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Same fears, different name?
Panic about climate change is not an entirely contemporary phenomenon. In fact, 40 years ago, some scientists were similarly fearful about an impending climate catastrophe. The world would be harmed and life would become harsh, we were told. Policies were drawn up to deal with the coming change, and the scientists crossed their fingers. But there is one vital difference between the panic then and the panic now. It wasn’t global warming that was concerning scientists 40 years ago; it was global cooling.

This revelation comes from a recently unearthed 1974 CIA report. Because of this we now know that a large number of scientists really were convinced that world temperatures were on the way down. The only uncertainty centred around the strength and duration of the upcoming cooling of the planet. Yet this apparent consensus around global cooling, so prevalent during the 1970s, seems to have been erased from history. Why? ...

...It doesn’t take much effort to find ‘the world is cooling!’ articles in the online archives of the New York Times and the Washington Post, or on websites reporting what appeared in a famous Newsweek article from 1975, ‘The Cooling World’ (2). Written by science correspondents, many of them now dead, these pieces show plenty of scientists ready to depict a colder future in doom-laden words. There are even mentions of government agencies getting involved.

All of this seems incompatible with the contemporary view of catastrophic global warming. First of all, the phraseology used then to describe a cooling world of floods and droughts is identical to the phraseology used now to describe a warming world of flood and droughts. Worse, even the mere acknowledgement that climate change alarmism is not new would undermine fears being stoked around impending environmental, social and economic disasters due to unfavourable changes in temperatures. ...

...Likewise, if it becomes widely known that a number of scientists agreed that catastrophic cooling was happening little less than 40 years ago, current fears about climate changes will be seriously undermined. It might then be possible to view climate change as a set of possible scenarios to be investigated instead of panicked over....

...Is it really a myth that a large number of scientists believed the world was getting cooler? Not quite. Peterson’s, Connolley’s and Fleck’s first trick is to narrow the ‘myth’ to ‘an imminent ice age’, rather than simply ‘global cooling’. They then argue that for it be even approaching a consensus view amongst scientists, there would have to be ‘both the presence of many articles describing global cooling projections and the absence of articles projecting global warming’. Absence? As in not even one? Is that really possible, even in theory?

Peterson, Connolley and Fleck proceed to conduct a scientific literature survey, but they exclude, for example, geology-related works, which is ironic given that they argue that ‘the myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts’. They carry on even after admitting ‘most’ of the surveyed articles ‘do not… make clear predictions’. They manage also to find a feeble excuse for the 1975 Newsweek article, enlisting New York Times uber-warmist Andy Revkin to explain that ‘cooling’ could have been a ‘good peg’ for climate stories at the time. They also extend the temporal window of their search so wide (1965-1979, with citations counted up to 1983) that it would have been truly remarkable if a scientific consensus of any sort had been maintained without an IPCC-like body to sustain it, especially in a science as young as climatology.

This certainly doesn’t seem like a healthy way to look at, and understand, history. There simply was no IPCC in the 1970s, and there was still space for a number of new hypotheses. To go out looking for a 2008-style consensus, and perhaps even an IPCC-equivalent body in the 1970s, is to be anti-historical. It is a view analogous to those paintings from the Middle Ages that naively portrayed ancient Romans in contemporary garb....

...Forgotten for 35 years, the CIA report, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems frequently mentions a scientific acceptance of global cooling. It also reveals how most climate fears have never really left us, regardless of the underlying temperature trend.

Having seen the CIA report mentioned in a 1976 Washington Post piece, but with no copy of it on the internet, I obtained the microfiche document from the British Library. The content of the report’s 36 pages is striking. It may have been written in 1974, but the depictions are uncannily familiar: climate change, it says, will lead to floods and famines, and leaders in climatology are issuing stark warnings about threats to ‘the stability of most states’. The only thing to differentiate it from today’s scaremongering is the fact that the CIA in 1974 was concerned about global cooling, not warming. The report even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.

The document is embarrasing to read. The ‘new climatic era’ is described in 1974 as a harbinger of famine, starvation, refugees, floods, droughts, crop failures, monsoons and the cause of all kinds of meteorological phenomena. As expected, potential benefits are downplayed and potential harms highlighted: the Sahara is expected to expand, and world grain reserves may last less than one month, the report claimed. There is even a cursory list of past civilisations destroyed by climatic episodes: The Indus, the Hittites, the Mycenaean and the Empire of Mali....