25 June 2005

Cool

Randomly spelunking through comments at The Washington Monthly on an article discussing the Republican war on science, I noticed that people still try to counter global warming by bringing up global cooling [Wikipedia]. They suggest that scientists were screaming dire warnings in the 1970s, and have now reversed themselves. Foolish science, when will it learn? Wikipedia's entry, specifically the section discussing the history of the scientific position, points out that this was an idea discussed in scientific journals and blown out of propotion by misquotes in the popular press. Cooling did occur up to around 1966, and the scientists were examining its possible causes.

(This Newsweek article is often cited by anti-climate change proponents. This section in the Wikipedia entry addresses that.)

To the credit of the comments in The Washington Monthly story, many people countered with the facts, along with several good citations from Wikipedia and RealClimate (which I had originally heard about from an NPR show, kinda supporting the Republicans v. science paranoia).

Next they're going to say that climate change is "just a theory."

[ posted by sstrader on 25 June 2005 at 12:49:06 PM in Science & Technology ]