Was There Consensus for Global Cooling in the 1970s?
February 28th, 2007 by Stephen
After I wrote my piece in this blog about Dr Timothy Ball’s opinion piece, where he claims that no one is listening to him, even though he was one of Canada’s first climatology PhDs, and a researcher in the field - Dr Ball wrote me a reply in the comments section arguing that the piece was ad hominem.
As I pointed out to him, the piece was in fact evaluating an appeal to authority using the same criteria that I proposed for evaluating such appeals. It is entirely valid to review the expertise of an authority when such an appeal is made.
But Dr Ball made one point which I will deal with a little more fully here:
Elsewhere you (I assume it was you, but no matter because the point is still important) make the argument that there was no consensus on global cooling in the 1970s. First of all, as with global warming today, consensus is not a scientific fact. Second, as an active climatologist during that period I can attest there was a general consensus, but as with warming today there were those who disagreed that the trend would continue.
Now I am sure that these are Tim Ball’s recollections of the time, but as with all things, our recollections will be coloured by anecdotal evidence and specific converstaions we had. Was there ever hype about global cooling? Certainly, as articles in Newsweek and National Geographic demonstrate. Would Dr Ball have been asked about the issues? I presume so.
But was there a scientific consensus on the issue? Certainly not.
How do we know? The same way we know anything about what is happening in science - by reading the scientific literature.
And that is very revealing, because there is very little literature on the subject, and clearly no consensus.
There is a site that has set out to evaluate all papers from the time to examine this. The challenge on the site is to present any paper that predicts an ice age in the 1970s. Thus far there are some 16 links to papers, and no obvious link to global cooling. Indeed, the action of carbon dioxide in warming the climate is a stronger theme in these papers! But if we allowed all 16 papers as candidates - that is a long long way from a scientific consensus.
A good summary of the field is found in:
National Research Council, US Committee for the Global Atmospheric Research Program, Understanding Climatic Change: A Program for Action, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, (1975), appendix A.
This paper has been summarised by W M Connolley, who also is gathering the other papers mentioned above. It is quite clear that (a) there was no consensus on global cooling, and (b) that the worldwide scientific consensus of the IPCC is wholly quantified where the above report only spoke of very small risks, without giving any numbers.
So what really happened in the 1970s? Essentially there was some cooling from the post war period into the 1970s as per the graph on the right.
No consensus was ever reached on the cause of the cooling, because at this time there was also a great deal of concern about acid rain. Consequently sulpher dioxide emissions were reduced through a series of international treaties and technological change. The result was that sulpher dioxide rapidly declined as an atmospheric aerosol. This had been very effectively masking the effects of carbon dioxide since the the second world war, and as sulpher dioxide emissions were reduced the temperatures started to rapidly climb.
This is all well known, and there has even been a half baked suggestion that we deliberately pump sulpher based aerosols into the atmosphere to keep global temperatures down!
What of the coverage in the popular press?
Well anyone who knows anything about science will be aware that the popular press love to latch on to preliminary studies - particularly when they are controversial, and make a big thing of them. The journalists do not quantify uncertainty in their reporting, and the result is a bit of hysteria, followed by ignorance of later refutations.
An example of this is seen, for instance, in breast feeding studies, where breast feeding has been linked to high IQ in the popular press. What the press do not mention is that earlier studies were contradictory, because they failed to factor in factors such that higher IQ mothers were more likely to breast feed. Even now that the science is settling, and it seems that there is a link between IQ and breast feeding, no-one actually mentions that whilst the effect is observable scientifically, we are not talking about an improvement that anyone would actually notice.
So don’t rely on the press for science reporting.
And in interests of balance, I will mention a recent article in “The Independent” which was predicting the possibility of extinction of life on earth at the upper end of the warming estimates from the IPCC. That was just as poor reporting as any I have seen on global warming science.
Isn’t there a political component to the current global warming scare that was not present in 1970? In a lot of my reading and experience anything that is going to go somewhere has to reach a certain threshold (whether it’s the first 24 hours for a news story, a certain number of people that believe in cult X or the number of comments on a blog before it gets a discussion life of its own).
Taking this into consideration, is it fair to compare the number of papers or public information on a topic as evidence, since there has been so much political focus on this topic that wasn’t there in the 70s. There has been more funding of this research, more time spent discussing it, and even the technology shift between then and now. It seems like it’s a stretch and you would have to look at what would be used at the time to indicate to what degree it was a concern at a time before the Internet or even a majority of households with color television!
I’m not wading into the topic as much as wondering aloud about the differences over time.
You wanna hear a good one about Tim Ball?
According to one of the guys who lives in the same condo building as Ball, there was a decision made that each resident was to pay $5000 to fix a minor leakage problem in the building.
