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I linked to WUWT for the video, clearly there were people politicizing science at the time and if you bothered to read my wikipedia link you can see how this st

I linked to WUWT for the video, clearly there were people politicizing science at the time and if you bothered to read my wikipedia link you can see how this stuff got into the press and public consciousness via the scientific community. >There was never a widespread consensus about global cooling: The problem is that its hard for the public to weigh these claims when experts go on TV. Again, my point is that consensus changes, politics change, etc. Scientific consensus is often more wrong than right and later replaced or refined by something else. Denying that is sophomoric. Scientists aren't immune from fads and hysteria, especially when that stuff results in grants and fame.

anon1385 11y ago
Yes, some people were worried about it. The one person you actually named in your post was not. Bad start. In my experience the main way it got into the public consciousness was through climate change deniers in subsequent decades. I've never seen anybody talk about it who wasn't a climate change denier. Most people today would have no memory at all of a couple of Time magazine articles in the 1970s that made wacky scientific predictions that turned out to be wrong. There must have been hundreds of articles like that on all sorts of topics. It was a minority position. There wasn't a huge amount of research published on the topic. As far as I know no government or corporate polices were ever changed based on the idea. So it isn't a valid comparison to the trans-fat issue at all. It's actually just a classic example of "small group of minority opinion scientists who got a disproportionate but still small level of media coverage were wrong". That happens all the time. The media loves a plucky outsider with a dramatic story to tell. It's a strange topic for WUWT to bring up since that entire site is based on the idea that the majority of scientists are wrong and that a small group of people (mostly not even scientists) with disproportionately loud voices in the media are actually right. If you want to make an analogy then WUWT are the global coolists of today (but with even less scientific credibility since they publish basically no papers). Which is of course fitting since a lot of people on that site are still predicting an imminent ice age.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >Time magazine articles in the 1970s We're talking network TV and the cover of the nation's most popular magazines and newspapers. A lot of people were exposed to these ideas, lets not deny that. >It's a strange topic for WUWT Let me guess, you're too young to know any of this stuff, but to the boomer generation they really went from "Guys new ice age coming" to "hey global warming" pretty quickly. I think you need to sympathize with them. Yes, obviously climate change/warming is happening, but dismissing how these things get into the media, climate cooling hysteria in the 70s, etc just makes you seem like some "SCIENCE CAN NEVER BE WRONG" type who disingenuously pisses on the experiences and realpolitik of the time. The reality is that that cooling was in the popular consciousness and led by x amount of high profile scientists. It happened. The question in my mind is what stops this from happening again? Nothing as far as I can tell. Experts have a high levels of influence and combined with mass media can change or understanding of things pretty quickly. This is often a feature of our mass communication society, but it is just as likely to be a bug (wrong facts, conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc). The internet seems to make this worse. tldr; science is as much political as it is technical

anon1385 11y ago

Yes, some people were worried about it. The one person you actually named in your post was not. Bad start. In my experience the main way it got into the public consciousness was through climate change deniers in subsequent decades. I've never seen anybody talk about it who wasn't a climate change denier. Most people today would have no memory at all of a couple of Time magazine articles in the 1970s that made wacky scientific predictions that turned out to be wrong. There must have been hundreds of articles like that on all sorts of topics. It was a minority position. There wasn't a huge amount of research published on the topic. As far as I know no government or corporate polices were ever changed based on the idea. So it isn't a valid comparison to the trans-fat issue at all. It's actually just a classic example of "small group of minority opinion scientists who got a disproportionate but still small level of media coverage were wrong". That happens all the time. The media loves a plucky outsider with a dramatic story to tell. It's a strange topic for WUWT to bring up since that entire site is based on the idea that the majority of scientists are wrong and that a small group of people (mostly not even scientists) with disproportionately loud voices in the media are actually right. If you want to make an analogy then WUWT are the global coolists of today (but with even less scientific credibility since they publish basically no papers). Which is of course fitting since a lot of people on that site are still predicting an imminent ice age.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>Time magazine articles in the 1970s We're talking network TV and the cover of the nation's most popular magazines and newspapers. A lot of people were exposed to these ideas, lets not deny that. >It's a strange topic for WUWT Let me guess, you're too young to know any of this stuff, but to the boomer generation they really went from "Guys new ice age coming" to "hey global warming" pretty quickly. I think you need to sympathize with them. Yes, obviously climate change/warming is happening, but dismissing how these things get into the media, climate cooling hysteria in the 70s, etc just makes you seem like some "SCIENCE CAN NEVER BE WRONG" type who disingenuously pisses on the experiences and realpolitik of the time. The reality is that that cooling was in the popular consciousness and led by x amount of high profile scientists. It happened. The question in my mind is what stops this from happening again? Nothing as far as I can tell. Experts have a high levels of influence and combined with mass media can change or understanding of things pretty quickly. This is often a feature of our mass communication society, but it is just as likely to be a bug (wrong facts, conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc). The internet seems to make this worse. tldr; science is as much political as it is technical