Climate Change Throughout Modern Times

I admit it; I'm a global warming skeptic (rotten tomatoes can be thrown at the end of the article, thank you!) It's not that I find the arguments for current global warming unpersuasive; it's that I have a problem with the stifling of debate debunking global warming that seems to be growing more widespread.

At any rate, if global warming exists, how do we know that it's caused by human carbon dioxide production? When we didn't have human pollution dumped into the atmosphere, there were still very significant variations in our climate. At one point, dinosaurs roamed the earth. At others, vast sheets of ice drained the ocean and covered our most fertile lands. Even looking at just the last thousand or so years, when we have reasonably good records, we see that the current global climate is neither as hot nor as volatile as at other periods.

Global Cooling: The Cause Du Jour of the Seventies

In 1972, a startling new study came forward. Using some of the first accurate global temperature readings from weather balloons and satellites, the National Science Board stated that the Earth's mean temperature was dropping quickly and alarmingly. Could this be the start of a new ice age? Time magazine (and other prominent magazines) thought so; they published a cover article titled "The Cooling World" on April 28, 1975.

This remained cause for alarm for several years, until about 1979, when the World Meteorological Organization stated that the cooling trend had actually stopped about the time meteorologists had first become aware of it in 1970. This fear was replaced by the fear of nuclear winter, possibly because nuclear winter was not terribly far from the global cooling theories.

At last, sometime in the mid-1990s the idea of global warming as climate change became the primary worry of many climateologists.

Historic Temperature Changes

If you read through history, you'll find a number of interesting blips. These data are accepted, although truly accurate methods for measuring global temperature vary. The two most significant recent changes are the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.