That 70s myth—did climate science really call for a “coming ice age?“

(credit: Ravi Kochhar)

One of the undying, zombie-like arguments against climate change is that you can’t trust climate scientists because they started out making doom and gloom claims about global cooling in the 1970s. But this, along with many other things comedian Dennis Miller has said on late night talk shows, needn’t be taken seriously.

By the time fears of an ice age reached the public's attention, there was a long history of concerns about warming. The idea that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet can be traced back to an 1896 paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. In the 1930s, Britain’s Guy Callendar concluded that global warming was already underway. So it seems a bit odd that anyone worried about cooling. What was really going on back in the 70s—both in science and in the media?

Reaching maturity

For climate science, the 1970s were a pivotal era. Even though the discipline was born much earlier, it’s probably fair to say that climate science grew up in that decade.

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