Post by J. ClarkePost by William HydePost by Lynn McGuire"13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970"
https://ricochet.com/424431/13-ridiculous-predictions-made-earth-day-1970/
"13. ?The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If
present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for
the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the
year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice
age.? ? Kenneth Watt"
He was a zoologist. Physicists and engineers say stupid things about biology all the time. Does it then follow that biologists are wrong?
And even he said "if".
Post by Lynn McGuireAnd they wonder why people like me don't buy the anthropogenic global
warming crap.
Yes, we do, and the above gives you no cover at all.
Actually it does.
You have to understand that the average member of the public
I give Lynn, who is an engineer, credit for knowing the difference between a Zoologist and a physicist.
You could look it up.
Note that Dr Watts did not say "An ice age is coming". He said "if present trends continue". That is speculation, not a prediction. We have no idea in what context he said it.
doesn't try to
Post by J. Clarkeevaluate the qualifications of one scientist vs another. All they get is
"scientists claim".
Mostly in shampoo and toothpaste commercials, I find.
In the '60s and '70s it was scientists claiming that
Post by J. Clarkeit's getting colder.
This is an oft-refuted lie.
Now it's scientists claiming that it's getting
Post by J. Clarkewarmer. 40 years from now what are the scientists going to be claiming.
Forty years ago scientists were claiming that the world would warm from AGW. Had been doing so for some time.
In the unlikely event I am alive, I won't be claiming anything. I'll be too busy laughing at you. In fact, I'm laughing now.
Post by J. ClarkeNow, your defense, I know, because I keep hearing this, is "well
climatologists didn't say that". So where were all these
climatologists
There weren't very many, for a start. There never were many climatologists, and in 1970 the vast majority were not working on climate change. More people were working on categorizing sea-breeze circulations than on climate change.
on
In their labs. Working. Or, if speaking up, being ignored by the media. Which is more dramatic, gradually increasing temperatures or a New! Ice! Age! by! the! year! 2000! (and we don't mean factorial!)?
Syukyro Manabe had already published radiative-convective studies on global warming, making predictions that have since been validated and was now, with Kirk Bryan, busy coding a general circulation model with which to carry on the work. Can you see Newsweek busting down his door?
James Hansen was working on the scattering of light by particles in planetary atmospheres, with papers like:
"Absorption-line formation in a scattering planetary atmosphere: A test of Van de Hulst's similarity relations."
it's a wonder Hollywood didn't come knocking.
Why weren't they addressing the wrong information that was
Post by J. Clarkebeing disseminated?
"Fred, we got this professor on line one, he says some other professor said something wrong". Click.
Where were they when Carl Sagan and company were
Post by J. Clarkeholding forth about "Nuclear Winter" in the '90s?
To start with you seem to be misinformed about NW.
That started in the eighties, and many of us were criticizing it. I argued against it myself, some of those discussions taking place here (before your time, I suspect).
The original paper was a reasonable piece of work. When investigating the possibility of something new, first make all approximations in its favour with a simple model. If it doesn't happen then, the idea can be safely dismissed and much time saved.
But if the event occurs in the simple model, it is time for followup work, studying and improving those approximations. Very little of this was done by the TTAPS authors, who gave the impression that their paper was the last word. Followup studies by others showed a muted effect (I used to call it "Nuclear Autumn") which would still be an extra burden on those trying to rebuild after such a war.
There was a seminar on this at NASA when I was there, the audience sharply divided. The people who worked purely in radiation and scattering (like the TTAPS authors) were convinced of NW, while the dynamicists were more than skeptical. As a person who worked on ice sheets, I went with the latter.
NW was not the scandal you seem to think it was. Personally, I think it was a time when emotion interfered with science to a disturbing degree. Megadeaths will do that. But it all got sorted.
And what makes the three
Post by J. Clarkeprofessors of atmospheric science who were working with Sagan not "climate
scientists" other than that they don't toe the "global warming" party line?
What makes you think any of them had doubts about the warming effect of GHGs? It is not a contradiction to believe that GHGs warm and aerosols cool. It's commonsense, in fact.
Post by J. ClarkeAnd why all of a sudden are we supposed to believe them NOW? From the
viewpoint of a member of the public what I see is yet more "The End Is
Nigh" posturing from yet another bunch of loons in lab coats. So what
makes these loons in lab coats different?
Predictions made fifty years ago coming true?
William Hyde