"The poorest nations, already beset by man-made disasters, have been threatened by a natural one: the possibility of climatic changes ...perhaps throughout the world. The implications for global food and population policies are ominous..." - NOAA, 1974
In October 1974, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published an alarming article in their quarterly magazine stating that climatologists believed a recent global cooling trend would starve the world and send the planet into another ice age. [1]
Most forecasts of worldwide food production have been based on the assumption that global weather will stay about the same as it has been in the recent past. But it has already begun to change.This is consistent with the documented media hysteria of the 1970s about global cooling and demonstrates, contrary to alarmist arguments - that many climatologists did agree with the media's representation of a coming ice age apocalypse. [2]
In the Sahelian zone of Africa south of the Sahara, the countries of Chad, The Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta are enduring a drought that in some areas has been going on for more than six years now, following some 40 previous years of abundant monsoon rainfall. And the drought is spreading—eastward into Ehtiopia and southward into Dahomey, Egypt, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, and Zaire.
Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend and changes in atmospheric circulation which, if prolonged, pose serious threats to major food-producing regions of the world.
Annual average temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere increased rather dramatically from about 1890 through 1940, but have been falling ever since. The total change has averaged about one-half degree Centigrade, with the greatest cooling in higher latitudes. A drop of only one or two degrees Centigrade in the annual average temperature at higher latitudes can shorten the growing season so that some crops have to be abandoned. [...]
...the average growing season in England is already two weeks shorter than it was before 1950. Since the late 1950's, Iceland's hay crop yield has dropped about 25 percent, while pack ice in waters around Iceland and Greenland ports is becoming the hazard to navigation it was during the 17th and 18th centuries. [...]
Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently in India—indeed, through much of Asia, the world's hungriest continent. [...]
Some climatologists think that the present cooling trend may be the start of a slide into another period of major glaciation, popularly called an "ice age."
References:
[1] CLIMATE: A KEY TO THE WORLD'S FOOD SUPPLY (NOAA Magazine, October 1974)
[2] 1970s Global Cooling Alarmism (Popular Technology.net, February 28,2013)
1 comment:
Hm. This revisionist page apparently just died in silence. RIH.
Post a Comment