The global warming fears of 1933

[Stephen Wilde]

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/061 ... 9-0251.pdf

So we had concerns about warming in the 1930's.

Then a new ice age in the 1970's,

Then global warming in the 1990's

Then with a modicum of cooling now some are already fearing a dangerous cooling spell.

In every case it was supposed to be our fault.

[questioner]

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/061/mwr-061-09-0251.pdf

So we had concerns about warming in the 1930's.

Then a new ice age in the 1970's,

Then global warming in the 1990's

Then with a modicum of cooling now some are already fearing a dangerous cooling spell.

In every case it was supposed to be our fault.

Reading the paper you linked, I didn't find any "global warming fears of 1933". The author simply showed data showing temperatures were on an upward trend in many places, using rolling averages of varying numbers of years to illustrate his point. I didn't see any fault of mankind mentioned in this 1933 paper.
I could have missed it. If so perhaps you could show it to me.
Modern analysis of the temperature record confirms a rise in global average temperature at that time.

I think that your account of the history is not correct.

As a matter of fact, historically the idea of CO2 caused global warming surfaced in the 1970's and came to the attention of scientists working for the US government of Jimmy Carter. Global cooling was due to aerosals was also a concern of some scientists at the time, but further study showed it was not as big a factor as CO2.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm

Modelers felt driven to do better, for people had begun to demand much more than a crude reproduction of the present climate. Weather disasters and the energy crisis of the early 1970s had put greenhouse warming on the political agenda (at least for the more well-informed people). It was now a matter of public debate whether the computer models were correct in their predictions of how CO2 emissions would raise global temperatures. Newspapers reported disagreements among prominent scientists. Some experts suspected that factors overlooked in the models might keep the climate system from warming at all, or might even bring on cooling instead. "Meteorologists still hold out global modeling as the best hope for achieving climate prediction," a senior scientist observed in 1977. "However, optimism has been replaced by a sober realization that the problem is enormously complex."(52*)

The problem was so vexing that the President's Science Adviser (who happened to be a geophysicist) asked the National Academy of Sciences to study the issue. The Academy appointed a panel, chaired by Jule Charney and including other respected experts who had been distant from the recent climate debates. They convened at Woods Hole in the summer of 1979. Charney’s group compared two independent GCMs, one constructed by Manabe and the other by Hansen — elaborate three-dimensional models that used different physical approaches and different computational methods for many features. The panel found differences in detail but solid agreement for the main point: the world would get warmer as CO2 levels rose.

[curious]

So we had concerns about warming in the 1930's.
Then a new ice age in the 1970's,
Then global warming in the 1990's
Then with a modicum of cooling now some are already fearing a dangerous cooling spell.
In every case it was supposed to be our fault.

Sometimes I do agree with Mr. Wilde. This time he's got it right - four out of five. Unless I was asleep during the ice age of the 70s. Missed that one.

On the other points he's headed generally in the right direction, if as often is the case here, for the wrong reasons. Most of all on 'a dangerous cooling spell' and 'supposed to be our fault'.

Mr. Wilde might clarify what he means by 'dangerous' when he writes 'cooling spell'. What HE means. What IS the case is that the slight levelling-off of temperature increases measured globally, during the past several years, ARE dangerous. They result from the growth and wide dispersion of ABCs and the attendant dimming of the sun. What these temperature trends demonstrate is NOT the any weakness in global warming hypotheses, but the very opposite. And worse.

The clouds are composed of extremely hazardous particulates and, of course, of CO2. They are part of sharply increasing levels of smog and pollution over the fastest growing and largest cities and slums in the world, so they damage the most the people who have the least with which to defend themselves from this danger.

Yes, it is our fault, for it is we who have driven the development absent mindful, constructive implementation of processes that permit improvement in the lot of the many as well as of the wealthy few. Including reductions in CO2 and related industrial and energy production emissions.

Soon it will be not only our fault but to our collective economic, political, and human sorrow, if we don't awake and smell something OTHER THAN just the coffee.....

[Stephen Wilde]

It is not me who says there is necessarily a dangerous cooling spell coming though it is possible.

The point I was making is that whatever trend is observed there will be those who scream that it will continue indefinitely and become dangerous. Sometimes such people are in positions of political and/or economic power and the more globalised the world becomes the more control and influence such people will have.

That only too human approach was observed in each of the periods I referred to.

It is no coincidence in the search for global power that our Prime Minister is going round the world trying to arrange a unified global approach to the financial crisis.

Politicians and single issue pressure groups complain about the malign effects of free market globalisation then try to trump it with governmental globalisation. The latter is the greater threat because governments also make the laws whereas the private sector cannot.

The theory about particulates is as yet unproven ( CO2 is not a pollutant, it is a plant fertiliser) but I share concern about them for health reasons independent of any climate effect. My position is that CO2 alone is not the cause of observed climate change being such a small influence in relation to natural forces that it should be ignored.

We should concentrate on pollution, resource depletion and population pressure instead.

[curious]

It is not me who says there is necessarily a dangerous cooling spell coming though it is possible.

Maybe not, but you take pains to repeat it often enough in your own voice that you make it hard to distinguish yourself from the scruffy crowd from which you now deign to distance yourself.

The point I was making is that whatever trend is observed there will be those who scream that it will continue indefinitely and become dangerous.

You are driving your car downhill at increasing speed in a straight line on a curving road. Your passenger screams at you that this 'trend' is dangerous, because you appear not to be taking into account the reasonable conclusion that without a course change you'll all wind up over the side. Screaming seems appropriate in that case.

