Leonard Nimoy on Global Cooling

[Ben]

From 1978. 

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2021/07/13/heres-an-old-video-of-leonard-nimoy-warning-about-the-coming-ice-age-that-will-leave-our-grandchildren-in-polar-deserts/

I like the part near the end where scientists are complaining that polar seas once free of ice are "now filling with ice and no longer navigable". Just 40 years later and now scientists are complaining that the ice is receding.

[MechAg94]

Well if Spock says it is true, I have no response. 

[JTHunter]

A few years before this video was made, the geophysical class I was taking in college had a very good scenario of how this "ice age" could start abruptly.
If you have seen the Dennis Quade movie "The Day After", that is fairly accurate except for the time it would take.  As the ice in Greenland melts and dumps all that fresh water into the sea between Greenland and Canada could disrupt the "thermo-haline current".  This is the dense, cold, and very salty current that sinks to the ocean bottom and heads back to the equator.  There, it warms, rises towards the surface and forms the bulk of the Gulf Stream.  The GS then takes that tropical warmth over to Iceland, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries.
Without the GS, all of those areas would freeze in much the same way Siberia is frozen.

[WLJ]

Oh yes the 70s.
We were going to be under a mile of ice in a few years.
We were  going to be completely out of oil in a few years.
The atmosphere would be unbreathable in a few years.
We were going to be out of drinkable water in a few years.
The population bomb was about to explode.
Soylent Green anyone?
The Soviet Union was unbeatable so just give up.
Nuclear war in 10, 9, 8, 7..............
Giant sharks were going to eat you if you came within 50ft of the ocean. If the giant rabbits didn't get you first that is.
Disco. Need I say more?



 

[Nick1911]

So lets talk about this.  I wasn't alive in the 70's, and growing up in the 90's would often hear remarks like "Oh, they don't have a clue - everyone was saying we were going to be in an ice age, then it was the hole in the ozone layer, now it's global warming, these guys are nuts!"

Well, is it true?  Here's a journal article that looked into it: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml

Their conclusions are:

Despite active efforts to answer these questions, the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent (see the "Perpetuating the myth" sidebar). A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myths basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then. The research enterprise that grew in response to the questions articulated by Bryson and others, while considering the forces responsible for cooling, quickly converged on the view that greenhouse warming was likely to dominate on time scales that would be significant to human societies (Charney et al. 1979).

They survey published journal articles from that period to provide evidence for this:
 

For those of you old farts ( ) let me ask: how do you remember this period?

[Ron]

The coming ice age was in the news broadcasts.
The coming ice age was in popular TV shows.
The coming ice age was in children's media.
The coming ice age was in popular publications.

I was 10 in 1974 and obsessed with dinosaurs until I discovered girls.

For whatever reason they needed to flip the script 180 degrees.

As we see, a smart guy like Nick only has what he can find researching the issue.

Apparently those of us who lived through the 70's are experiencing the Mandela Effect and are misremembering. A mass hallucination.

In 10 years there will be zero remembrance of the coming ice age and there will be no records of it either. 

[RocketMan]

The coming ice age was in the news broadcasts.
The coming ice age was in popular TV shows.
The coming ice age was in children's media.
The coming ice age was in popular publications.

I was 10 in 1974 and obsessed with dinosaurs until I discovered girls.

Pretty much this.  We were being inundated with hysterical claims of a coming ice age, along with numerous other things there were going to spell the end of civilization as we knew it.  The only thing missing was Al Gore cashing in on all the fear mongering.
BTW, I was 17 and on my way to boot camp in July 1974.

[Jim147]

We where even learning about it school. But you probably won't find that on google so I must be wrong.

[MechAg94]

A few years before this video was made, the geophysical class I was taking in college had a very good scenario of how this "ice age" could start abruptly.
If you have seen the Dennis Quade movie "The Day After", that is fairly accurate except for the time it would take.  As the ice in Greenland melts and dumps all that fresh water into the sea between Greenland and Canada could disrupt the "thermo-haline current".  This is the dense, cold, and very salty current that sinks to the ocean bottom and heads back to the equator.  There, it warms, rises towards the surface and forms the bulk of the Gulf Stream.  The GS then takes that tropical warmth over to Iceland, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries.
Without the GS, all of those areas would freeze in much the same way Siberia is frozen.

