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Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by reaperducer on Friday June 14, 2019 @04:47PM (#20186555)
This article is from 1958, but we were taught in school as late as the 1980's that the Earth is cooling, and no longer a black box.

I vaguely remember in the last few years someone linking to a Time magazine cover published in the 80's about global cooling.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by ergl on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:28PM (#20186813)
The Time magazine thing is a fake: https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-...

There is another cover going around mentioning "The Big Freeze", but it refers to a particularly cold winter in the US during the 70s, and not about the so called Global Cooling

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by scottlocklin on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:06PM (#20187046)
You should correct wikipedia then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1974_Time_magaz...

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,...

Just because some meme is fake doesn't mean OP was wrong. OP was right.

Also it is hilarious Betty Friedan wrote the harpers article.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by tasty_freeze on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:30PM (#20187186)
No, it was an article in Time, but not a cover story. Any image you see of a cover story is fake.
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by bostonpete on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:34PM (#20187221)
Time magazine article != Time magazine cover
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by standardUser on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:46PM (#20186924)
I was learning about global warming in grade school in the early 1980's, for whatever that's worth. I had never heard of "global cooling" until decades later when people who purport to not believe in global warming started using it as a talking point.
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by sverige on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:18PM (#20187446)
I have a distinct memory of two of my friends in college in the mid-80s talking about this. One was reading the paper. He announced without looking up that there is a new Ice Age coming. The other guy jumped up, looked out the window, and said, "Where!?"

It was just another crackpot theory used to fill space in the newspaper. Back then, the serious neurotics used the threat of nuclear annihilation to make themselves sick with worry.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by agildehaus on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:21PM (#20186764)
I don't know about the 1950s, but Earth experiencing a cooling trend would have been an extremely minority view in the 1980s.
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by inflatableDodo on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:06PM (#20187051)
>This article is from 1958, but we were taught in school as late as the 1980's that the Earth is cooling, and no longer a black box.

This would not be the article to use to support that claim though.

'As Ewing and Donn read the evidence, an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place.'

What are you meaning by 'no longer a black box' in this context?

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by reaperducer on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:59PM (#20187350)
What are you meaning by 'no longer a black box' in this context?

Sorry, I mean "black body." We were taught that the Earth absorbs as much radiation as it emits. The term we were taught for that is "black body."

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by greglindahl on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:39PM (#20187547)
That’s not what a black body is - that’s a body in thermal equilibrium.
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by reaperducer on Friday June 14, 2019 @09:15PM (#20187886)
That’s not what a black body is - that’s a body in thermal equilibrium

Wikipedia disagrees.

"A black body or blackbody is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence. (It does not only absorb radiation, but can also emit radiation. The name "black body" is given because it absorbs radiation in all frequencies, not because it only absorbs.)"

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

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by inflatableDodo on Friday June 14, 2019 @10:20PM (#20188076)
>Wikipedia disagrees.

It really doesn't.

This might help. http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/B/Blackbody+Radiation

Note the line 'As the temperature of the blackbody increases, the peak wavelength decreases'

Just because some things can be approximated for varying degrees of usefullness as absorbing and emitting equally well on all frequencies (which the earth is really bad at anyway), does not mean they are stable in temperature.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by Swizec on Friday June 14, 2019 @04:56PM (#20186615)
This makes me wonder if the current political “backlash” against global warming is because many politicians are ... old.

If they were taught in school that the earth is cooling, and we know from research that people are very unlikely to change their mind about things after 35 ... well why would they believe it’s now warming?

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by iak8god on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:30PM (#20186818)
Or maybe it's this [OpenSecrets - Oil & Gas: Money to Congress | https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=e01&c...].

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by roenxi on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:14PM (#20187424)
Cause and effect is a bit of a baffler here though. The summary stats/top 20 figures suggest there is a TX bias to funding which in turn suggests to me that oil companies are funding politicians from their own states. Ted Cruz, Ted (R-TX) and Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) combine to a disproportionately large $1 mil, and probably represent a lot of people who are quite happy in the oil industry.

So it seems reasonable that despite the money the people who are receiving it might rationally support O&G regardless because it is great for their constituents.

It isn't because of what they were taught in school though, that much is pretty clear.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by iak8god on Saturday June 15, 2019 @07:27PM (#20192834)
> suggests to me that oil companies are funding politicians from their own states

This makes sense. I assume they're expecting more out of this package than some stubborn climate change denialism.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by Gibbon1 on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:39PM (#20186869)
Well two things.

Fossil fuel industries are spending large sums of money to promote backlash. Same as was with smoking and Freon.

Typically people stop updating their world views as they get older.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by spaceprison on Saturday June 15, 2019 @06:27PM (#20192577)
I think there's something here, just like how you stop liking new music.

There were a bunch of articles in the 70s talking about the potential of an ice age. So much so that I remember my dad (69yo) talking to me and my brother about global cooling/ice age when we were kids in the 80s.

He bought the articles in his 20s but now can't be bothered by climate change, because "it was just cooling 40 years ago..."

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by pmoriarty on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:13PM (#20186719)
"This makes me wonder if the current political "backlash" against global warming is because many politicians are ... old."

It's more of a mix of anti-environmentalism (as environmentalism is closely associated in the public mind with the global warming denier's boogeymen -- liberals and the left), ignorance of climate science, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theorizing that's rife on right-wing media, a desire to recklessly exploit natural resources, and a belief that counteracting global warming will harm businesses and cost taxpayer dollars, which they'd rather spend on the military or on handouts to corporations.

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by civilian on Friday June 14, 2019 @05:06PM (#20186669)
You're strawmanning the position. It's not that those skeptical politicians believe what they were taught in school-- it's that they see that the science can change, and that calls of doomsday can turn out to be wrong.

Even Al Gore's doomsday predictions in the late 90s turned out to be woefully inaccurate. I'm all for being a good steward of the planet, but I think it's reasonable to wait in order to:

- Make sure this is a serious risk, and not just something we can adapt to

- Let technology develop so we can combat climate change effectively and without bankrupting the world.

Furthermore, I see environmentalists who are anti-nuclear, anti-iron-fertilization, and anti-atmospheric-sulfur-injection. If global warming is truly an _existential_ threat, then why aren't these projects appreciated by the run-of-the-mill environmentalists?

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by hn23 on Saturday June 15, 2019 @03:18PM (#20191601)
I would say it is pretty risky to run a nuclear power plant you cannot cool because the river is dry or too warm... happenend in France last Year.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...

Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by fooblitzky on Friday June 14, 2019 @07:10PM (#20187406)
For the last point - you need to stop emitting before you deploy your hail-Mary countermeasures. Otherwise you only delay the inevitable for a few years.
Re:The Coming Ice Age (1958) by KirinDave on Friday June 14, 2019 @06:35PM (#20187232)
Okay, but some of that technology exists. Why aren't we adopting it aggressively?