Ball, went around talking to all the residents telling them that the damage wasn\’t as bad as people thought and to listen to him because he knew all about building envelopes.
When it came to the vote, Ball convinced enough people that the decision failed and Ball won. The repairs were never done.
Fast forward two years later:
Since the initial damage was never fixed b/c our little “leaking building envelope denier,” Tim Ball, it got way worse and now everyone in the building is facing $100,000 each to repair the damage. I\’m not making this up, heard it straight from one his neighbours, who obviously hate Balls\’ guts.
If you don\’t believe me, ask Ball himself: [email deleted]
So how does this relate to global warming. Well, Ball is NOT an expert in climate change, he has not published any research in over ten years. He is also NOT the “first PhD in climatology in Canada,” not even close. Just like the leaking building envelope he fought against taking action on, global warming is only going to get more expensive the longer we wait to take action.
JC, thanks for your comments. However, I don’t want to start getting into hearsay evidence about personalities. I have removed Tim Ball’s email from your post, as it is unfair to post email addresses without the person’s permission.
Your last paragraph is the key one. When I posted on his appeal to (his own) authority, I made the point that he had not published research on the issue that he was denying, and that all his research was at least 10 years old. You can see the discussion if you wish.
These issues are relevant to what Dr Ball has to say on this subject. Issues of how he deals with personal issues are not, and the argument is therefore ad hominem. We should avoid ad hominem arguments wherever we find them because:
They raise the temperature of debate, causing people to become over invested in their “side” and thus unable to think into the other person’s point of view.
They do not offer a refutation of the issue, and are thus fallacious.
Anyone on the receiving end of an ad hominem argument can make the argument that the person making the point has no stronger refutation, and must be losing the argument.
Thanks again for your comments.
Stephen
Min, there has been a problem with the current global warming debate because the issue has been politicised. Not that science is in any way immune from internal politics! But because policy has been affected by this issue, and because policy makers on both sides have not necessarily understood what the science is telling them, there has been a rush to polarise the debate.
On one side you have a tiny and diminishing band of people who want to tell us that humans are not causing a warming through release of CO2. This group is becoming increasingly marginalised, as the evidence just does not support their thesis.
On the other side you have people who accept the scientific consensus, but misunderstand the predictions, and the tolerances within which predictions are made.
But comparing with the 1970s, we note that plenty of people were studying climate back then, and 16 papers is just a tiny fraction of the climate research of the day. These days there are more papers, and even greater consensus.
Is there a critical mass argument? Not on the major issues such as whether CO2 causes global warming - that has been settled for about 150 years. Not on issues such as human contribution to CO2 to the enviornment and so forth.
However, we might expect that there are parts of the argument which perhaps do not recieve the attention they deserve. There are areas of our understanding that will change, even though this is unikely to cause any radical change in the basic thesis: fossile fuel emissions are causing climate change.
One of the areas of uncertainty, for instance, is how climate change will affect us. I mentioned the Independent article predicting possible extinction of life on earth! It is more likely that there will be both winners and losers from climate change. It is just that people are unlikely to universally be winners.
Stephen
Even though the case for anthropogenic climate is convincing, I think a major problem is that the argument is presented from a very overconfident and simplistic position.
Without being lectured by experts and searching for information myself, I doubt I would have heard about most of the information which convinced me in the popular media. For example the generally closing gap between night and day temperatures, the aerosol explanation for cooling in the 1970s, and the lack of powerful enough solar forcing. Even the physical properties of CO2 are hardly ever discussed. Again and again the cynics claim that the whole basis for the theory is that correlation means causation (this isn’t helped by people like Al Gore) and harp on about the medieval warm period as if most climatologists are idiots who’ve never thought of these things themselves.
Somebody needs to present a comprehensive review of the evidence to the public without just latching on to eye-catching graphs of CO2 and temperature.
Ben,
You are absolutely right. The level of reporting on this issue is generally extremely weak (as per “the Independent” article I mentioned). And evry time there is a heat wave, people start talking about the effectos of global warming, as though we had never experienced heat waves before 1970!
The problem is that when you look at the science, which is indeed very comprehensive, you start getting into detail that many people do not want to be bothered with. For instance, you mention the physical properties of CO2, but most people do not want to know about molecular dipole moments, nor that CO2 has molecular mirror symmetry but dipole moments induced by polarisation…
What is needed is a popular science writer who really understands the issues, but is able to write up the science in an easily digestable format. A Brian Greene of climate science.
Actually, such a book may exist. If you have any recommendations, I would be happy to take a look and perhaps link to an appropriate book from here.
In the meantime, on my blogroll I have a link to “realclimate”. This is a site contributed to by climate scientists, talking about climate change.
Thanks for your comments.
Stephen