Newsweek reports: "There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now."
The article goes on with impressive quotes from NOAA scientists, Columbia University professors and climatologists – all giving dire warnings about the impending climate crisis.
Ending with – "The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."
Grim indeed.
These words are from the infamous 1975 Newsweek article titled "The Cooling World" (for your reading pleasure, the entire article is attached on the bottom of this post).
Newsweek was on the global cooling scare bandwagon back then and the article points to all of the recent weather disasters then (tornados) as an ominous sign. Sound familiar?
But – global cooling? C’mon – how silly – everyone knows our world is burning with a fever. Al Gore told us so.
Or is it? Have you noticed a chill in the air lately? It seems the world has been getting colder this past year.
Uh oh.
Michael Asher’s blog post in the Science section over at DailyTech.com details those stubborn facts (click on his links – very in-depth):
TEMPERATURE MONITORS REPORT WIDESCALE GLOBAL COOLING
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let’s hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Hmmmm….. well this global cooling trend just might end up as ‘an inconvenient truth’.
Pun intended.