This is untrue unless “mass media” means “one issue each of Time and Newsweek quoting Reid Bryson”.

It was all over the media at the time. You are cherry picking.

Care to show your work?

I was alive then and remember the coverage.

You remember your view of what you saw.

If there was a mix of articles, then there will be a mix of people claiming that they personally saw all one side.

Several others in this thread claim they saw cooling articles in the 90s. I never saw a single cooling article but saw many many warming articles and knew even very conservative Republican families that got worked up about the dangers of global warming.

Anybody citing a single article or their personal experience is degrading the conversation. A single person's recollection is not even evidence when we can compare to an entire historical record.

Memories are very much subject to confirmation bias and sampling bias. Basing knowledge on personal experience is not solid epistemology. Further, the "I was alive and remember all of the media landscape at a time 50 years ago" is an appeal to authority fallacy. I don't personally dispute your recollections at all, and that is your impression and lived experience - but it does not make it facts. Extrapolating from an individuals experience is liable to be very faulty, again, poor epistemology.

Not that this will convince anyone currently attempting to rewrite this out of history (or determined to believe those who rewrite history), but the media panic, reporting on the scientific discussion, was much broader than that. The scientific studies and opinions varied - it was not one-sided, but the "ice age" predictions were much more marketable, at least.

5 minutes of checking found three issues of Time, one from 1994.

  * 24 Jun 1974 https://time.com/archive/6878023/another-ice-age/ (well-known)
  * 13 Nov 1972 https://time.com/archive/6844319/science-another-ice-age/ ("refuses to speculate")
  * 31 Jan 1994 https://time.com/archive/6724662/the-ice-age-cometh/ ("the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill.")

Here are others:

  * “The Earth’s Cooling Climate,” Science News, November 15, 1969
  * “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age,” Washington Post, January 11, 1970.
  * “Science:  Another Ice Age?”  Time Magazine, June 24, 1974.
  * “The Ice Age Cometh!”  Science News, March 1, 1975.
  * “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975.
  * “Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead,” New York Times, May 21, 1975.
  * “In the Grip of a New Ice Age?” International Wildlife July-August, 1975.
  * “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” New York Times, September 14, 1975.
  * “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science magazine, December 10, 1976.

Yeah. It was all over popular media, but that seems to be ignored by people who weren't around then. They'll claim that what you actually saw is just anecdotal and should be ignored.

It appears that you are the one attempting to rewrite, the claim is that both cooling and warming were reported on in mass media, not that just one was.

One can't search for this stuff without coming across lots of both warming and cooling articles. And one finds tons of intentional deception pushing cooling articles. Here's a Reuters article calling out one bit of misinformation pushing cooling articles that were not actually about cooling:

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/time-magazine-front-cover...

My question is why there is such a modern push to decieve about cooling in the mass media? What purpose does it serve for people?

> It appears that you are the one attempting to rewrite, the claim is that both cooling and warming were reported on in mass media,

I posted several headlines and links in mass & scientific media promoting the global cooling belief, which corresponds to my recollection of the dominant media.

I recognize my recollection may be flawed. If you have evidence to that effect, please post a similar collection from the time period promoting global warming belief to support your assertion.

My personal belief is that the media over-hypes scientific findings and under-reports uncertainties. We see this today in global warming coverage, as we saw it (or at least, as I recall it) in the 1970s global cooling coverage.

The “we need to stop polluting or we’ll cause another ice age” was floating around classrooms in the 90s.

Intelligent design was floating around in classrooms but we don't need to pretend that it was anything other than a fringe political and religious belief.

I remember reading a very solid article from the 90s by Imbrie (the father, not the son) about a global cooling model.