I am 60. I was a little nerd when I was around 11-12 yo and I read all pop science magazines.

Being afraid of an upcoming ice age definitely was a thing, many articles were written on it, quoting scientists, even in national newspapers. I remember writing an essay on it for school.

I don't have those magazines any more but you should be able to find them somewhere.

> Being afraid of an upcoming ice age definitely was a thing, many articles were written on it, quoting scientists, even in national newspapers.

I mean, I'm not denying that an imminent ice age was on the public consciousness at some point; as you point out, articles saying as much can be found relatively easily. I'm just saying that that isn't necessarily representative of climate research at the time.

> not necessarily representative of climate research at the time

If that's true it's hard to understand why the majority of the press was publishing information opposite to the state of the climate research at the time. Unlikely to me.

> If that's true it's hard to understand why the majority of the press was publishing information opposite to the state of the climate research at the time.

Those stories do have a kernel of truth, as there does appear to have been a cooling trend at the time; it sort of comes down to the difference between "What if this trend continues?" and "This trend is likely to continue and here are the consequences".

At least in the sampling of news stories in the paper I linked earlier, the quoted scientists seem to lean more towards "we need more data" and/or a more long-term warming trend, if they offered a long-term prediction at all.

I don't know about that

Don't know about what?

Okay sorry, I was being Quick Draw McGraw with the articles.

This was the article published by time referencing the "New Ice Age": http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9449.... I knew I saw it before ;) And of course, the paper you linked quotes many, many more that perpetuates the myth. I'll be bookmarking that!

A quote:

"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."

So the scientific community seems to have the same perspective as I, whereby the media alarmists cause unnecessary fear among the population that accepts their orthodoxy unabated.

Thanks for the link! That does seem to be more in line with your original comment.

Makes me curious what the results might be if an analogous survey of news articles were done to see the proportion of ones covering global warming vs. global cooling. There are a few articles mentioned in the paper, but it's not comprehensive (though to be fair those are supposed to be the most frequently cited articles).

Might be time to dust off those NLTK skills. Can probably answer this over the weekend.