Spend five minutes with a global warming denier, and you will inevitably hear about how the scientific community was predicting an ice back back in the 1970s. As with so much else on that side of the debate, it simply isn’t true. Eduardo Penalver links to a study showing that there was in fact no such scientific consensus in the 1970s. Myth, meet fact:
“The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.”