Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No

With the recent drivel in "Metro" making the news, it may be time for another anti-ice-age-myth post; the last from me that I can see is from 2015, when the Squareheads went mad. To remind you, the "proper" scientific source for all this is Now out in BAMS: The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus, which is my wild-eyed enthusiasm, Thomas Peterson's careful scholarship, and John Fleck's journalistic flair. My¹ RC post from 2005 is also worth a look.

But what I wanted to link to here, for those young 'uns who don't know the history, is http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/. Which is hosted on my web site (remember when people had personal web sites?) and will probably one day disappear when I forget to pay the bills; happily there's an archive of it. As you can tell, it is a page that Just Grew; I even felt moved to add a note to new readers at one point. So all this started in the sci.env days, let us say around the year 1995-2000. In those days GW "skepticism" was a little bit more respectable, the evidence wasn't all in the way it is now, and one of the themes was the familiar "but you were all predicting ice ages in the 70's", and what I discovered was that when you actually read the papers that people were putting forward, you discovered that no, people weren't predicting ice ages (with a few exceptions).

Some flavour of sci.env comes from Re: control the climate by Michael Tobis in 1995, or Cooling vs. Warming by Robert Parson in 1993. In some ways the best summary is by Dick "Mad Dog" Lindzen:

Many studies from the nineteenth century on suggested that industrial and other contributions to increasing carbon dioxide might lead to global warming. Problems with such predictions were also long noted, and the general failure of such predictions to explain the observed record caused the field of climatology as a whole to regard the suggested mechanisms as suspect. Indeed, the global cooling trend of the 1950s and 1960s led to a minor global cooling hysteria in the 1970s. All that was more or less normal scientific debate, although the cooling hysteria had certain striking analogues to the present warming hysteria including books such as The Genesis Strategy by Stephen Schneider and Climate Change and World Affairs by Crispin Tickell--both authors are prominent in support of the present concerns as well--"explaining'' the problem and promoting international regulation. There was also a book by the prominent science writer Lowell Ponte (The Cooling) that derided the skeptics and noted the importance of acting in the absence of firm, scientific foundation. There was even a report by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reaching its usual ambiguous conclusions. But the scientific community never took the issue to heart, governments ignored it, and with rising global temperatures in the late 1970s the issue more or less died. In the meantime, model calculations--especially at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton--continued to predict substantial warming due to increasing carbon dioxide. Those predictions were considered interesting, but largely academic, exercises--even by the scientists involved.

though of course you can't trust everything that article says. The 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report is also worth a look; and since Big D mentions it, here's my read of The Cooling.

Refs

* 2012: Carbon Dioxide: Our Salvation from a Future Ice Age?

Notes

1. Now assigned to "group" but as the archive shows, it's mine.
2. The pic is me - I'm the little one - my mother, and Scary Great Aunt Jess. at their house in Leighton Buzzard, in 1964 I'd imagine.
3. A point that VV makes in hist comment elsewhere is that even if the meme were true - if the consensus had been for cooling then - it still wouldn't affect the quality of today's science. That is logically true, but I suspect it wouldn't play well politically, so it isn't my lead argument. I prefer to go with the argument that the entire meme is broken, which it is.