It sometimes amuses me to backtrack on things like this. So, you started with the author in Message 25758168 . A perfectly reasonable post with calm and rational points. Vis:
Mistakes also played a part. Some of the calculations published with great fanfare were simply wrong. Soon after his 1971 paper came out, Schneider realised he had greatly overestimated the future cooling effect from human-made aerosols. He had assumed that the increased levels of aerosols in the air that he had measured applied globally. They did not; they related only to small areas close to their source. Moreover, much of the aerosols turned out to be natural, so that even if emissions from human sources did quadruple, their effect would be much smaller than he had calculated.
Schneider also realised that he had underestimated the likely warming effect of CO2: it would be three times as great as he first calculated. When he redid his sums, he concluded that the balance between warming and cooling now tipped strongly towards warming. In 1974, he published a retraction of his earlier prognosis - "just like honest scientists are supposed to do", he says.
The science of ice ages has also advanced since. The planetary wobbles that periodically tip the world into ice ages are not identical, so some interglacial periods last longer than others. Good theoretical work now shows that the current one is likely to be unusually long.
Finally, far from cooling, since the middle of the 1970s the planet has been warming exceptionally rapidly. The link between this and the accumulation of greenhouse gases is almost universally accepted.
Most now agree that the cold decades from the 1940s to 1970s had little to do with either anthropogenic pollution or planetary wobbles. The mid-century cooling, Bryson now agrees, was associated with the eruptions of a cluster of medium-sized volcanoes that pumped sunlight-scattering sulphate aerosols into the upper air.
All this raises an alarming question. If climatologists were so wrong then, why should we believe them now? As those who played a part in the cooling scare now readily admit, those early studies were based on flimsy data collected by very few, often young, researchers. In 1971, when Schneider's paper appeared, he was instantly regarded as a world expert. It was his first publication.
Today, vastly more research has been done into how and why climate changes. The consensus on warming is much bigger, much broader, much more sophisticated in its science and much longer-lasting than the spasm of concern about cooling.
Ok, then. No mention of a book there, and a pretty calm discussion. When further queried about a book, you give me Message 25788621
Ok, so I look up the book, which is indeed by Schneider, and the first thing that comes up is wmconnolley.org.uk , which goes through it in some detail and doesn't seem to find much objectionable. It does lead me, though, to a book that does seem to really believe in global cooling, which Schneider is on record as, well, you know. . .
In 1977 Schneider criticized a popular science book (The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age) that predicted an imminent Ice Age, writing in Nature:
...it insists on maintaining the shock effect of the dramatic...rather than the reality of the discipline: we just don't know enough to chose definitely at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling— or when. [1] en.wikipedia.org
And then, to round things out, you give me " the scanned image of the pages" from a totally different book by Holdren. Incredible, indeed. Turns out Schneider's 1977 review of the one book that really seems to be primarily about "global cooling" is on line, at stephenschneider.stanford.edu , I'd post the text as a suitable wrapup but it doesn't seem to be clipable. |
