https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1970s_awareness
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compila...
Obviously, research changes and consensus changes. Being wrong in the past doesn't mean you're wrong today. Or being right in the past doesn't mean you're right today.
No he wasn't: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/07/28/if-you-wish-to-make-...
There was never a widespread consensus about global cooling:
>A 2008 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society actually reviewed the climate research published in the 70s and concluded that "global cooling was never more than a minor aspect of the scientific climate change literature of the era, let alone the scientific consensus" and "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."
WUWT is a climate change denial site run by conspiracy theorists. It's not a good place to get facts about anything.
>There was never a widespread consensus about global cooling:
The problem is that its hard for the public to weigh these claims when experts go on TV. Again, my point is that consensus changes, politics change, etc. Scientific consensus is often more wrong than right and later replaced or refined by something else. Denying that is sophomoric. Scientists aren't immune from fads and hysteria, especially when that stuff results in grants and fame.
It was a minority position. There wasn't a huge amount of research published on the topic. As far as I know no government or corporate polices were ever changed based on the idea. So it isn't a valid comparison to the trans-fat issue at all. It's actually just a classic example of "small group of minority opinion scientists who got a disproportionate but still small level of media coverage were wrong". That happens all the time. The media loves a plucky outsider with a dramatic story to tell.
It's a strange topic for WUWT to bring up since that entire site is based on the idea that the majority of scientists are wrong and that a small group of people (mostly not even scientists) with disproportionately loud voices in the media are actually right. If you want to make an analogy then WUWT are the global coolists of today (but with even less scientific credibility since they publish basically no papers). Which is of course fitting since a lot of people on that site are still predicting an imminent ice age.
We're talking network TV and the cover of the nation's most popular magazines and newspapers. A lot of people were exposed to these ideas, lets not deny that.
>It's a strange topic for WUWT
Let me guess, you're too young to know any of this stuff, but to the boomer generation they really went from "Guys new ice age coming" to "hey global warming" pretty quickly. I think you need to sympathize with them. Yes, obviously climate change/warming is happening, but dismissing how these things get into the media, climate cooling hysteria in the 70s, etc just makes you seem like some "SCIENCE CAN NEVER BE WRONG" type who disingenuously pisses on the experiences and realpolitik of the time.
The reality is that that cooling was in the popular consciousness and led by x amount of high profile scientists. It happened. The question in my mind is what stops this from happening again? Nothing as far as I can tell. Experts have a high levels of influence and combined with mass media can change or understanding of things pretty quickly. This is often a feature of our mass communication society, but it is just as likely to be a bug (wrong facts, conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc). The internet seems to make this worse.
tldr; science is as much political as it is technical
"I disagree with their position so I will slander them."
I then provided additional commentary about the quality of the site.
Which isn't to say that climate & environmental science isn't a bit sick. It suffers from group-think and a pretty hefty anti-human bias.
They in general did not begin from "I do not like the implication of the carbon emission -> global warming hypothesis to my business model so I will not consider explanations that force me(or my patrons) to stop making money from fossil fuels"
My point is that both are a valid critiques and should influence how you read the arguments made by both sides.
I was mostly annoyed that you were calling skepticism for those biases slander instead of pointing out that both sides are biased, and thus we(as humans) are likely to fall for the side that our confirmation bias leads us to.
Overall I'm convinced that warming is happening, and that human CO2 emissions are probably single largest cause of that. I'm also pretty well convinced that the impact of that warming is well below the alarmists views, and that we will move to renewables just as soon as it is efficient to do so.
Just think how bad things would be if someone had taken that 70s era belief in global cooling and used it as a justification to require us to dump more CO2 into the atmosphere to mitigate it.
The only good thing about doing nothing in principle is that when something bad happens there's nobody to blame. Of course it may be the case that we have good reasons to believe that doing nothing is always safer than doing something, but we need some data and some models to support that belief, it's not enough holding it a priori just because many people still believe in "Mother Earth", even though they consider that "Father God" is dead.