AGW Claims vs Truth – 1b timeline of climate alarms

kaykiser
Global Temperatures 2500 BC to 2040 AD
Global Temperatures 2500 BC to 2040 AD (projected) Note: Temperature range is less than plus or minus 2.5oF (1.4oC) from present.

Part 2 of answers to AGW Claim 1. “Global warming and/or climate change are established facts.”  See “Anthropogenic Global Warming vs. Truth – Part 1” blog post for Part 1.

Quote: “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.”

— Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006

Here is a more complete timeline straight from the headlines and texts of leading newspapers and other reliable sources, thanks to http://butnowyouknow.net/those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history/climate-change-timeline/ and other reliable documentation as noted below.

  • 1872 John Tyndall measured the heat absorption of various atmospheric gases over the entire wavelength range of his heat source. He found that water vapor and CO2 absorbed more strongly than other atmospheric gases such as oxygen and nitrogen. Oxygen and nitrogen, major components of the atmosphere, had little or no absorption of heat in the range tested. It is important to note that his experiments did not separate the heat into specific wavelengths. See Claim 2 and its chart in the next blog post.

Quote: “…if, as the above experiments indicated, the chief influence be exercised by the aqueous vapour, every variation of this constituent must produce a change of climate. Similar remarks would apply to the carbonic acid [CO2] diffused through the air… they constitute true causes, the extent alone of the operation remaining doubtful.”

              — John Tyndall,                                                                             Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat, 1872

  • 1895, February, The New York Times: “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again”
  • 1899, Nils Eckholm claims that burning coal will double CO2 and cause climate change. Eckholm and Svante Arrhenius claim that it will prevent a predicted coming Ice Age. From Historical Perspectives on Climate Change by James Rodger Fleming, 1998, Oxford University Press.
  • 1902, Los Angeles Times: “Disappearing Glaciers … persistency that means their final annihilation …”
  • 1912, October, The New York Times: “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age”
  • 1923, Chicago Sun-Times: “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada”
  • 1923, The Washington Post: “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers … possible advent of a new ice age.”
  • 1924, September, The New York Times: “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age”
  • 1929, Los Angeles Times: “Is another ice age coming?” “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.”
  • 1932, The Atlantic magazine, “This Cold, Cold World”
  • 1933, March, The New York Times, “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise.”
  • 1933, National Weather Bureau Monthly Weather Review: “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather … Is our climate changing?”
  • 1938, Royal Meteorological Society Quarterly Journal: (Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide) “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind …”
  • 1938, Chicago Tribune, “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise … mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades.”
  • 1939, The Washington Post: “… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”
  • 1952, August, The New York Times: “… the world has been getting warmer in the last half century.”
  • 1954, U.S. News and World Report: “… winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing.”
  • 1954. Fortune magazine: “Climate – the Heat May Be Off”
  • 1955, Gilbert Plass predicts 3.6o C (6.8o F) warming if CO2 is doubled.

Quote: “ … average surface temperature of the earth increases 3.6o C if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is doubled …” (this is the false assumption on which many computer models rest)

Quote: “The extra CO2, released into the atmosphere by industrial processes and other human activities may have caused the temperature rise during the present century. In contrast with other theories of climate, the CO2 theory predicts that this warming trend will continue, at least for several centuries.”

—Gilbert Plass, 1956, “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.” [1]

  • 1956, October 28, The New York Times: “Warmer Climate on Earth May Be Due To More Carbon Dioxide in the Air,” by Waldemar Kaempffert in The New York Times “Science in Review”
  • 1959, The New York Times: “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures”
  • 1969, February, The New York Times: “… the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become open sea within a decade or two.”
  • 1970, The Washington Post: “… get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come … there’s no relief in sight.”
  • 1974, Time magazine: “Global cooling for the past forty years”
  • 1974, The Washington Post: “… weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”
  • 1974, Fortune magazine: “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed.”
  • 1974, The New York Times: “… the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure … mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence.” (emphasis added)
  • 1975, The New York Times: “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”
  • 1975, Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist in International Wildlife Magazine: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” (emphasis added)
  • 1976, U.S. News and World Report: “Even US farms may be hit by cooling trend”
  • 1981, The New York Times: (Global Warming) “… of an almost unprecedented magnitude”
  • 1988, James Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testifies before Congress that global warming is a fact and that consequences of doing nothing will be dire.
  • IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was established by the United Nations in that year with the mission to find a connection between human activity and climate change. (emphasis added)
  • After that, the media blitz of articles supporting the belief in global warming or climate change are too numerous to list in detail here.

Quote: “The 1995 IPCC draft report said, ‘Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.’ It also said, ‘No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes.’ Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate.'”  (emphasis added)

 — “Aliens Cause Global Warming,” Caltech Michelin Lecture, Michael Crichton, 1/17/2003

Quote: “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems. Even the most credible international assessment body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has refused to attempt subjective probabilistic estimates of future temperatures. This has forced politicians to make their own guesses about the likelihood of various degrees of global warming.” (emphasis added)

— Stephen Schneider, (warmist camp), former Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, in “Global Warming: Neglecting the Complexities,” Scientific American, January 2002, an article requested by the publisher to critique Bjorn Borg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist

Quote: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.

To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” (emphasis added. Note that the excuse for dishonesty is based on an unsubstantiated assumption that doing so will result in a better world.)

— Stephen Schneider, (warmist camp), former Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, in Discover, 1989

 

[1] Plass, G. N. (1956), “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.” Johns Hopkins University Press, Tellus, 8: 140–154. doi: 10.1111/j.2153-3490.1956.tb01206.x