The following is excerpted from Paul Homewood’s weekly roundup of the climate doomsters. Homewood takes us back to the old-timey days of climate fearmongering…from the 1970s. –CCD Ed.
We are constantly warned that we are living through a climate emergency, with floods, droughts, and storms all getting worse.
Some people must have short memories! [bold, links added]
By the 1970s, the world had undergone three decades of cooling, which followed what the renowned climatologist of the time, H H Lamb, described as the ‘benign warming trend’ of the early 20th century, which peaked in the 1940s.
Sea ice in the Arctic expanded rapidly and growing seasons became shorter – Lamb related at the time that in England, they were two weeks shorter than prior to 1950.
Did people welcome this return to a colder planet? Silly question!
One of the direct consequences of the cooling was the catastrophic drought that affected a wide band, from the Sahel in Africa through the Middle East and beyond into India.
The Sahel drought was, strictly speaking, a series of droughts, which affected the region from West Africa across to Ethiopia between 1968 and 1985 and caused an estimated 100,000 deaths. Meanwhile, in India, monsoon failures became more common again.
In the US, the wettest year on record arrived in 1973, bringing devastating floods to Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Denver.
The colder weather triggered many more severe tornadoes than have been seen since, including the most severe tornado outbreak on record in April 1974.
The US experienced its coldest winter on record in 1978/79, the winter notable for the Presidents’ Day storm in February 1979, one of the greatest snowstorms of the 20th century.
In Iceland, the 1960s and ’70s were known as the Sea Ice Years, as Arctic ice surrounded the island. Both farming and fishing were badly affected by the deterioration of the climate, unemployment soared and the currency collapsed, losing half its value.
Britain, of course, baked through the successive heatwaves in the summers of 1975 and 1976, the latter still the hottest on record.
Only eight years before, floods had devastated the Home Counties, which leading meteorologist, the late Philip Eden, described as ‘probably the most severe flood to hit the Home Counties in the last century.’
On the other side of the world, Australia’s wettest year came in 1974; according to Lamb, ‘Floods beyond all previously recorded experience stretching across the central Australian desert.’
The list could go on and on. World leaders were so concerned about the deteriorating climate that the White House set up a sub-committee in 1974 to ‘assess the problem and determine what concerted action ought to be undertaken.’
In the same year, the CIA published a study that began: ‘The Western world’s leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of a detrimental climate change.’
If we had a thermostat for the Earth’s temperature, would anybody in their right mind turn it back to the temperatures of the 1970s?
Read rest at Conservative Woman
How Time has forgot or ignores the past when it was suppost to be another Ice Age was coming and Newsweek did about the same
I remember 1974 on the east coast of Australia. It was stinking wet. That was even without the constant cloud-seeding we are subjected to currently, in a wet La Niña cycle. Now, why would governments cloud-seed in a wet year but not in a drought?