ALERT, ALERT … Breaking News … New Climate Change Threat … Take Action
“There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.”
I hope that got your attention as it was intended to do. That quote was the lead paragraph in the April 28, 1975 edition of Newsweek magazine cautioning that a drastic cooling of the planet with “resulting famines (that) could be catastrophic.”
Unlike Newsweek, Time magazine often covers climate change on its covers. (forums.baptist.com)
“A major climate change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” reported the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The excitement was the result of a NOAA finding that a drop of a half of a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. The administration also noted that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished 1.3 per cent between 1964 and 1972.
While there are those who today seem to insist that human activity is causing global warming, it is interesting to note in the Newsweek article, “Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. Our knowledge of climate change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” the NAS conceded. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered but in many cases, we do not know enough to pose key questions.”
While science has progressed since 1975, there is no solid proof that human activity is causing the current warming, just as there has been no explanation for previous warming trends before the invention of the combustion engine.
Just as people are attempting to scare the public of warming today, the Newsweek piece covered “the pessimism of political leaders to take any positive action to compensate for the climate change, or even allay its effects.” I wonder exactly what they expected them to do.
Considering the covering of the arctic ice cap with black soot or diverting arctic rivers to cause melting were thought to present greater problems. Scientists were disappointed there was no simple measure to stockpile food.
“The longer the planners delay,” wrote Peter Gwynne (obviously, a greenie of the time), “the more difficult will they find it to cope with climate change once the results become grim reality.”
Grim reality? Just five years later the earth began warming and that arctic ice cap was melting. Food shortage averted.
There are temperature cycles, folks.
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