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>it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now

That's a common myth. 70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns.

Sometimes the result was conductive to the environment (e.g. efficiency increases), sometimes it was less so (various US gov research into more polluting alternatives like synthetic oil or shale oil), and sometimes it was just silly (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry).

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"70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns."

Quite - the environment was not much of a concern.

Bear in mind that lead in petrol was your anti-knock agent and the catalytic convertor didn't exist.

I remember really yellow coloured, sickly verges alongside roads and strawberry sellers in laybyes on the A303 ...

In the 1970s, the feared effect was global cooling.

I doubt that Carter could have intervened in any case.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

I'm not sure your article agrees that cooling was the dominant thought in the public sphere:

> "While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way"

And it definitely wasn't in the scientific world:

> Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then

Seems more likely that if Carter had an opinion it would be the scientific one, and even if he only read mass media on it he wouldn't necessarily think cooling was the dominant trend.

Mass media was clearly on th side of cooling and anyone trying to argue anything else looks like an idiot to anyone with a memory. And mass media had plenty of science people to quote. (this is of course different from what science showed but almost nobody knows that - what we see on the media is reality)

This is untrue unless “mass media” means “one issue each of Time and Newsweek quoting Reid Bryson”.

It was all over the media at the time. You are cherry picking.

Care to show your work?

I was alive then and remember the coverage.

You remember your view of what you saw.

If there was a mix of articles, then there will be a mix of people claiming that they personally saw all one side.

Several others in this thread claim they saw cooling articles in the 90s. I never saw a single cooling article but saw many many warming articles and knew even very conservative Republican families that got worked up about the dangers of global warming.

Anybody citing a single article or their personal experience is degrading the conversation. A single person's recollection is not even evidence when we can compare to an entire historical record.

Memories are very much subject to confirmation bias and sampling bias. Basing knowledge on personal experience is not solid epistemology. Further, the "I was alive and remember all of the media landscape at a time 50 years ago" is an appeal to authority fallacy. I don't personally dispute your recollections at all, and that is your impression and lived experience - but it does not make it facts. Extrapolating from an individuals experience is liable to be very faulty, again, poor epistemology.

Not that this will convince anyone currently attempting to rewrite this out of history (or determined to believe those who rewrite history), but the media panic, reporting on the scientific discussion, was much broader than that. The scientific studies and opinions varied - it was not one-sided, but the "ice age" predictions were much more marketable, at least.

5 minutes of checking found three issues of Time, one from 1994.

  * 24 Jun 1974 https://time.com/archive/6878023/another-ice-age/ (well-known)
  * 13 Nov 1972 https://time.com/archive/6844319/science-another-ice-age/ ("refuses to speculate")
  * 31 Jan 1994 https://time.com/archive/6724662/the-ice-age-cometh/ ("the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill.")

Here are others:

  * “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969
  * “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age,” Washington Post, January 11, 1970.
  * “Science:  Another Ice Age?”  Time Magazine, June 24, 1974.
  * “The Ice Age Cometh!”  Science News, March 1, 1975.
  * “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975.
  * “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21, 1975.
  * “In the Grip of a New Ice Age?” International Wildlife July-August, 1975.
  * “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” New York Times, September 14, 1975.
  * “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science magazine, December 10, 1976.

Yeah. It was all over popular media, but that seems to be ignored by people who weren't around then. They'll claim that what you actually saw is just anecdotal and should be ignored.

It appears that you are the one attempting to rewrite, the claim is that both cooling and warming were reported on in mass media, not that just one was.

One can't search for this stuff without coming across lots of both warming and cooling articles. And one finds tons of intentional deception pushing cooling articles. Here's a Reuters article calling out one bit of misinformation pushing cooling articles that were not actually about cooling:

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/time-magazine-front-cover...

My question is why there is such a modern push to decieve about cooling in the mass media? What purpose does it serve for people?

> It appears that you are the one attempting to rewrite, the claim is that both cooling and warming were reported on in mass media,

I posted several headlines and links in mass & scientific media promoting the global cooling belief, which corresponds to my recollection of the dominant media.

I recognize my recollection may be flawed. If you have evidence to that effect, please post a similar collection from the time period promoting global warming belief to support your assertion.

My personal belief is that the media over-hypes scientific findings and under-reports uncertainties. We see this today in global warming coverage, as we saw it (or at least, as I recall it) in the 1970s global cooling coverage.

The “we need to stop polluting or we’ll cause another ice age” was floating around classrooms in the 90s.

I remember reading a very solid article from the 90s by Imbrie (the father, not the son) about a global cooling model.

Intelligent design was floating around in classrooms but we don't need to pretend that it was anything other than a fringe political and religious belief.

Here is an article from the New York Times in 1975, that trots out quite a few Ph.D. recipients:

"That the climate, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, has been getting cooler since about 1950, is well estabt lished—if one ignores the last two winters."

https://archive.ph/k6xfu

A single article does not in any way refute the quote in my comment, and could not. Even 10 or 20 such articles could not refute. It would take a study of the entire media environment of the time.