Wouldn't something have to change in the warmer waters to keep them from moving North?  I thought the temp differentials is partly what fuels those currents.  There is already a great deal of fresh water going into that area from rivers and ice melt. 

[MechAg94]

We where even learning about it school. But you probably won't find that on google so I must be wrong.

When I was in elementary school in the early 1980's, we did these weekly reader things for reading comprehension exercises.  They were usually about fun topics like killing all the whales and such.  I do remember them covering global warming as a topic.  This was back when there was no proof whatsoever.  It is an old idea that finally gain political traction.

[Nick1911]

As we see, a smart guy like Nick only has what he can find researching the issue.

This is why I asked those of you who lived through it.  Things get twisted and manipulated over time, but people that were there know what they saw.

[Ben]

I was in High School at the time, so while a knucklehead, still old enough to have some grasp of what was going on even if I didn't care about it.
At home, we got National Geographic, and I had my own subscription to Scientific American. Any climate stuff was global cooling. We watched a lot of PBS stuff at home, and again,  I don't remember a single "global warming" show. Everything was "ice age". I think Carl Sagan may have mentioned warming in the Cosmos series, but I recall it was focused on previous warming, and that natural climate cycles were taking us to the cold.

So there might have been some global warming papers or even popular articles or TV science shows, but I remember none of them, and school science classes talked about global cooling. Even after I got out of High School and did my one year of community college before life, both the geology and geography classes I took talked global cooling.

Oh, and lets not forget acid rain. In fact I think, at least on the PBS, acid rain was a more covered, bigger threat than global cooling. I recall it was a dying theory by the early 80s though. I don't recall it being discussed in the aforementioned college classes. It was certainly a big thing in the 70s though.

When I returned to college for real in the early-mid 90s, I was in the geospatial sciences department. When I hit grad school, global warming was more of a focus, but I recall when taking an atmospheric sciences seminar and doing radiation budget equations (which were like two pages long showing your work), the professor, from France and well known in the discipline, while being a commie, was not "all in" on global warming. She was all about the math.

By circa 2010, I would occasionally be back at the university for the job, and the remote sensing dept was all in on OMG warming and the computer models, including Michael Mann's incredibly flawed model.

[zxcvbob]

The coming ice age was in the news broadcasts.
The coming ice age was in popular TV shows.
The coming ice age was in children's media.
The coming ice age was in popular publications.

I was 10 in 1974 and obsessed with dinosaurs until I discovered girls.

For whatever reason they needed to flip the script 180 degrees.

As we see, a smart guy like Nick only has what he can find researching the issue.

Apparently those of us who lived through the 70's are experiencing the Mandela Effect and are misremembering. A mass hallucination.

In 10 years there will be zero remembrance of the coming ice age and there will be no records of it either.

Another vote for Ron.  (I was a freshman in high school in 1974)  But be careful, the Madela Effect is real at least somewhat.  False memories can be contagious even without manipulation.

[TommyGunn]

So lets talk about this.  I wasn't alive in the 70's, and growing up in the 90's would often hear remarks like "Oh, they don't have a clue - everyone was saying we were going to be in an ice age, then it was the hole in the ozone layer, now it's global warming, these guys are nuts!"

Well, is it true?  Here's a journal article that looked into it: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml

Their conclusions are:
They survey published journal articles from that period to provide evidence for this:
 

For those of you old farts ( ) let me ask: how do you remember this period?

What I distinctly recall from jr. High school & high school science was a ice age was coming.  No one talked about  co2 and greenhouse gasses causing globular warmulating.  It may have been a matter for researchers to study,  as  many theories might also have been,  but it was not being flaunted by any major media myrmidon  at the time.

I'm not sure that data collection technologies were sophisticated enough or widespread enough to get an accurate  world-wide idea of what really was happening.  But I could be wrong.

[WLJ]

I remember some of the crazy ideas they came up with to warm the earth like covering the poles with a black dust.

