Thanks for your comment Skeptical. You say that "In the 70s, the 0.2 degree cooling was very uncertain and speculative, derived by a small band of scientists." No, the belief in a continuing trend came from a small band; the cooling is on the record, and generally accepted, as is the recent warming - bearing in mind, of course, all the uncertainties that surround even the measurement of these figures, ie. they are averages - not globally uniform, instrument error, technological change, urban heat effects etc, etc, etc., lots of etceteras...

I also disagee that older people (skeptic or otherwise) are necessarily struggling to "keep up" with the internet. They may not use it to download every latest pic of Paris, but I know plenty of older people who are making great use of the technology. Maybe some of these older people, who've been around the block a few more times, aren't distracted as easily by the medium itself, but can see through the BS to what's really going on - perhaps history repeating itself. I don't think the internet is concentrating our fears, but disseminating them.

But I appreciate your comment.

Richard (not Russell)

Sorry Richard (not Russell).
I do indeed allege that the basis for the science of global cooling of the 70s was (at the time) sketchy, just as was its extrapolation. To quote realclimate’s article: “The global cooling myth”:
“… there was a trend of cooling from the 40's to the 70's (although that needs to be qualified, as hemispheric or global temperature datasets were only just beginning to be assembled then)”.
By concentrating upon this alleged “scare”, I think you have been sold a bill of goods. Such “skeptical” and populist products are manufactured as much over the internet as anywhere. The democratising effect of the internet, for better or worse, gives weight and distribution to views which would not previously have got that treatment.
Look, I don’t want to overstate the age effect in the AGW debate (being an older citizen myself), though I note you won’t concede my memory of the 70s has much weight. My assessment of this factor comes from such articles as the Washington Post’s on Bill Gray:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305.html

Sorry, skeptical of skeptics, but you’re the one who’s been sold a bill of goods. There was genuine expert concern about global cooling in the 1970s and it certainly wasn’t manufactured over the internet or made up by the media.

The US National Defense University conducted an international survey of expert views on prospective climate change to the year 2000 in 1976 and 1977, and published the results in the report “Climate Change to the Year 2000: A Survey of Expert Opinion” (1978). Individual quantitative responses were weighted according to expertise and then averaged. The aggregated subjective probabilities were used to construct five possible climate scenarios for the year 2000, each having a “probability” of occurrence. The survey showed that expert opinion was fairly evenly divided between expectations of warming and cooling and that there was a significant minority opinion (10% probability) expecting large cooling. This scenario was described in the “Global 2000 Report to the President” (1980), prepared jointly by the US Environmental Protection Authority and the State Department, in the following terms:

‘The global trend that began in the 1940s accelerated rapidly in the last quarter of the 20th century. The average global temperature reached its lowest value of the past century a few years before the century ended. By the year 2000, the mean Northern Hemisphere temperature was about 0.6 deg. C colder than in the early 1970s, and climate conditions showed a striking similarity to the period around 1820. Climatologists explained this large global cooling in terms of natural climatic cycles, partly solar induced and partly attributable to several major volcanic eruptions that occurred between 1980 and 2000’ (vol. 2, p. 52).

Skeptical, I mean no disrespect to you, your age or your memory, when I say that your lack of such memories of the 70s doesn't negate my thesis, but supports it. The concern about cooling didn't grab the public. Had the internet been around (and The Wall not) it may have been quite different.

Allison, how does the The Defense Technology Information Center summarise this survey?
It mentions that it was a survey of 24 climatologists from seven countries. (This doesn’t seem a large number, especially in modern terms.)
It goes on to say: “The derived climate scenarios manifest a broad range of perceptions about possible temperature trends to the end of this century, but suggest as most likely a climate resembling the average for the past 30 years. Collectively, the respondents tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling. More specifically, their assessments pointed toward only one chance in five that changes in average global temperatures will fall outside the range of -0.3C to +0.6C.”
I would be interested to know how you fit a scare about global cooling into the above summary.

Arjay, interesting that you would raise the topic of the millennium bug (well you said "millinium bug" but I think I know what you meant).

Leaving aside that Y2K had nothing to do with scientists, but rather engineers like myself, it is quite telling that you laugh it off like that.

Do you have any idea how many billions were spent worldwide to ensure that Y2K didn't become a world-crippling problem? I don't have any solid figures to hand, but I would guess that it may well have been orders of magnitude more than has been spent on the reduction of carbon emissions.

It's very easy for you to use inductive reasoning and say "the world has never ended before, so it's not going to end in my lifetime", and then laugh at any successful prevention of a global crisis. But civilizations and ecosystems have both been observed to collapse before, so it does need to be taken seriously.

Note that I am *not* stating that Y2K "would have been" an economic crisis. I am pointing out that the people involved had the foresight to take it seriously and do something about it, *years before* any directly observable crisis would start to unfold.