in the late 70's early 80's, but I didn't hear much about it until the late 90's, when we started talking about the 33 year solar cycle.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mikestew 4y ago

What's the saying, "if you remember the 80s, you weren't really there, man"? Or maybe it was the 60s. Anyway I, too, was there and despite trying desperately to forget the popular music of that era, I am quite confident that your recollection is wrong as it pertains to climate change. No, you only think you remember that Time magazine cover.

hinkley 4y ago
My recollection was that the warming guys spent the 70's trying to figure out how to be coherent, and at the first sign of the solar epicycle going the other way, a bunch of whataboutists started clanging the bell about climate cooling they could drown out the warming people. And it mostly worked. The first time I was ever mad about politics was in grade school, when some fake magazine for kids (probably one of the ads from Scholastic) had an interview with Ronald Reagan, and what the interviewer thought kids needed to know about Reagan was how crazy he was for jelly beans. If I had known the phrase, "What in the actual fuck?" I would have said it out loud. It would be 6 more years before someone summed up how terrifying the 1980's were and that man's name was Phil Collins (Genesis, Land of Confusion). But those bases were already loaded with... well, take your pick. You can go with Michael Keaton Movies about the crumbling economy or West German rock bands with a sprinkling of Sting ('Russians') while we all collectively crossed our fingers that we wouldn't wake up on The Day After.
- rurp 4y ago
  The exciting news is that we're probably heading into another one of these terrifying periods: between Russia's aggression, growing conflict with China, accelerating climate change, and potentially catastrophic effects from AI. If we survive, whole new generations will have a lot of vivid memories to look back on.
musictubes 4y ago
It’s behind a paywall but here is an article from a 1958 issue of Harpers discussing a pair of scientists, Ewing and Donn, had a theory about how the last ice age was caused by melting arctic ice. They were primarily trying to figure out what would cause the ocean to heat up so much so quickly. https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/ https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/ I have a distinct memory of my “science” textbook in 2nd grade circa 1981 had a section on the upcoming ice age. Once I realized that the book was old enough to not include the moon landing I didn’t pay much attention to it. In any case, the idea about an impending ice age was in the science zeitgeist, at least the layman understanding of it well before the 80s.

michael1999 4y ago

The first UN climate treaty was signed in 1992. This is not new stuff. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Con...

mitthrowaway2 4y ago

Your recollection is incorrect. Concern about global cooling peaked in the '70s, and even then was still a minority position in the scientific community compared with concern about warming. In the '80s, cooling concerns were related to hypothetical scenarios like nuclear winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1980s

peterashford 4y ago

That was the 70's.