[cordex]

What I remember from mid to late 80s was lots of concern about acid rain (including where some parents would use it to discourage their kids from playing in the rain), the ozone hole, and insufficient space in garbage dumps.  I don't recall any climate change alarmism in either direction.

[Ben]

No one talked about  co2 and greenhouse gasses causing globular warmulating. 

A lot of the "input" talk for both cooling and acid rain was particulate pollution. I recall that being a major anthropogenic driver in both theories.

[Ron]

This is why I asked those of you who lived through it.  Things get twisted and manipulated over time, but people that were there know what they saw.

I meant smart as in higher than avg IQ who actually researches things. No snark.

[MechAg94]

I thought they tightened up on coal plant emissions as a response to the acid rain.  I remember it being blamed on SO2 in the stack emissions.  The issue went away, but I never heard if the problem was solved or if they found another cause or if they realized it wasn't an issue. 

[fifth_column]

I thought they tightened up on coal plant emissions as a response to the acid rain.  I remember it being blamed on SO2 in the stack emissions.  The issue went away, but I never heard if the problem was solved or if they found another cause or if they realized it wasn't an issue.

I haven't read the article yet:  https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/07/09/whatever-happened-acid-rain-15651

[MechAg94]

So they passed emissions limits that limited SO2 emissions from electric power plants in 1990.  I know they also cut the Sulphur allowed in diesel fuel.  I guess all that had its effect. 

[fifth_column]

And scrubbing technology in smokestacks. A 93% reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions is impressive.

[kgbsquirrel]

I was in High School at the time, so while a knucklehead, still old enough to have some grasp of what was going on even if I didn't care about it.
At home, we got National Geographic, and I had my own subscription to Scientific American. Any climate stuff was global cooling. We watched a lot of PBS stuff at home, and again,  I don't remember a single "global warming" show. Everything was "ice age". I think Carl Sagan may have mentioned warming in the Cosmos series, but I recall it was focused on previous warming, and that natural climate cycles were taking us to the cold.

So there might have been some global warming papers or even popular articles or TV science shows, but I remember none of them, and school science classes talked about global cooling. Even after I got out of High School and did my one year of community college before life, both the geology and geography classes I took talked global cooling.

Oh, and lets not forget acid rain. In fact I think, at least on the PBS, acid rain was a more covered, bigger threat than global cooling. I recall it was a dying theory by the early 80s though. I don't recall it being discussed in the aforementioned college classes. It was certainly a big thing in the 70s though.

When I returned to college for real in the early-mid 90s, I was in the geospatial sciences department. When I hit grad school, global warming was more of a focus, but I recall when taking an atmospheric sciences seminar and doing radiation budget equations (which were like two pages long showing your work), the professor, from France and well known in the discipline, while being a commie, was not "all in" on global warming. She was all about the math.

By circa 2010, I would occasionally be back at the university for the job, and the remote sensing dept was all in on OMG warming and the computer models, including Michael Mann's incredibly flawed model.

Acid rain seems to have gone out of vogue after it was used to help kill the steel industry.  Last I heard about it was in the mid 90's.

[kgbsquirrel]

I haven't read the article yet:  https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/07/09/whatever-happened-acid-rain-15651

Most sulfur or nitrogen dioxide comes from electrical power plants, with a smaller amount coming from cars and other vehicles and natural sources such as volcanoes and wildfires.

Uhh what?  Volcanic activity outweighs all human production of sulfur release by orders of magnitude.

[JTHunter]

Wouldn't something have to change in the warmer waters to keep them from moving North?  I thought the temp differentials is partly what fuels those currents.  There is already a great deal of fresh water going into that area from rivers and ice melt.

Not exactly.  The fresh water coming out of that area between Canada and Greenland was theorized to flow south and block the GS like a wall, preventing its northward flow.  It would also be a great deal more water than that area has experienced in over 20,000 years.  Without that flow, the return current along the ocean floor would also stop and not replenish the Gulf Stream.  No GS - no tropical warmth to the north Atlantic.  Everything from Iceland and Ireland on north would become the new Siberia.