Global Warming, Again

Local climate skeptic Lou Johnson has been spreading his ignorance again, most recently in a letter to the Times Herald on 17 December. He's taken to task in today's (22 December) Times Herald by SC4 biologist David Webb, who correctly points out that Johnson is getting much of his misinformation from the discredited and erratic William Gray. In his retirement, Gray is going around the country arguing that global warming is a myth. For a solid, devastating rebuttal of Gray's nonsense see this page on the excellent Real Climate web site.

Another of Johnson's errors demands correction. This is the claim, routinely repeated by climate skeptics, that "in the 1970s, scientists were instead predicting another ice age." To begin with, there was no consensus in the '70s about an impending ice age, nothing like the nearly unanimous understanding today that warming is real and that it's anthropogenic. Johnson and his ilk like to make this claim because it suggests that scientists were wrong then and we therefore have no reason to take them seriously today. What happened was this: some scientists did suggest that a cooling trend might be beginning. Their predictions were tentative, and they did not reflect anything like a consensus among climate scientists. It in no way constituted a situation analogous to what we have today. Like everything else that Johnson and other climate skeptics say, this claim is misleading and irrelevant. Grist provides a good response to it.