[arethuza]

"I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter."

I'm nearly 60 and I don't ever remember anyone talking about an imminent ice age - given my fondness for skiing when I was younger I'm sure I would have noticed.

[mythrwy]

Surprising. I'm 54 and the coming ice age was pretty widely published in my childhood. Lenard Nimoy had a movie about it, it was in Newsweek etc (and before you laugh, Newsweek was "real news" back in those days and my parents had a mail subscription).

I remember being extremely worried about it as a child and thinking "I am the last generation to know civilization as it has been before the world freezes over!"

It probably goes without saying but I haven't been especially concerned about global warming this go around.

[isleyaardvark]

There was one Newsweek article about it, and the Leonard Nimoy movie you are talking about is most likely “In Search Of…”, which also covered Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.

[mike_hearn]

You might want to double check that claim about Newsweek being the only coverage. I've seen climate crisis promoters say that, but it's misinformation. Global cooling was widely discussed by scientists and journalists from about the early 60s up to the mid 1970s, when recorded temperatures stopped falling.

They held international conferences to discuss it and wrote to the US President with their conclusions, warning him of the certainty of an impending ice age. This tweet [2] has the first page of the letter and an article from the Guardian headlined, "Space satellites show new ice age coming fast", by Anthony Tucker. The first paragraph says:

"WORLDWIDE and rapid trends towards a mini ice age are emerging from the first long term analyses of weather satellite data [...] an analysis carried out at Columbia University by climatologists Doctors George and Helena Kukla indicates that snow and ice cover of the Earth increased by 12% during 1967-1972"

Note that this claim about the data is incompatible with modern claims about the climate. If you try to look up the data they're talking about you'll find it's hard because modern graphs are truncated in the 1980s or even 1990s. The original paper is here [1] and argues the next cooling period will last 8000 years, driven by solar factors.

Back then climatology was obscure, because the idea of climate change being important hadn't been invented yet. You can see the seeds of it being planted with journalists, though:

"The trends appear to be cyclic, fairly long term and extremely important. It is therefore surprising that, in Britain at least, support for historic analysis of the climate is almost non-existent."

The letter to the president warned him to prepare "agriculture and industry" but also said that the ice age had a natural cause.

You can dig up endless pieces of evidence like these, especially if you go back into the journal archives. The papers read just like modern climate papers do, except that they talk about cooling instead of warming and blame natural astronomical cycles (here's another [3] and another [4]). Just search Google Scholar for papers published between 1960 and 1975 containing the phrase "climatic change".

The Leonard Nimoy documentary was part of a pop-sci series. The series did include episodes on the paranormal especially early in its life, but it also had plenty of episodes on general science topics like the study of earthquake prediction, bees, ants, hurricanes, DNA research, biblical historicity and so on. Anything the general public might find interesting. The episode on the coming ice age was grounded in and triggered by claims by the climatologists of the era.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/...

[2] https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1758729686434320645

[3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/627434

[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974...

[arethuza]

But isn't that just science working as expected - there are a set of different views and over time a consensus evolves? Nobody ever agrees with everything - that's not how science works (at least in my experience).

Edit: I haven't worked in academia for a long time and I wasn't working in anything even remotely related to climate science...

[mike_hearn]

That's not how science is meant to work. These things are fine if they happen in order:

1. We lack data on a topic so are collecting it.

2. Our data is certain but our understanding isn't.

3. Our understanding has been proven and here are some policies.

What's not OK is:

1. Our data shows X and our understanding is certain that Y is happening, so do Z.

2. Our data shows the opposite of X and our understanding is certain that the opposite of Y is happening, so do the opposite of Z.

The Newsweek article mentioned above says: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” So the gap between proposing to melt the polar ice caps and James Hansen testifying about global warming to Congress was only about 13 years.

The point of the scientific method is to build an understanding of a phenomena based on robust evidence, as well as to understand the limits of our own understanding. If a group of people claim to be scientists and then one day invert everything they're saying, then at some point the scientific method has broken down. If they admit that this happened and implement really convincing changes to prevent it ever happening again, then maybe that's recoverable. But if they ignore and try to cover up what happened, that should be the end of that group's credibility and funding. Unfortunately, in this case they have indeed tried to cover it up.