Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified. We didn't know that people would be still burning coal in forty years time, much less such vast quantities, because nuclear was still a politically viable option despite various hysterical claims against it. And we had even less clue then as to how the climate system would respond to any perturbation than we do today, and we have relatively little clue today.
But a huge number of people think "the science is settled" with regard to climate change because the popular press tells them so. With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change that's reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense, and this article from the '50's suggests why that is so: because popular accounts just don't convey the messy uncertainty of the real science. They pull a coherent thread out and make it sound as if we understand far more than we actually do.
This is not to say we shouldn't be building new nuclear capacity, and ignoring all the "green" groups who are protesting solar, wind, geothermal and biomass development (search for "environmentalists against $X" where $X is any industrial-scale green power and you'll see what I mean). We should be doing all those things, and we should be shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions. But we should remember that the science is a lot messier than it gets portrayed in Harpers and the like, and we shouldn't be so afraid of Denialists as to want to avoid acknowledging that.
"Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified"
Concern by whom? Among the scientific papers of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority view was for global warming. Quoting from http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf , "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; "The survey [of papers from 1965 through 1979] identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations." This is why I mentioned there were only a 'handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age'. Thus, that stance in the scientific literature was uncommon.
Among some of the popular press, there certainly were articles by Newsweek and Time on the possibility of a new ice age. (Or in SF, Larry Niven wrote "Fallen Angels" (1991) on the premise that anthropogenic warming was actually preventing an ice age from coming.) Then again, some of the recent popular press also had a lot of articles about the 2012 phenomenon, based on reaching the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - "The Crazy Years" of Heinlein. On the gripping hand, science popularizers like Issac Asimov understood the global warming topic correctly back in the 1970s.
Regarding 'the messy uncertainty of the real science', what you've said applies to everything the popular press reports. When the NY reports on the situation in Ukraine, they leave out a lot of the messy details. The same when Sports Illustrated reports on a doping scandal, or the WSJ about a recent merger, or the latest weather prediction in the local paper. It's odd that you think people treat science reporting as the final, conclusive word on a topic. I don't agree.
I believe the rest of your comment pivots into your views on nuclear power. This is not related to the Harpers piece or the presumed reasons for why this link was posted on HN, and I decline to follow up on it.
Also, "relatively little clue" can still enough to make useful decisions. Therefore I ignored it.
Without knowing which consequences, what am I supposed to say? I see no reason to think the Dutch are misspending their money in building up their sea defenses against likely sea level rise.
Look at the parent comment - it uses name calling and labels to advance the argument. That is not science. The entire topic was raised as possibly heretical in case someone might suspect this pointed to anything but a complete and utter belief in co2 as the planetary thermostat.
People need to back away from the political bandwagon on this and start using their heads again.
In this case, research after the intriguing hypothesis of Ewing and Donn shows that it's not what happened.
For example, from Science (1964), http://www.sciencemag.org/content/145/3633/707 :
> Pollen analysis of radiocarbon-dated samples from the arctic coastal plain of Alaska shows that vegetation of 14,000 years ago reflected a climate colder than the present, and that there has been a progressive warming, culminating in the present cold arctic climate. The record indicates that the Arctic Ocean has been covered with ice since the time of the Wisconsin glacial maximum, suggesting that the essential condition of the Ewing and Donn hypothesis for the origin of ice ages, that the Arctic Ocean be ice-free up to 11,000 years ago, cannot be met.
Ewing and Donn write (quoting from Harpers):
> “The answer, we believe, is chat [sic] until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold.
Remember, this is shortly after we realized that the continents could move. They based their conclusions on the magnetic record, but the magnetic pole also wanders and flips. The actual movement is nowhere near what's required for their hypothesis to be true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_polar_wander for some background. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JB090iB09p07737/a... for a paper which says that paleontological records show about 1 degree of shift per million years for the last 7 million years.
From what I understand, global warming entered the popular awareness in the 1970s-1980s. This aricle from the 1950s shows awareness even then:
> Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.