I'm watching Al Gores 'An inconvenient truth'

[Final-Fan]

Kasz216 said:

Final-Fan said:

donathos said:

Final-Fan said:
The idea that global cooling was a major concern is just bogus, I can't believe how widespread that misinformation is.

You know... I just don't know.  I wasn't really aware for my small time in the 1970s.

I saw the Wikipedia link you mentioned in another thread and, given the nature of Wikipedia, and how fickle people tend to be, it gets me to wonder.  (And also, the article on global cooling certainly seems to me to be written from a particular... perspective.)

Was global cooling a major concern in the way that global warming is today?  Probably not, though I suspect that at least some of global warming's traction has to do with the advent of the Internet and the rise of a very powerful environmentalist movement.

It's probably useless to speculate what the Wikipedia article on global cooling would have been like in the mid 1970s, or what a Wikipedia article on global warming would look like forty-plus years from now, should global warming be "disproven" tomorrow.

But were global warming disproved, I suspect that there would be many people who would seek to wash their hands of their involvement in the controversy, and look to downplay it as much as possible.

This is not to take anything away from any current theory regarding global warming; I'm not studied enough to be able to really say.  But I can certainly believe a claim that current concerns echo concerns over diametrically opposed scenarios just a few decades back--it's not climatology that people love, it's doomsday.

I know that Wikipedia isn't always unbiased, and one must be particularly careful when consulting it on this issue. 
But this: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Cooling#Concern_in_the_mid-twentieth_century
seems to make a very strong case that the "global cooling" idea was mere speculation among scientists -- something to be studied as a possibility -- although it found added life as a minor scare in media articles. 
Whereas this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
seems to me to make it faily clear that a (certainly not infallible) consensus has emerged in favor of the idea that global warming exists and is at least partially due to human activity. 
"With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change."

Although individual scientists do continue to assert that every respected national or international scientific organization with an opinion on the matter is wrong -- and it is possible that they are in fact justified in their doubts -- I don't see that there is any doubt that the "global cooling" idea was nowhere NEAR as widely believed by the scientific community.

Global Warming is actually one of the least credible sources on Wikipedia.

There is a story out there about a scientist who "used to disagree" with global warming but now agrees it exists.  Except the sceintist still doesn't agree it exists.  It's just that Pro-global warming people constantly edit it and there was no way to change it back to the correct information.

Pro global warming people troll everything on wikipedia to change it to fit their agenda. 

That's terrible.  Is the key, italicized assertion false?