Dr. Thomas Karl recently retired as Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In 1989, Karl’s stated position was that global temperatures cooled between 1921 and 1979.
Source: RealClimateScience
“Analysis of warming since 1881 shows most of the increase in global temperature happened before 1919 ‚Äì before the more recent sharp rise in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, said Thomas Karl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. While global climate warmed overall since 1881, it actually cooled from 1921 to 1979, Karl said.”
Today, not only has the 1921-1979 cooling disappeared from NOAA’s official temperature record, it has been replaced by a +0.45¬∞C warming trend during that nearly 60-year period.
1. Early NOAA Graphs Confirm Strong Cooling Through The 1970s – Before It Was Removed
As recently as the early 1980s, it was still widely accepted in the scientific community (National Academy of Sciences, hundreds of scientific papers) that the Northern Hemisphere had undergone a dramatic warming of nearly 1°C from about 1900 to 1940, and then, after the 1940s, the trend reversed to severe cooling, fomenting the 1970s global cooling scare.
Agee, 1980
NOAA’s Karl had also supplied plenty of evidence to support the original (1989) position that a global cooling trend persisted through the late 1970s. Graphs appeared in his papers with strong warming trends through the 1920s and 1930s and then cooling trends from the 1940s to the 1970s. For example, the NOAA graph of U.S. annual temperatures showed the cooling trend from 1921-1979, and even indicated there had been no net warming in the U.S. in the 90 years between 1895 and 1985.
