Just a warning, I may agree with them overall, but they are constantly getting the numbers wrong. We have been 3 years away from the point of no return for the last 20 years. I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter. There are a ton of video clips showing Al Gore predicting things that never came to past.
I read the science and I agree that climate is changing, but to the layperson, they have been saying wrong things for years now and they are tired of hearing them "cry wolf". The moral of the "cry wolf" story is that the falsehoods are what causes people not to be prepared. It is not helping the cause.
I'm nearly 60 and I don't ever remember anyone talking about an imminent ice age - given my fondness for skiing when I was younger I'm sure I would have noticed.
I remember being extremely worried about it as a child and thinking "I am the last generation to know civilization as it has been before the world freezes over!"
It probably goes without saying but I haven't been especially concerned about global warming this go around.
There was plenty of coverage of this, although certainly much less than the climate gets today. They held international conferences to discuss it and wrote to the US President, warning him of the impending ice age. This tweet [2] has the first page of the letter and an article from the Guardian headlined, "Space satellites show new ice age coming fast", by Anthony Tucker. The first paragraph says:
"WORLDWIDE and rapid trends towards a mini ice age are emerging from the first long term analyses of weather satellite data [...] an analysis carried out at Columbia University by climatologists Doctors George and Helena Kukla indicates that snow and ice cover of the Earth increased by 12% during 1967-1972"
Note that this claim about the data is incompatible with modern claims about the climate. If you try to look up the data they're talking about you'll find you can't, it's been dropped from the record. The original paper is here [1] and argues the next cooling period will last 8000 years, driven by solar factors.
Back then climatology was obscure, because the idea of climate change being important hadn't been invented yet. You can see the seeds of it being planted with journalists, though:
"The trends appear to be cyclic, fairly long term and extremely important. It is therefore surprising that, in Britain at least, support for historic analysis of the climate is almost non-existent."
The letter to the president warned him to prepare "agriculture and industry" but also said that the ice age had a natural cause.
You can dig up endless pieces of evidence like these, especially if you go back into the journal archives. The papers read just like modern climate papers do, except that they talk about cooling instead of warming and blame natural astronomical cycles (here's another [3]).
The Leonard Nimoy documentary was part of a pop-sci series. The series did include episodes on the paranormal especially early in its life, but it also had plenty of episodes on general science topics like the study of earthquake prediction, bees, ants, hurricanes, DNA research, biblical historicity and so on. Anything the general public might find interesting. The episode on the coming ice age was grounded in and triggered by claims by the climatologists of the era.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/...
[2] https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1758729686434320645
[3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/627434
Edit: I haven't worked in academia for a long time and I wasn't working in anything even remotely related to climate science...
1. We lack data on a topic so are collecting it.
2. Our data is certain but our understanding isn't.
3. Our understanding has been proven and here are some policies.
What's not OK is:
1. Our data shows X and our understanding is certain that Y is happening, so do Z.
2. Our data shows the opposite of X and our understanding is certain that the opposite of Y is happening, so do the opposite of Z.
The Newsweek article mentioned above says: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” So the gap between proposing to melt the polar ice caps and James Hansen testifying about global warming to Congress was only about 13 years.
The point of the scientific method is to build an understanding of a phenomena based on robust evidence, as well as to understand the limits of our own understanding. If a group of people claim to be scientists and then one day invert everything they're saying, then at some point the scientific method has broken down. If they admit that this happened and implement really convincing changes to prevent it ever happening again, then maybe that's recoverable. But if they ignore and try to cover up what happened, that should be the end of that group's credibility and funding. Unfortunately, in this case they have indeed tried to cover it up.
> [relays bullshit]
There was never anything like a scientific consensus on a coming ice age.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
> One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. "Collectively," the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey "tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling" (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978).
> we [also] conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society's electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR)... The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.
Here's an alternative explanation: you were duped back then just like you've been duped today, but in the opposite direction than you thought.
No where in my statement did I say that I agreed with anything, just that constant "false predictions" causes people to quit listening.
But as you have proved, reading comprehension can be a big part as well.
You are remembering a fringe theory amigo. If that's what you expected to happen, it's because you were listening to fringe scientists.
You are continuing to listen to fringe scientists.
Science happens in public, so you will hear all sorts of different theories thrown out. If you are latching onto these and then perceiving divergence from them later on as "creating a loss of trust," that's on you. It means you are incapable of reasoning about the world and is probably something you should try to address yourself instead of externalizing blame.
You keep harping on my beliefs, but I have not stated them. I did not believe in an ice age, and I have already stated that I believe in climate change. Why do you keep trying to talk about what I personally believe when you dont even know what they are?
When have I hurt you in the past? Go back to the article on what it is about. I am only trying to add to the discussion on what could be a cause.
I understand the dynamic you're pointing to, but it's simply not something that's solvable from the institutional/scientific-community side. We cannot allow institutions to actually control media, nor can we allow science to "go private."
The responsibility, which you and I both should reaffirm, is that individuals need to better manage their own information ecosystem and diet!
Do you have another solution?
As for solutions? What about ramifications for any media that cannot backup what it says? What about people being held responsible for what they spread?
> As for solutions? What about ramifications for any media that cannot backup what it says? What about people being held responsible for what they spread?
I mean... effectively not possible in the US (First Amendment). Gnarly situation as the cost of producing bullshit plummets to zero, or goes negative since you can earn money from it, while the cost to find and publish truth continues to rise.
It has its warts, but the first amendment needs to be protected.
Hint: it's the latter.
Does this mean the experts are wrong? Nope. It’s for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the largest is that experts are handcuffed by corruption.
A real doctor knows best, but there are negative outcomes because of the insurance industry. A climate scientist knows best, but corruption and fossil fuel industry prevents implementation of the correct policies. Some financial advisors are scam artists and others are legit, leading people to trust neither.
For experts to gain trust they have to deliver visibly positive outcomes, and they have to greedily take credit for those outcomes. When people experience a good result, they have to make the connection that it was the advice of smart, correct, educated people that got them there.