Another Perfect Storm in the 1970s
The following are excerpts taken from "Hysteria's Report: Environmental Alarmism in Context" by Amy Kaleita, Ph.D with Gregory R. Forbes
In the 1970s, increased scrutiny of global climate patterns revealed that estimates of global temperatures had been declining since the mid-1940s. For the most part, the scientific community recognized the trend but also acknowledged its inability to make predictions of related and forthcoming climate change, because of a lack of understanding of the issue.
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) included climate change in its assessment of major questions in need of more research, noting, “The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know.” While these discussions were taking place in the scientific community, the media caught wind of the story. As reported in the popular press, the situation was much more dire than it appeared in the scientific literature, the science was much more settled, and global cooling was an indisputable fact.
On June 24, 1975, Time magazine published a story titled, “Another Ice Age?” The story stated: “However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” The article noted a number of side effects of the coming ice age: violent storms in the Midwest, a sharp reduction in global food production, and continuing drought.
On April 28, 1975, a little article on the observations appeared in Newsweek. Titled “The Cooling World,” it noted “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change” and cited “a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.” The article continued: “The evidence in support
of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.” It warned of an array of disastrous (and now familiar-sounding) consequences: “resulting famines could be catastrophic,” “drought and desolation,” “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded,” “floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, [and] delayed monsoons.” Newsweek claimed: “The present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age.” In 2006, 31 years later, Newsweek reflected on that article, noting that it had been “so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future” but insisting that “the story wasn’t ‘wrong’ in the journalistic sense of ‘inaccurate.’ ” But the damage was done. Other major media outlets rushed to jump on the bandwagon. A May 21, 1975, headline in the New York Times said, “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate Is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable.” Time put “The Coming Ice Age” on its cover. The November 1976 issue of National Geographic had a lead article on global cooling. In the late 1970s, several popular books on the topic were published, including The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age. The global-cooling stories of the 1970s were not really new. They were just the most successful in gaining widespread public attention despite not having widespread scientific backing.
In truth, media stories of impending catastrophic climate change have a long history. On October 7, 1912 (notably, several months after the sinking of the Titanic, caused by a collision with an iceberg), a headline on page one of the New York Times reported that a well-known professor “Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.” On September 10, 1923, Time warned, “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.”
However, the conventional wisdom on such matters can change quite quickly, and on March 11, 1929, the Los Angeles Times responded to its headline question “Is another ice age coming?” with the answer, “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.”
In many cases, the alarmists identify a legitimate issue, take the possible consequences to an extreme, and advocate action on the basis of these extreme projections. In 1972, the editor of the journal Nature pointed out the problem with the typical alarmist approach: “[Alarmists’] most common error is to suppose that the worst will always happen.”82 But of course, if the worst always happened, the human race would have died out long ago. When alarmism has a basis in reality, the challenge becomes to take appropriate action based on that reality, not on the hysteria.
A major challenge in developing appropriate responses to legitimate problems is that alarmism catches people’s attention and draws them in. Alarmism is given more weight than it deserves, as policy makers attempt to appease their constituency and the media. It polarizes the debaters into groups of “believers” and “skeptics,” so that reasoned, fact-based compromise is difficult to achieve. Neither of these aspects of alarmism is healthy for the development of appropriate policy. Further, alarmist responses to valid problems risk foreclosing potentially useful responses based on ingenuity and progress. There are many examples from the energy sector where, in the presence of economic, efficiency, or societal demands, the marketplace has responded by developing better alternatives. That is not to say that we should blissfully squander our energy resources; on the contrary, we should be careful to utilize them wisely. But energy-resource hysteria should not lead us to circumvent scientific advancement by cherry-picking and favoring one particular replacement technology at the expense of other promising technologies.
Environmental alarmism should be taken for what it is—a natural tendency of some portion of the public to latch onto the worst, and most unlikely, potential outcome. Alarmism should not be used as the basis for policy. Where a real problem exists, solutions should be based on reality, not hysteria.
As a Social Phenomenon a Perfect Storm does not have to be Environment Related and Can Produce Dire Consequences
The following is from Appendix 1 of Michael Crichton's State of Fear and supported by content in Wikipedia.
Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out. This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
This real experience is a matter of recent history. It's supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Luis Brandeis who ruled in it's favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, Luther Burbank, Leland Stanford, H.G. Wells, George Barnard Shaw and hundreds of others. Research was backed by Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins.
Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California. These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort. All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of the public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century.
Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected. Today, we know the famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of this theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people. The theory was Eugenics.
Eugenics in Wikipedia
Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary[1] Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier and more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering. traits through various forms of intervention.
Earlier proposed means of achieving these goals focused on selective breeding, while modern ones focus on prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering. Opponents argue that eugenics is immoral and is based on, or is itself, pseudoscience[citation needed]. Historically, eugenics has been used as a justification for coercive state-sponsored discrimination and human rights violations, such as forced sterilization of persons who are claimed to have genetic defects, the killing of the institutionalized population and, in some cases, outright genocide of races perceived as inferior or undesirable.
For some eye opening evidence of the extent of this conventionally accepted alarmist event, take these links:
How do I know I am in a Perfect Storm?
Based upon patterns of this social phenomenon, the following seem to apply.
- The information being acted may have some truth but it is fear based
- The media and others stories have an alarmist aura, "if you don't act now, something dire will happen".
- Those who see self serving opportunities jump on board:Politicians who now can have power by being seemingly needed as a protector.
- The uninformed but popular like celebrities - who want more fame as contributors to society than the source of their celebrity bringsThe uninformed but fearful public, out of fear of the unknown but seemingly generally accepted.`
- Those who are knowledgeable, but in opposition are branded as heretics, or being funded by the opposition, while those studies that support it are branded as true, regardless of funding source or details included in the studies.
What is interesting, is that we have heard this story since we were kids and were told the story of Chicken Little, who ran about yelling the Sky is Falling.
What This Means to Me
While I don't ignore it completely, because it is likely centered on some truth, I don't let it set my priorities and become reactionary. There are other Important and Urgent issues to address. I don't look at ways to waste energy, but do a part in saving energy because it is a limited resource, but I don't go overboard, because the history of mankind has proven the the real energy is man's ability to think, invent, and adapt. I look to the free market, which has proven time and time again that the natural economic reward for those who successfully produce the needs and demands of the customer, will survive and thrive due to the viability and profitability of the solution, and that as such the demanded solutions will be developed as profitable alternatives and promote growth of the the economy and the progress of the solutions, rahter than limitations and restrictions.
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