Is it really true that the scientific concensus was in favor of ice age in the 70s? I have heard people say this before but I have never seen the historical evidence.
In 1974 and 1975, Time and Newsweek respectively ran articles proposing a global cooling trend. These articles were (loosely) based on a couple of papers that found that if fine-particulate atmospheric aerosols continued to increase the way they were, they could reflect away enough sunlight to cause surface cooling. (And in fact, exactly that was happening during the 70s.)
However, the Clean Air Act and other similar efforts around the world reduced the amount of particulate aerosols in the air. The amount of CO2 kept climbing though, so the warming model won.
The consensus among published climate science papers at the time was predicting an overall warming trend.
But then Dennis Miller said that scientists believed in an ice age in the 70s, and a bunch of suckers fell for it.
More reading at https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in... and https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
Here is a paper [1] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that warns of crisis-level warming. From the abstract --
> In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage."
For whatever it's worth, this also appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the warming problem. See [2], from 1983.
By contrast, I don't think the possible cooling effect ever received broad support, it was more of a hypothesis.
[1] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
[2] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of....
You just found a solution to global warming. Since you agree that particulate aerosols in the air were going to cause an ice age and the Clean Air Act would fix that, then the Clean Air Act is what has contributed more than anything else to global warming. Repeal the Clean Air Act, reintroduce those old aerosols, and the problem is solved. The global cooling certainty cancels out the global warming certainty and normalcy is achieved.
There were a few studies that predicted an incoming ice age, but they were by far the minority. And these studies were based on predictions of the composition of the atmosphere which did not pan out, where the CO2 predictions have been on point.
CO2 atmospheric levels are way below what was predicted because huge amounts of CO2 was absorbed by the oceans. This has wrecked havoc on the oceans, but the point is that the predictions of atmospheric levels were absolutely wrong because they did not account for the ocean absorption effect.
Check out the apocalyptic tone of the last paragraph: http://agem.com/GlobalCooling.htm
Not just Newsweek, but Time, the New York Times, and other outlets reported on it.
Elementary school children were taught it. I was one of them.
I read now that meteorologists (this is before "climatologist" was a real thing) were divided on whether there was cooling or warming. (But it seems that they were mostly in agreement that something catastrophic was going to happen!)
This global cooling episode does not teach us that there was a scientific consensus on cooling in the 70s, or that climate research since then is equally unfounded. However, it is a really interesting story.
I wonder how old these people are swearing that we are wrong and hallucinating. Most of them were undoubtedly born long after these events.
In the early 80s I picked up one of the "coming ice age" paperbacks, remaindered down to pennies, in the same category as Von Danekin's Chariots of the Gods and his Egyptian aliens. It was absolute garbage, but that's beside the point here. I probably still have it at the back of a bookshelf. Yet already by the early 80s climate heating was coming up in conjunction with acid rain and ozone depletion - they were a holy trinity that often seemed to come together, and they were starting to crop up regularly. Ultimately reporting of all increased throughout the decade, leading to action on ozone and acid rain, and formation of IPCC, at the end of the decade but also the start of the industry moves to oppose via disinformation and obfuscation - the tobacco playbook. Like the Bush administration effort to rebrand climate heating as climate crisis - as that sounds benign and normal.
So I'm old enough, and I doubt your tale - perhaps some sources were reporting it poorly, perhaps the US bought into some climate cooling cult in a way that was completely and entirely unseen here in Europe.
However that is kind of moot, because human driven climate change has been pushing temperatures up faster than any natural temperature reduction has ever achieved. Even if we would otherwise be experience a reduction in average global temperature it doesn't matter because human driven warming would overcome that.