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

http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_s_new_thinking_on_the_climate_crisis.html

He talked in the 15th minute about companies that would profit from a carbon tax. Many of them he has a stake in. He is pushing an agenda that could make him very very wealthy.

As for other planets warming up, just google it. It's all over the place:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=jErYSY2KKeXelQev7ezFDA&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=are+other+planets+warming+up%3F

Gore is certainly 'green'. He loves green. He wants the world to be green.

Then he'll go home and wade in his favorite kind of green. ...The green we put in our pocketbooks.

I'm all for environmental conservation and awareness, but the stuff this movie was pushing didn't agree with me at all, namely the scare tactics based on theories that are quite far from solid. There's plenty of counter evidence out there.

If anyone wants to see this, I'd say take it with a grain of salt and be sure to research all of the theories you can and evidence that supports them. Remember, Al Gore is a politician first, and green is the 'in thing' right now...for good reason of course. :)

First result:  http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html

There's enough of that to cast some doubt, but I hope you're not saying that like it's disproof.  Anyway, I could debate that but that's not what my post was about. 

I don't doubt that he's investing in efforts to encourage the sort of behavior he believes will benefit the environment.  Since he's been in on the ground floor of some of that stuff, it's not surprising that he has interests there.  What I question is the amounts of money you propose he stands to make.  Where exactly is he going to get DOZENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in personal profit?  That is what I want you to substantiate and you have not.

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 havent gotten to seeing it sohuld soon

How is the propaganda trip so far?

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.

I don't disagree with anything you've said.

For my part, I really can't suss out all of the global warming debate (and not for a complete lack of trying; I even read The Skeptical Environmentalist, and had a bunch of my friends go with me to see An Inconvenient Truth in the theaters on my birthday that year... and yeah, I really am that lame).

What I do feel fairly certain of is that there's always someone shouting that the sky is falling, and always a (bigger than I'd like) group of people listening to it.  For instance, that Wikipedia page on global cooling mentions Paul Ehrlich a couple of times, seeming to cast him as some sort of prescient Cassandra, warning about greenhouse gasses way back in the late 60s.

Well, apparently Ehrlich did that in his book The Population Bomb, in which he also prophecized mass starvations in the 80s due to overpopulation.  And, famously, that kind of talk hearkens back to Malthus who thought that population would outstrip food production back in the early 19th century.

So, yeah.  Is global warming the really-it's-true-OMFG-sky-is-falling scenario?  Maybe it is--many bright, learned people seem to think so.  But I won't personally be stunned if 1) it doesn't turn out to be as bad as originally thought (or actually beneficial in some ways); or, 2) it is bad, but mankind dynamically adapts in exciting and unforseeable ways, as we tend to do, and so the potential catastrophe is adverted, or maybe even sublimated into benefits; or, 3) the science was horribly wrong, and twenty years from now we're on whatever will pass for chat boards talking about global cooling again.

And if that happens--if the current doomsday scenario is forgotten, but another has taken its place--I'll be happy to be alive, but even more jaded than I am now.

*sigh* has anybody ever noticed that 99% of the people who are in denial about global warming are Americans?