That only too human approach was observed in each of the periods I referred to.

What would you do? What would Jesus do? (As has been chic to snipe, on recent occasion.) You beg the question, dear sir. The observation that a trend exists is half the picture. The other half is to see what that means: why the trend exists, and what, if anything, might be worth doing in response.

The 'trend' of not-so-steep temperature rises since the late '90s is NOT, as some contend, because CO2 and the greenhouse mechanism it drives have suddenly become irrelevant. No. It is because a set of human activities (we are talking about what is all too human, yes?) continue to produce a situation that looks pretty threatening, for everyone. ABCs offset greenhouse warming, in part, and only temporarily. They also present a gigantic danger in their own right.

Your response cleverly steers around any discussion of that, which is really the nut of the discussion. We have some things to fear that are eminently worthy of our being scared by them.

It is no coincidence in the search for global power that our Prime Minister is going round the world trying to arrange a unified global approach to the financial crisis.

Good God man! Global power! This is bad, in the quest for growth in collaboration and incentives that can lift us beyond this stuff. And grow health and wealth for the greatest possible number?

The theory about particulates is as yet unproven.

What is the theory about particulates to which you refer? Particulates are well known to harm people, animals, plants, and the environment in general, and to burden economies worldwide with large costs in return for uncontrolled releases of them.

( CO2 is not a pollutant, it is a plant fertiliser)

A farmer I know explains that a 'weed' is a 'plant out of place'. One man's fertiliser is another man's pollutant. Don't spray nitrates around my place unless you prove you can do it without polluting my soil, water, and air.

No, CO2 is not a pollutant, nor a fertiliser. (It is a source of metabolic material for plants; fertilisers, analogous with vitamins, play a different role.) CO2 may become a pollutant when, like a plant that becomes a weed, it is a gas out of place. In too great a concentration. You try it, put a bag over your head [ ] and breathe in and out - until you pass out from hyperventilation because the rising CO2 triggers your respiratory reflexes into overdrive.

CO2 in rising amounts in the atmosphere qualifies as a pollutant because it drives a mechanism that threatens my (and your) safety, health, wealth, and way of life. If you have children or grandchildren, it threatens them, too.

Wish I could cobble together some really hard-hitting crystal-clear hartlothian syntax here just to drive the point home. But - can't quite get it up for that so plain English will have to do. You may run, but you can't hide. From CO2. Or particulates. The ABCs are most prevalent across south Asia and the Far East in their recent effects, but the products they contain and their sphere is expanding and already has some manifestation worldwide. The temperature decreases or at least levelling-off is just one.

I share concern about them for health reasons independent of any climate effect.

If by 'them' you include CO2, particulates, NOx, sulfur compounds, heavy metal complexes, and so on - the full range of polluting and hazardous effluents the industrial age produces, then I'm completely with you. They should be controlled just for their health effects, no question. And 'just' doing that would go a long way to resolve the climate impacts, precisely because their production is intimately tied in with greenhouse gas emission and energy efficiency.

My position is that CO2 alone is not the cause of observed climate change being such a small influence in relation to natural forces that it should be ignored. We should concentrate on pollution, resource depletion and population pressure instead.

Until you present a credible explanation for why you believe CO2 is unimportant to climate change (one that is good enough to disprove the preponderance of the evidence and the scientific thought on the subject currently) we'll have to take what we can get from you. That is, your commitment to support population moderation (not via more wars, famine, epidemic, or natural calamity), the elimination of pollution, and resource stewardship - just as you say - which one imagines perforce includes alternative, clean, safe, non-CO2 or other pollution-creating energy sources and a cleanup of the messes we have made, terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric.

See, if you push, really push, those agendas, the yapping about CO2, climate change, and the rest will go away, right along with the ABCs and the yellow fogs over London. Yippee!

[curious]

You might need to 'read' and 'observe' somewhat more ...and 'froth+bubble' somewhat less ...'curious' (viewtopic.php?f=4&p=2162#p2162) than you're seeming content on 'doing' persistenly here.
That as 'the time' that 'frothing nonsensical' (as you again attempt) could rationally be expected to have avoided everyone else noticing there's no 'problem' ...'Physicist predicts man-made global warming bubble to burst in 2008'... of either 'warming' or Climate is 'long passed'.
Yours, Peter K. Anderson aka Hartlod(TM)

Moderator please note personally-insulting language, name-calling, and inappropriate implied ad-hominem attack.

[Climate Realist]

There seems to have been four seperate climate scares over the last 110 years.

The 1970's scare was real, I remember seeing documentaries about the "coming ice age" in the 1970's and reading articles in the paper, Here is an article detailling media coverage of the four seperate climate scares:-

"It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age.

The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.”"

http://www.businessandmedia.org/special ... andice.asp

Hopefully the current warming scare will die soon (due to unexplained cooling) and we can get back to busness as usual. I predict wind turbines will be cut up for scrap metal within ten years.

[curious]

Hopefully the current warming scare will die soon (due to unexplained cooling) and we can get back to busness as usual.

Unexplained cooling? Try ABCs. Which exist thanks to business as usual.

[Climate Realist]

Hartlod, Curious, don't get yer nickers in a twist . If you read what I said, you will see I was referring to the current cooling as being unexplained by current AGW theory. Hence, if it continues (the cooling) the current warming scare will die and be forgotten.

[Co2sceptic]

Hence, if it continues (the cooling) the current warming scare will die and be forgotten.

I think most of us have that view, im glad to here it