"Global warming" stopped 16 years ago

Time Magazine cover 1979

George Will column from 2009: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/13/AR2009021302514.html

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950” (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

Another classic George Will column: Inconvenient Kyoto Truths

http://trademarked.blogspot.com/2007/02/george-f-will-inconvenient-kyoto-truths.html

We do not know how much we must change our economic activity to produce a particular reduction of warming. And we do not know whether warming is necessarily dangerous. Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs. Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?

It could cost tens of trillions (in expenditures and foregone economic growth, here and in less-favored parts of the planet) to try to fine-tune the planet’s temperature. We cannot know if these trillions would purchase benefits commensurate with the benefits that would have come from social wealth that was not produced.

I thought of the global cooling scare as soon as I saw the headline. Nice artistic support there Jim.

I’m waiting for the global “just right” crisis, although I am wondering how that is going to play.

I’ve lived through the cooling brouhaha, and the warming frenzy. Maybe I’ll live long enough to see the “just right” terror, too, if I’m lucky.

I’m sure the Dem’s and the UN will want to tax that!

Just to even the scales a bit, it appears there was no such special report after all. It is one group’s spin on the data. There is another side to the story. Just sharing this other link not necessarily siding with either position:

http://news.discovery.com/earth/no-global-warming-hasnt-stopped-121017…