4.24 The Coming Ice Age
In the 1970s the earth was cooling and there was concern among scientists that an ice age was coming. Today the discussion of global warming has become a political one with 82% of Democrats in 2021 believing it is a critical threat and only 16% of Republicans believing it is a critical threat. Democrats use the global warming scare as a way to get votes. They say they'll do something to stop climate change and say their Republican opponents won't. Prominent Republicans such as Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich have said that climate alarmism is a hoax and that the Democrats are wasting a lot of tax payer money trying to stop it.
The fact that scientists were predicting global cooling in the 1970s makes people who know that, doubt that scientists who predict global warming today know what they are talking about. That's why Republicans remind people about it and why Democrats say that it isn't true.
If you do a google search on the words "global cooling 1970s" you see a lot of links to articles that say that the statement that scientists were worried about global cooling in the 1970s is a myth. Was it a myth? The following video is a short documentary made in the 1970s in which scientists were interviewed about their reasons for believing that an ice age was coming.
In the documentary above Leonard Nimoy tells us that scientists were able to tell from cores dug up from the ocean floor when the last ice ages were. Those times match the times predicted by a theory by Milutin Milankovic a Serbian scientist that ice ages are caused by changes in the earths orbit and tilt toward the sun. Dr. Milankovic's theories predicted that ice ages occurred every 41,000 years. If the 41,000 interval holds than in about 20,000 years from now Manhattan might be covered by a mile high of ice again.
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What about wildfires? Aren't they caused by global warming?