Here is a good example oh how people take a short term trend (a few decades is a very short term trend when you are dealing with world climate changes) and extend it resulting in predictions of imment doom. Global warming is a similer case. You need a lote more then a few decades worth of data to tell a real trend.
Tim
burrow.marnanel.org
"Perhaps the most famous form of the ``sky is falling'' claim today is global
warming--the so-called ``Greenhouse Effect.'' The U.N.'s 1992 Rio summit
focused on this issue. The fear is that pollution, particularly such
``greenhouse gases'' as carbon dioxide, will stay within the atmosphere,
leading to a rise in the earth's temperature, which will create deserts, melt
the polar icecaps, and flood coastal nations.
In fact, warnings of global warming are not new: The theory was first
advanced in the 1890s and re-emerged in the 1950s. But soon thereafter a new
theory gained sway--that we were entering a new Ice Age. In 1974 the U.S.
National Science Board stated that ``during the last 20 to 30 years, world
temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last
decade.'' In the same year, Time magazine opined that ``the atmosphere has
been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no
indication of reversing.'' Similarly, observed Dr. Murray Mitchell of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1976, ``Since about 1940
there has been a distinct drop in average global temperature. It's fallen
about half a degree Fahrenheit.''
Five years later Fred Hoyle's Ice: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe appeared,
warning that a new Ice Age was long overdue, and ``when the ice comes, most
of northern America, Britain, and northern Europe will disappear under the
glaciers. . . . The right conditions can arise within a single decade.'' He
advocated warming the oceans to forestall this ``ultimate human
catastrophe.'' Another two years passed and Rolling Stone magazine declared
that: ``For years now, climatologists have foreseen a trend toward colder
weather--long range, to be sure, but a trend as inevitable as death. . . .
According to [one] theory, all it would take is a single cold summer to
plunge the earth into a sudden apocalypse of ice.'' "
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