Global Cooling?

It snowed on May Day.  But hey, we are Montana and stuff like that happens here -- but not so in the central Plains and the Midwest.

Omaha, Neb., Mason City, Iowa, and Rochester, Minn., are but only several cities that have been clobbered by their biggest May snowfall on record. In many cases in the major cities in the Plains, those records date back to the 1800s.

18 inches of snow fell in Blooming Prairie, Minn. Several locations in western Wisconsin have reported more than 14 inches of snow, including one report of up to 18 inches near Hayward, Wis. Up to 11 inches was reported in Britt, Iowa.  We had the first ever recorded May snow in Arkansas.  Twenty major baseball games have been snowed out.  

The last time we had a spring this cold Newsweek magazine published a feature article on global cooling.

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon. 

April 28, 1975 Newsweek

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states. 

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.

Massive evidence?  Devastating weather outbreaks?  Drastic declines in food production?  This must have been very controversial.  But the article continued, "the present [temperature] decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average."  Some meteorologists viewed  "the cooling as a reversion to the 'little ice age' conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City."  Scientists warned that cooling "causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies."  In other words, cooling temperatures cause almost everything that is now attributed to warming temperatures.

For the record, world wheat production rose from 353 million tons in 1975 to 654 million tons in 2012, an 85 percent increase, compared to the 1975 vintage expert claims of a drop in output from wheat producing lands.   Good thing the politicians of that era flat ignored fear mongering academics and left wing loonies, who back then were recognized for what they are -- the fickle few.  Today's single-variable, adjusted data, straight line extrapolation climatologists and slide show mavens deserve no more credit.