Back in the late '70s when I was in college, we needed to go fast on I-94 to get to Madison for other reasons, but we all thought that it would be funny to tell any officer that pulled us over that we were "outrunning the glaciers". Those were the days of Global COOLING ... which I know as now gotten the left all riled up to be reminded of, so they have went to work trying to rewrite that part of history.
No, it WASN'T "the same" then, since not EVERYTHING had been fully politicized yet! One of the outcomes of that was that "research" tended to end up in a lot of different places, and maybe more importantly started from a lot of different premises. Today, you can set out to "continue to prove" GW, or you can get no money, get no degree, lose your professorship, etc. Tough choice if you are an academic that wants an advanced degree and needs to eat.
In the "old days", we all watched, read, or listened to the same message on NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, NYT, WaPO, etc and if you were a complete low brow reactionary, you MAY have gotten some wild right wing thinking from the EDITORIAL page of the WSJ, although their news pages were (and still are) just as left as the rest of the media. Oh yes, there was Buckley and National Review -- which I had never heard of until I got bummed out because Jimmuh assured me that the era of fun in America was OVER!
"Many" scientists thought the data showed we were cooling. It was NOT a "religious issue"! The idea of using "science" as a political cudgel to pound down the apostates had not been even remotely associated with "science" in those days (we still had religion for for the fixed outlook). "Acid Rain", "Coming Ice Age", "Ozone Hole", "DDT", "we are going to turn Japanese", "Detente --- the obvious reasonableness of surrender to the USSR", "the world is OUT of petroleum" .... those were the "smart topics" of the day.
The list of topics aren't an accident, They were ALL considered to be "common sense", and if had Fox news in those days, you could likely have done a poll showing that people "didn't know the answers to the issues of the day" ... as in, "all the forests will die from acid rain" (probably before the glaciers ran over them, but they were not clear on that), all us country kids will be dead of skin cancer long before now, and the penguins would ALL be gone due to the "ozone hole".
DDT, well, it turned out to kill 50 million plus 3rd worlders by NOT being around, but we are back to using it now with no problem to birds (if a couple beers are OK, a keg isn't necessarily better), we not only didn't turn Japanese, they started their eternal government managed recession in '90 and are still in it.
We didn't ever try the surrender to the USSR route -- but given BO, maybe there is still time. Oh, and world oil reserves were at "400ish Billion Barrels BB) in '80 and they are N of 1.6 TB today with a lot of countries using less ... + a lot of the Baaken isn't even online! The US could push Venezuala and the Saudis for the the top of the list! We talk about that as about as much as GW folks talk about GW during a record cold March.
Don't get the impression that EVERYONE was just stupid back then, and we have obviously gotten smarter. SOME predictions DID happen! Reagan DID consign the USSR to the ash heap of history for example (until BO resuscitated it like a long dead Chicago voter).
So the linked article brings back memories:
And lobby they did. Between 1994 and 1996 the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, and together with the Pew Center and the Heinz Foundation they engaged in an energetic and successful global warming fear campaign which included attacks on scientific dissenters. Incidentally, the Heinz Foundation, headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry, generously provided a $250,000 award to Al Gore’s star congressional hearing witness, NASA’s James Hansen, who subsequently went on public record supporting her new husband John Kerry’s failed presidential bid.A bunch of people hardly remember Enron ... going from the most admired business in America in the late '90s with a myriad of connections to both parties, to an early example of "W's fault ... he met with Ken Lay" (the CEO of Enron). As WSJs "Best of the Web" likes to point out, Paul Krugman was an Enron advisor and proponent and proud of it in the late '90s. Ah, how easy the memory hole works for one side of the political spectrum.
Historically, mankind inherently understood the relation between age and "wisdom", because it was ASSUMED, and UNDERSTOOD by at least the educated that to a very significant extent "education + experience = wisdom". Put that was before the cult of "progressivism", which assumes that the data/information/knowledge that they pick up today is INHERENTLY superior to the past (mostly because they have no clue about what happened in the past)
So, most no longer learn from the past ... even just a few short years in the past. It matters not that every time a set of policies has been applied in history, they have failed. If the "smart guys" think that printing bags of money + taxing it away from the economic winners so that the economic losers get "another chance" (typically to lose bigger amounts faster), it doesn't really matter how many times it doesn't work until you end up in Greece or Japan and you are just STUCK --- no capital to go forward, no successful folks left, and a bunch of unsuccessful ones that have even lost the will to fail after pissing away multiples of borrowed / subsidized fortunes.
I have to admit that as much as I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, a nice big continental glacier forming would be VERY cool. Sure, the "30-40 tops" years I have remaining would only allow for a few100 feet of snow and ice AT BEST, puny by the 5000+ full monty behemoth, but the warmist tap dances would be a thing of beauty ... and there is always tracks for the Ranger!
Oh, never mind ... they will claim it is "due to human caused climate change" ... or it will just go down the memory hole like Krugman/Enron, "out of oil", "ozone", etc.
It is the age of OZ, and even when Toto pulls the curtain, the lefty witches will conjure SOME way to hide the humbug!
'via Blog this'
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