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

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.