Re:The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)
by mkempe on Friday March 20, 2015 @08:09PM
(#9241387)
You're paranoid. I posted the article because it seemed interesting; in particular I had no idea a global-cooling hypothesis was part of the landscape in the 50s.
Re:The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)
by hughw on Friday March 20, 2015 @08:12PM
(#9241395)
What do you think about tjradcliffe's comments "...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...With regard to the existence of anthropogentic climate change ["the science is settled" is] reasonably correct, but with regard to the consequences it's complete nonsense"?
Re:The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)
by dalke on Friday March 20, 2015 @09:03PM
(#9241511)
I think that statement about less clue/relatively little clue is true about nearly every field of active research, including nuclear fusion power, hurricane path and strength prediction, understanding the brain, designing new drugs, and the life of pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas. In 20 years we'll look back and comment about how little we knew of the human genome, or how wildly wrong we were in predicting the effect of autonomous vehicles on daily life.
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.
"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.