Everyone knows that before the global warming scare began in the 1980s, scientists were much more worried about global cooling and the coming ice age.
At least everybody did till a cabal of lying climate alarmists – one then a senior administrator at NOAA, now a president at the World Meteorological Association – hijacked Wikipedia, published a lying paper, and rewrote history by painting the 1970s Global Cooling Scare as an urban myth.
Now the full extent of these activists’ skullduggery has been uncovered by researcher Kenneth Richard, writing at No Tricks Zone.
Richard shows that during the 1960s and 1970s, there was an 86 percent scientific consensus that the planet was on a cooling path. But this was airbrushed out of history so successfully that even now if you do a Google search on “70s global cooling scare” the top results claim it never really happened.
The top result is this one from Wikipedia on Global Cooling, which says:
This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.
This is flat-out untrue – in fact the vast majority of scientific papers (220 out of 264) supported the cooling thesis – and makes a mockery of Jimmy Wales’s oft-expressed desire to reduce Wikipedia’s outrageous left-wing bias.
Possibly, the misleading entry is a hangover from the extraordinary period in which William Connolley, a Green party member – then working for the British Antarctic Survey – was able to abuse his Wikipedia administrator status by rewriting thousands of Wikipedia articles in order to give them the ‘correct’ alarmist spin. This scandal was exposed by Lawrence Solomon in the National Post.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand.
When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
Connolley was an associate of the alarmist propaganda site RealClimate which he co-founded with several of the world’s most egregious alarmists, among them, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann and Gavin Schmidt, notorious for his data manipulations at NASA.
It was Connolley too who co-authored the hugely influential and utterly mendacious 2008 paper The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus . Another of its authors Thomas C Peterson was formerly Principal Scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Education and now rejoices in the title President of the World Meteorological Association’s Commission for Climatology.
The paper, published in the prestigious American Meteorological Society journal, was a pack of lies.
It falsely claimed:
[T]he following pervasive myth arose [among skeptics]: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent. A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. … During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers. … There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
But as Kenneth Richard explains here, it did so by deliberately and cynically excluded many papers inconvenient to its lying thesis:
As will be shown here, the claim that there were only 7 publications from that era disagreeing with the presupposed CO2-warming “consensus” is preposterous. Because when including the papers from the 1960s and 1970s that indicated the globe had cooled (by -0.3° C between the 1940s and ’70s), that this cooling was concerning (leading to extreme weather, drought, depressed crop yields, etc.), and/or that CO2’s climate influence was questionable to negligible, a conservative estimate for the number of scientific publications that did not agree with the alleged CO2-warming “consensus” was 220 papers for the 1965-’79 period, not 7. If including papers published between 1960 and 1989, the “non-consensus” or “cooling” papers reaches 285.
Again, these estimates should be viewed as conservative. There are likely many dozen more scientific papers from the 1960s-’70s cooling scare era that would probably fall into the category of a “cooling” paper, but have not yet been made available to view in full online.
Perhaps the biggest irony of Connolley’s and Peterson’s trashy, junk-science paper is the bit where it pontificates about lousy scientists abusing data for political ends.
“Underlying the selective quotation of the past literature is an example of what political scientist Daniel Sarewitz calls ‘scientization’ of political debate: the selective emphasis on particular scientific ‘facts’ to advance a particular set of political values. In this case, the primary use of the myth is in the context of attempting to undermine public belief in and support for the contemporary scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change by appeal to a past “consensus” on a closely related topic that is alleged to have been wrong.”
Scientization is, of course, what climate alarmists do all the time in order to support their bankrupt (but highly lucrative) thesis. Such is their brazen shamelessness, indeed, that you can’t help wondering whether – along with a worthless degree in something like environmental sciences from somewhere like the University of East Anglia – the main requirement for thriving in the world of climate science is the personality of a psychopath.
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