Re: Receding glaciers

Norman wrote:

Back in the 1970s many "experts" of the day were predicting that a
significant cooling was imminent. Today, I think most responsible
scientists would say that those predictions in the 1970s proved to be
incorrect, yet they were made by the experts of the day. I appreciate
that understanding of the science has advanced a lot since the 1970s
but is it not just a bit arrogant to claim that we now know the answer
with certainty. The "experts" of the 1970s were proved wrong. I keep an
open enough mind to say that there's a possibility that today's
"experts" could ultimately be proved wrong. I'm not saying that I think
they are wrong but we're not dealing with black and white here, only a
great variety of shades of grey. I'm sure that the weather/climate
machine has a lot of surprises in store during the next 100 years.

I remember a widely-advertised cooling theory but it was more late sixties
than seventies and it only applied to the UK and not a global forecast.
Even at a talk I attended in 1969 it seemed obvious from the graphics -
though not from the lecture itself - that we were past the depth of the
cooling spell of cold UK winters. However, the same lecture did say we were
heading for fifty-year spells of cold springs and autumns.

A study of temperature cycles for the globe, published in the mid-seventies
and based on 700,000 years of data, had temperatures lowering until the end
of the twentieth century and then rising.

The foregoing forecasts were both wrong, but an earlier forecast of global
warming if carbon dioxide were to increase in the atmosphere has been
proved right. Were the cooling forecasters incorrect in their theories or
had they just ignored the effect of carbon dioxide?

--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy

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