I don't remember "global cooling" but to be fair, I was only 10 by 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling - OK but do bear in mind that fags (cigarettes) were still being advertised as good for your health in the '70s.

Global cooling/warming was not really a feared effect back then - both were merely noted. What really concentrated the mind was the Cold War for the mainstream minded. For the usual bat shit loopy mob, there was the usual alien invasions and that!

I was a UK soldier's brat (my mum was a soldier too when she met dad but "retired" on advice when they married). We spent quite a lot of time in West Germany. I remember seeing Tupolev Bears and Badgers getting "lost" and being given directions by large fireworks with pilots strapped on top with a couple of side winder missiles and a cannon that fires rounds that they might fly into themselves.

OK it was the '70's. Dad's staff car was a Sioux or a Merc. 432s and 434s, Chieftains, Stalwarts, Saracens, Saladins and the rest would rumble around - that was just UK gear. West Germany had Leopards, Luchs (Lynx) and more. Phantoms, Starfighters, Buccaneers, Harriers and all the rest. I remember watching flights of Phantoms (four) lift off from say RAF Wildenrath, put their foot down (afterburner) and scoot off to whatever they had to do. It was quite deafening, and I was in a playground!

"Global cooling" - no, no idea!

I hope I have given you a mild flavour of just how unimportant the environment was generally considered back in the day by the general public. There was quite a lot of other things going on.

Nowadays, the weather rather speaks for itself.

> In the 1970s, the feared effect was global cooling

This is a common trope but it’s mostly been promoted by fossil fuel lobbyists to pretend climate scientists weren’t right than reality. That alternate history is mostly promulgated by the likes of noted-creationist Duane Gish or general purpose denialists like Stephen Milloy, but it doesn’t hold up when you look at the record.

People had been concerned about global warming since 1896, and scientists had been increasingly concerned before World War II. There were a handful of papers in the early 1970s predicting cooling based on aerosol effects BUT those did not reflect widespread consensus and other researchers at the same time published papers predicting warming, and those papers were considered stronger.

What most of this hangs off of is that Time magazine “Another Ice Age?” article which sounded dramatic but was actually inconclusive about the future. It sold a lot of issues, but it wasn’t exactly a climate science journal.

By the end of the 1970s, consensus had been reached that the earth was warming and most climate science research was focused on how it would happen rather than whether.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

> In the 1970s, the feared effect was global cooling.

Not really. From your Wikipedia link:

> In the scientific papers which considered climate trends of the 21st century, fewer than 10% were inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming.[1] […] By the time the idea of global cooling reached the public press in the mid-1970s temperatures had stopped falling, and there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide's warming effects.[4] In response to such reports, the World Meteorological Organization issued a warning in June 1976 that "a very significant warming of global climate" was probable.[5]

It was a small minority in the scientific community. The concern got blown out of proportion by some cover stories.

I was alive in the 1970's and I can tell you that aside from a Time magazine article, Global cooling was not a broadly feared effect.

The Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon in 1970.

The clean air act was in 1967.

We were talking about energy policy. It was well known at the time policy was motivated by the oil crisis and environment was a second fiddle:

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist...

* Aside: EPA and the Clean Air act weren't motivated by Climate Change but by particle pollution concerns.

OP > …real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981…

I don’t think that’s incorrect even if you ascribe all of the era’s environmental decision making to energy scarcity.

Carter still set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and that still would have made a significant impact.

It seems obvious to me that environmental policy was in some part driven by concern for the environment itself, but that doesn’t change the simple statement that things would have been better if we’d followed it.

* The main practical work the admin did wasn't solar but synthetic fuels cuz the Carter admin believed in peak oil. That's an incredibly polluting technology that didn't happen in our timeline. It's only possibly reasonable if it displaces tarsands, but if it doesn't we end up in the worst scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation

* Aside, significant global warming became scientific consensus only sometime between 1979 and 1989. The global cooling thing above is wrong in that most scientists expected some warming and that it expects too much from science. It does connect to the fact there was real scientific debate at the time and not just denialism, it wasn't clear warming would be that much a problem.

This should not be a point against climate science - scientists aren't born with the correct climate model! It took time to get the modeling right, but once they did the predictions were completely accurate.

It's an interesting question to ponder what could have been done had they knew how big a problem it would be. Imagine going back in time, but lacking any technical knowledge to bring. You also can't do 'I am from the future and this is what you must work on'. All with past tech and past political economy.

* I wonder how much investing in solar would have been worth it. The tech was carried over by a huge investment in semiconductors that helped silicone tech on the side. If you go back early you probably end up replicating it and that costs a lot? Or I could be wrong here.

* Wind tech was probably doable. You could have iterated over designs, material science was behind but not that much I think. Nuclear was reasonable too.

* CFLs were developed in the late 70s. One could have done an early version of banning incandescent lighting. Blue LED lightening weren't invented yet and took a breakthrough.

* Probably even more stringent fuel mandates. Electrical vehicles were in the future, you could have brought them forward by a decade or two, but in the 1980s they weren't an alternative, and I don't think in the 90s either?

