This seems destined to be ignored by today's climate change obsessed
media: Scientists from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -
the very organization now presaging gloom and doom at the hands of
global warming - predicted a new ice age back in 1971.
Think this will be a focus of tonight's evening news broadcasts?
Regardless of the answer, the Washington Times wonderfully reported
Wednesday (emphasis added throughout, h/t Marc Morano):
NASA scientist James E. Hansen, who has publicly criticized the
Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and
labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting "court
jesters," appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an
impending ice age within 50 years.
The Post archives do indeed identify the existence of such a piece,
with the following preview:
The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a
disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. Dr.
S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
Columbia University says that...
The Times piece continued:
The scientist was S.I. Rasool, a colleague of Mr. Hansen's at the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The article goes on to
say that Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in
part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied
clouds above Venus.
The 1971 article, discovered this week by Washington resident John
Lockwood while he was conducting related research at the Library of
Congress, says that "in the next 50 years" - or by 2021 - fossil-fuel
dust injected by man into the atmosphere "could screen out so much
sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees,"
resulting in a buildup of "new glaciers that could eventually cover
huge areas."
It turns out the Post was referring specifically to an article
published at the journal Science that day, which was written by Rasool
and S. H. Schneider.
Science archives identified the following abstract of the piece
entitled "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large
Increases on Global Climate," and indicated the authors were from
"Institute for Space Studies, Goddard Space Flight Center, National
Aeronautics and Space Administration" (emphasis added):
Effects on the global temperature of large increases in carbon
dioxide and aerosol densities in the atmosphere of Earth have been
computed. It is found that, although the addition of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of
temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. For aerosols, however, the net effect of increase in
density is to reduce the surface temperature of Earth. Because of the
exponential dependence of the backscattering, the rate of temperature
decrease is augmented with increasing aerosol content. An increase by
only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be
sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 ° K. If
sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease
over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice
age.
How marvelous. Yet, 36 years later, this same organization is
predicting a planetary cataclysm at the hands of global warming.
Which one of this agency's warnings should we heed?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/19/nasa-scientists-predicted-new-ice-age-1971
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