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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t to refute your point… but do you also remember when scientists in the 1970s were panicking about global cooling and an impending ice age?

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"As reported in the press" - yes.

"As placed in the press by the same think tanks upselling tobacco" - yes.

Paid for and spun as media confusion by powerful oil and resource extractors, such as but not limited to the Koch brothers, yes.

As a reaction to the late 1960 papers on CO2 impacts being taken seriously by world forums - yes.

But an actual significant number of atmospheric scientists and global modellers "panicking" about glacial expansion of the ice age we're currently in (you know, an ice age being any era during which ice covers the poles) ... uhhh, no.

Mainly as that didn't happen.

This is a common misrepresentation that deniers use to rationalize their unscientific position. The vast majority of the science, even in the 70s, stated that global warming was our future, not global cooling.

Source?

I remember them referencing global cooling on science Friday on NPR as late as 2005

Some scientists, amplified by journalists. Other scientists at the time were predicting warming.

https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/1hajzg9/here_is_th...

They were in a sense correct, because the aerosol cooling they were worried about did in fact (and continues to) have a fairly significant cooling effect... one that is offsetting the rapid warming that CO2 is causing presently.

Media outlets were driving panic. Scientists were always saying warming is a problem

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/876

No. I heard global warming.

The cooling was from nuclear war.

Actual cooling was from industrial emissions, but that was over by the 1970s. It being something to panic about at that point was a media amplification or a contrarian position, precisely because it was contrarian, not representative of scientific opinion at the time.

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