Covering Up The Inconvenient Consensus On Global Cooling

The world had been cooling since the 1940s and by the 1970s the consensus of climate scientists was that we were about to enter another “ice age” or at least to return to the cold of the “little ice age” (the period from about 1300 to 1870).

Dire predictions appeared in the popular press; see here for a sampling of story headlines.

“During the 1970s the media promoted global cooling alarmism with dire threats of a new ice age. Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls.”

Does that sound familiar?

There were many scientific papers supporting future cooling also. People trying to justify the current human-caused global warming scam by claiming a supporting consensus of scientists want to get rid of that previous consensus which said global cooling was the existential danger.

This previous cooling consensus, and attempts to erase it, are the subject of an article by Kenneth Richard writing in the NoTricksZone blog (link to article). The article is titled: “Massive Cover-up Exposed: 285 Papers From 1960s-’80s Reveal Robust Global Cooling Scientific ‘Consensus.’”

At the end of the article, Richard gives links to and abstracts of many papers from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s which predict global cooling to come.

The first part of Richard’s article concerns the coverup of the existence these papers:

Beginning in 2003, software engineer William Connolley quietly removed the highly inconvenient references to the global cooling scare of the 1970s from Wikipedia, the world’s most influential and accessed informational source.

It had to be done. Too many skeptics were (correctly) pointing out that the scientific “consensus” during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Earth had been cooling for decades, and that nascent theorizing regarding the potential for a CO2-induced global warming were still questionable and uncertain.

Not only did Connolley — a co-founder (along with Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt) of the realclimate.com blog — successfully remove (or rewrite) the history of the 1970s global cooling scare from the Wikipedia record, he also erased (or rewrote) references to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age so as to help create the impression that the paleoclimate is shaped like Mann’s hockey stick graph, with unprecedented and dangerous 20th/21st century warmth.

A 2009 investigative report from UK’s Telegraph detailed the extent of dictatorial-like powers Connolley possessed at Wikipedia, allowing him to remove inconvenient scientific information that didn’t conform to his point of view.

“All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles.

Richard also discusses an attempt to say that there really wasn’t a cooling consensus at all so we should now believe the “real” consensus of human-caused warming.

Ironically, some scientists are again predicting a cooling phase because solar cycles (sunspot numbers) are weakening which leads to more cloud cover and cooling.

Beware of claimed consensus in science:

“Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” – Michael Crichton

See these articles about the warming consensus:

Note to readers:

Index with links to all my ADI articles: http://wp.me/P3SUNp-1pi

My comprehensive 28-page essay on climate change: http://wp.me/P3SUNp-1bq