Some background on global cooling fears

In an email discussion of global cooling, Nigel Calder provided these passing remarks:

Global cooling was officially on the international scientific agenda as early as October 1963, when the UN Food & Agriculture Organization convened a conference in Rome on the threat that global cooling posed to world food supplies. The eminent British climatologist Hubert Lamb led the discussions. I was there as a young reporter, and after that the cooling story ran till the late 1970s. For example in 1974 leading experts talked with great concern about the global cooling in a 2-hr TV documentary, The Weather Machine, which I scripted for the BBC, WNET and four other national broadcasters.

The cooling was not in doubt. The arguments were about whether it was natural or anthropogenic, whether we might be looking at a Little Ice Age or even a full-blown glaciation, and whether putting out more CO2 might conceivably help to reverse it. We in the media simply echoed what was commonly discussed in scientific meetings and journals. The subsequent attempts to rewrite science history to fit the AGW storyline are Orwellian.

Nigel Calder