Climate Change in the 70s: Global Cooling

In the 1970s, the prophets of doom and gloom warned that the earth was about to enter another Ice Age and that we had to do something to prevent going the way of the Wooly Mammoth. Beginning around the end of World War II, temperatures on the earth fell so consistently that many feared it was the beginning of a trend that would eventually end in another ice age. Of course, global trends take much longer than twenty years to establish themselves, so the scientific community remained divided on the issue. They realized that they did not have enough data to say with any authority that temperatures would continue to fall.

The media, however, accepted less solid evidence for proof of the global cooling phenomena and reported in a famous 1975 Newsweek article about the "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change." The "global cooling hysteria" even inspired a song from The Clash called "London Calling."

Like the global warming crowd today, global cooling activists believed that man was the cause of this cooling. They believed that there were two main ways that man could influence the environment. When humanity released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, energy from the sun would be trapped within the atmosphere, producing a warming effect. When it released smog, however, this smog would deflect rays from the sun entirely, producing a cooling effect. Obviously, global cooling activists were concerned about smog whereas today's global warming activists are concerned about greenhouse gases.

There were also some who believed that humans had nothing to do with global cooling. They believed that it was caused by changes in the tilt of the earth's axis and its orbit. This would cause less sunlight to reach the earth, making the planet colder. This was a phenomena described by geologists who believed that the earth was in the midst of or about to begin one of these periodic changes. Although they thought these changes would take thousands of years to take place, the idea that Ice Ages could be predicted and that one was coming "soon" caused a great deal of worry.