Who now remembers the 1970s when we all feared the coming Ice Age?

Fifty years ago, newspapers and magazines assured us that the world had been growing steadily cooler for centuries and that this process had accelerated dramatically since 1945

It is hard to imagine that there was a time, well within living memory, when scientists were worried about the serious problem of global cooling. Graphs were published, showing that the temperature of the world had been declining since the so-called Medieval Warm Period and that this process has been speeding up over the last few decades, until it appeared that some kind of tipping point had been reached. The change in temperature was becoming so rapid that it was said to be inevitable that we would soon be in the grip of another Ice Age. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the whole business was the claim that the sharp drop in global temperatures between 1945 and 1975 was a direct result of pollution from power stations and factories and that it was the Industrial Revolution which had acted as a catalyst for the rapid onset of the new Ice Age.

     All this, of course, reads like the history of some alternative universe. We know that in our own world, temperatures have been rising for centuries and that industrial pollution has led to higher temperatures, not lower. How can it be possible that the same data which fifty years ago were showing the planet to be cooling, can now indicate that without the shadow of a doubt that it is in fact heating up? Perhaps a look at the evidence will provide us with a clue about what has been going on. I give a link below to article from Time magazine in 1974, so that readers can check for themselves what was being claimed at that time.

     Consider first the indisputable fact that the temperature of the planet was warmer during the medieval period, six hundred years ago, than it is now. Then too, remember that between 1940 and 1974,  there were five winters in Britain in which an entire month averaged below freezing point. There was not a single winter like that between 1896 and 1939. In the course of those decades between 1940 and 1974, the mean temperature of the planet dropped by over one degree Celsius. Pack-ice in the Arctic was growing thicker and lasting longer each year. Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, was free of snow in the summer up to the 1940s, but by 1974 it was covered in snow all year round.

     Just as today, when we are assured that climate change is affecting the habitat of various species, so to was it disrupting the traditional way of life for animals and plants in the 1970s. Off the coast of the English country of Devon, cold-water fish like cod and ling were being observed. They seemed to moving from the North Sea as the temperature fell and they felt at home in locations which had previously been too warm for them. In the United States, armadillos were moving south from the mid-Western states for the opposite reason. As the weather grew colder, they were moving towards warmer regions. These are just random instances of a widely reported trend; there were many more.

     Anxieties about global cooling permeated popular culture, with novels about the coming Ice Age being published from the early 1960s onwards. John Christopher’s The World in Winter was published in 1962 and two years later Time of the Great Freeze, by Robert Silverberg, came out. Books such as these were well-received, as they played into current fears about the future.

     The most intriguing part of this previous episode of climate change anxiety is the role which humans were thought to play in it. The theory was that particles contained in smoke from the chimneys of power stations burning coal, as well as air-borne pollution from industry, were all floating to the upper atmosphere, where they were reflecting sunlight and preventing it from reaching the Earth’s surface. As the planet became colder and more snow fell, this would exacerbate the problem, because the white snow would reflect the sunlight and not allow it to warm the earth. In recent years, plans have been mooted for combatting global warming by projects involving what is sometimes known as geo-engineering. In the 1970s, it was seriously suggested that scattering coal dust on the snow of the arctic might help to warm the planet, by absorbing more heat from the sun.

     Remember, all the scientific evidence going back centuries backed up the fears of global cooling, just as they now supposedly support the opposite case. How can we explain this seeming contradiction? The answer is that we must turn to religion, rather than science to explain what we are observing here. Mythic narratives have an enormous and primitive appeal to us. One popular and widespread such narrative is the destruction of the world which is caused by human sins such as cruelty and greed.  Knowledge of Bible stories is no longer as widespread as was once the case, but even so, most people in Europe and America know about Noah and the Great Flood. Mankind had grown so wicked that God decided to punish them with rising sea levels. This resulted in an environmental catastrophe, and it was all brought about by the actions of those foolish and shortsighted men and women who would not reform their ways. Their entire civilisation was swept away by the sea and they were all drowned. There is something eerily familiar about this scenario. The idea of humanity’s bad behaviour bringing about its near extinction appears in almost every daily newspaper and television news bulletin. There are clear and obvious parallels between the story of a flood which inundates the whole world and current fears about climate change and sea-levels rising. Both global warming and global cooling are versions of this myth, but there have been others in the last sixty or seventy years, all conforming to a similar pattern to that of the Biblical flood.

     In the 1960s, there was a great fear that over-population would cause an unimaginable number of deaths through famine. Popular books such as the 1968  Population Bomb, by Paul Erlich, proved beyond doubt that the planet was headed for disaster through over-population. Just as with the idea of the Ice Age, this became the theme for novels and also films such as Soylent Green. Then came a panic about running out of natural resources and destroying the earth through pollution. This too would be caused by human greed. The fear of destruction by nuclear of course produced a panic too, stoked by books such as Neville Shute’s On the Beach. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, there have been regular scares of this kind, culminating in that of climate change, which still grips us.

     The way in which climate change differs from past world-shattering disasters is that it has lingered for rather longer than any of the others. This is perhaps because it emerged just as the first satellite measurements of various weather-related phenomena began in 1979, at a time when there were some good summers and signs of glaciers retreating. Of course, glaciers advance and retreat regularly over the centuries, but being able to measure this process more accurately made it look as though it were something new. Then too, the idea of rising sea levels and the world being drowned is just so uncannily similar to the Great Flood, that it awakens some vague recollection of scripture in the minds of people in the West. The flood was caused by greedy and selfish people and now we face another flood for those very same reasons!  It will be curious to see how much longer this particular craze lasts and to guess what might replace it in the long run.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061108113528/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html