Denier 'facts' alive and well ...
Once again the climate change / global warming Deniers are trying to revive the dead; this time the ridiculous “Scientists predicted Global Cooling in the 1970’s” myth.
This myth has been thoroughly debunked as having been nothing more than media sensationalism over the beliefs of a handful of scientists based on a limited number of studies.
Now some enterprising Denier found this gem “SCIENTISTS AGREE WORLD IS COLDER; But Climate Experts Meeting Here Fail to Agree on Reasons for Change” in the New York Times archive. Needless to say this is rocketing around the Denialopshere as “Proof of Scientific Consensus on Global Cooling: 1961” and “Global Cooling Consensus in the Past: the Evidence.”
So the Deniers are trying to spin this as proof that in 1961 there had been scientific consensus that the world was entering an ice age, and since that did not in fact happen we should all therefore ignore the equivalent current scientific consensus on climate change.
Needless to say that is a pile of bullshit.
So what’s really going on?
From “The Modern Temperature Trend“:”In January 1961, on a snowy and unusually cold day in New York City, J. Murray Mitchell, Jr. of the U.S. Weather Bureau’s Office of Climatology told a meeting of meteorologists that the world’s temperature was falling. Independently of Callendar (who had meanwhile been updating and improving his own global temperature history), Mitchell had trudged through all the exacting calculations, working out average temperatures for most of the globe, and got plausible results. He confirmed that global temperatures had risen until about 1940. But since then, he reported, temperatures had been falling. There was so much random variation from place to place and from year to year that the reversal to cooling had only now become visible.”
The story refers to:
* a single meeting of a particular group of meteorologists, not even representing American meteorologists, much less multiple sciences, much less global in scope;
* they “generally agreed” that there seemed to have been a cooling for a couple of decades. They did not agree on a mechanism, and they most certainly did not make any predictions about future cooling;
* thier agreement was not put to the general scientific community and the scientific debate about what was going on continued with a majority favouring warming although the handful predicting cooling got the media attention.
To equate this small one time meeting of a few meteorologists with the global consensus on climate change backed by a mass of scientific evidence is just more Denier idiocy. As usual they have nothing to offer but frauds, lies, and spin in a feeble attempt to ressurect the dead.
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Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 8 … still no evidence.
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Greenfyre's 
Maybe your blog would be better if you made it more about the science behind why global warming/climate change/climate crisis is real instead of attacking skeptic blogs on every other post. While this may indeed be your goal, it would lend credibility to your blog if it weren’t.
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Hello Greenfyre
I certainly support letting everybody perfectly free to use their own definitions. As long as it is clear what they are talking about.
That 1961 New York meeting I have blogged about, was sponsored by the American Metereological Association and The New York Academy of Sciences. That should be enough to consider it an important conference. And it was co-chaired by Rhodes W. Fairbridge, not a minor figure in the last 40/50 years of climatology. Furthermore, it was followed by another meeting in Rome, organized by UNESCO and again with major climatologists in attendance (J. Murray Mitchell, Jr. C. C. Wallén , E. Kraus).
Once again in Rome, they all agreed that the world was cooling. The full proceedings are available and I extracted some interesting snippets.
If scientific experts meet once, and then meet again, and there is general agreement among them that the world is cooling, I’d say most people will agree that THAT is evidence for “global cooling scientific consensus”.
I am just using perfectly common and sensible definitions for “cooling”, “global” and “consensus”.
If instead you decide e.g. that “global cooling” has to mean “predicting future cooling”, feel free to do so: but please do yourself a favor and provide reasons for your choice.
Because of course the more we restrict a definition, the less the chance that anything will fall into that category.
This “restricting the definition until there is nothing left” is after all what Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck have done in their largely mistitled “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”.
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My memory of the 70’s cooling thing is pretty vague, but I remember something. It was a newspaper headline or magazine cover or maybe it was on the evening news, but only because it was a slow news day.
Discussion with omnologos continues here
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