* Of course, the US could have mandated solar water heaters where the climate allows.

We can imagine an alternate past where green tech was wind + nuclear, and lightening was CFLs.

One thing that happened under Carter was the deregulation of natural gas (the 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act). Before that, wellhead prices were federally regulated.

It's difficult to understand now, but natural gas was viewed as something in short supply back then that had to be price controlled. Of course the causation was in the other direction: price controls led to shortage, and once those were removed enormous new sources of gas began to be uncovered, eventually leading to the fracking revolution. Today in the US natural gas is a colossus, having beaten down coal and nuclear.

> (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry)

How did this set back the whole industry? Experience since then, even in France, is that reprocessing is uneconomical. Understand that Carter's executive order was rescinded by Reagan, and yet reprocessing has gone nowhere since then in the US.

Because the waste issue became a problem for every new commercial project, and well, waste is rather unfortunate by itself. Reprocessing remained in France and UK, so it mustn't have been that uneconomical - I guess that the investment/approvals required to open a new site were too much.

It wasn't that uneconomical because the back end of the fuel cycle is a relatively small part of the cost of nuclear power. So France and, for a time, the UK could continue to operate their white elephants. But other countries that were using their reprocessing services gradually fell away -- the separated plutonium has negative value. Even if the reprocessing were free, it would be cheaper to make fresh fuel from newly enriched uranium than to make MOX fuel with plutonium.

The world has converged on the most economical solution to spent fuel: dry cask storage. This is not an ultimate solution, but it forecloses no ultimate solution, and by delaying any such expensive step it minimizes the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste. In the meantime, the spent fuel gradually cools off, rendering any future ultimate solution easier.

Reprocessing can be seen as a fossilized remnant of an earlier failed vision of where nuclear power was going to go. The vision was that nuclear power plants would be cheap, lots of them would be built, and then uranium would start to run out. Fuel would start getting expensive, so we'd have to move to breeder reactors. Fast breeders burn plutonium, so you want to start them with Pu separated from the earlier thermal reactors (and then continue to fuel them with Pu they themselves produce.)

But this vision never came to pass. Nuclear power plants turned out to be expensive and uranium remained cheap (and enrichment got cheap). Reprocessing ended up unneeded and unwanted. It really did serve as a cover for proliferation, too: Japan now has enough separated reactor grade Pu for about 1000 bombs. It's not as good as weapons grade but it can still serve for weapons if boosting is used to ameliorate premature initiation of the chain reaction.

There's an inversion of cause and effect here. Nuclear didn't fail because we didn't reprocess, we didn't reprocess because nuclear failed. To invert the actual causation is an example of cargo cult thinking.

There are serious proliferation concerns surrounding nuclear waste reprocessing.

Btw Carter put solar panels on the white house.

Which didn't justify the ban. Other countries didn't follow suit, main effect was hurting US nuclear industry and increasing pollution.

P.S. These weren't solar panels (i.e. electricity generation), but solar water heaters. A very different tech, a useful tech, but not a global warming solution.

Solar water heaters reduce the fossil fuel that would be used to heat the water, reducing CO2 emissions very slightly, and therefore can be part of the climate change solution.

This is perfectly true, but as you say a small effect. Even in countries like Cyprus and Israel where nearly every home has a solar water heater and the climate is very conductive it saves something like 1-3% of electricity consumption I recall?

I meant it's not a solution in the class of solar panels, where the electricity can be used for nearly anything. Also heater tech isn't very high tech and didn't need much gov support in developing it. Mandating it in law where climate allows may have been useful though.

A huge percentage of energy is used for household heating, solar water heaters were definitely a potential contributor to solving global warming (and other concerns of the day like air pollution, acid rain (solved!), peak oil (not a problem as it turns out), or just reducing oil dependency in general).

Solar electricity has become much, much, cheaper and more efficient since then, and heatpumps have made electric heating much more efficient, so solar hot water doesn't look like it's going to be the future (though new installations do still happen today, despite the advances in solar electric). It wasn't a bad bet at the time though.

Water heating is a sgnifant use of energy so an easy convert to solar there would be significant. Alone not enough of course but still significant

Solar thermal water heaters are a retro technology at this point. It's simpler and easier to install PV panels driving a heat pump water heater.

Yes, at this point. At the time, they were not.

Seriously everyone critiquing 40 year old projects like they just had PVs laying around in the 70s.

And people incorrectly saying Reagan had PV panels pulled down, the troglodyte. /s That solar thermal collectors never really caught on in the US shows the technology was marginal and the decision to remove them (I think when they leaked?) was arguably a good one.

It's not that retro. In some places in the world it's still very common, and heat pumps very uncommon. It's a response that makes sense in the right climate (and I should note Carter did create a tax credit program for it, though it never got popular in the US).

It's still used in some projects. I remember seeing a deep dive into a net zero lodge (for vacationing) someone built just a few years ago that featured all of those: solar water preheating & PV on the roof, as well as heat pump HVAC/water heaters. Perhaps now it would be cheaper to just beef up the PV and active water heating but I'm sure they had their reasons at the time, at least.

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