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Old 04-18-2008, 09:31 PM   #4
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Quote:
Originally Posted by Six_Gun_Sam
I remember in the 70's when the big deal was global cooling.
Only in the popular press. Newsweek is not a scientific journal.

There was a cooling trend from about 1940 to 1970, which was caused by particulate pollution, mostly sulphates from industrial smokestacks. It was observed in the 60s, its causes were discovered, remedies were applied, and the cooling had ended by 1972 when the journalists started making a flap.

If you read that the next ice age was coming, that story started when a scientists said "I don't know whether this effect could trigger an ice age" and a journalist decided that "this effect could trigger an ice age" was simpler, less confusing, and more likely to make a good story.

In no way does the existence, discovery, diagnosis, and remediation of particulate cooling between 1940 and 1970 show that atmospheric science is indecisive or unreliable, nor does it cast doubt on the observation that Earth is now warming as predicted by Arrhenius.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 04-18-2008 at 10:57 PM.
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